Somatic Therapy
to Heal Your
Nervous System
For anxiety, trauma, chronic pain, burnout and relationship issues that talk therapy hasn’t shifted. We work directly with your nervous system, in person across CaliforniaCA and online.
- 9 CA locations & online
- 12 Practitioners
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Immediate scheduling
and availability - OON claims submission
Trusted by clients at leading firms
No client identified and no endorsement or affiliation implied.
Talk therapies often describe an issue like anxiety or depression without shifting it.
We treat your symptom at the body level using somatic modalities that are direct and evidence-based.
Working in this way can produce powerful transformations over a short span of time.
When mind and body are reconnected, pain gives way to the full spectrum of experience.
Our approach comes from training personally with:
Bessel Van Der Kolk,
Author of The Body Keeps the ScorePeter Levine,
Founder of Somatic ExperiencingDick Schwartz,
Founder of Internal Family SystemsLaurel Parnell,
Founder of Attachment-EMDR
How are we different?
Unlike most practices, we submit out-of-network claims directly to your insurance. This saves time and increases likelihood of payment. Learn more here
Hear from our clients
The Beyond approach
Stress, anxiety and pain are rooted at the body level where unprocessed emotion, trauma, and energy are stuck.
We treat the core process of nervous system dysregulation using somatic modalities that are direct and evidence-based.
All of our therapists are trained in the core Beyond approach, which blends:
We also offer bodywork and breathwork.
Together we:
Build the relationship
We offer a corrective experience where you are deeply understood, accepted and supported. We work at your pace without rushing or pushing.
Map the pattern
We build a shared understanding of how your symptoms operate. We’ll map the parts of you that may be blocking your healing and figure out your personal roadmap to health.
Heal at the body level
Inside each session, we use somatic techniques to get to the root of symptoms. We’ll reprocess your trauma and strengthen your positive connection to the body.
Who we serve
“The body remembers what the mind forgets.”
Jacob Levy MorenoYour pain story has become a novel. You’ve seen the specialists. You have the scans, the folder of results that come back normal. But your back, your gut, your head, or your pelvis keep insisting otherwise. You are so self-reliant that you might never have come to therapy but for your body. But you can’t stop ruminating and troubleshooting your symptoms.
Pain that persists is not imaginary nor a character flaw. It is a pattern that results from complex trauma. The body keeps sounding the alarm because stuck energy, bracing, numbing and emotional pain from past events still live unprocessed in the body.
We work directly with that alarm system. Slowly, at a pace your body can tolerate, we help it complete what it has been holding and discover what safety actually feels like from the inside. Symptoms soften as you reconnect and the bracing lets go. You stop being at war with your own body and start to experience it as an intelligent guidance system.
Learn more about how we work with chronic pain here.
“Trauma is when severe emotional pain cannot find a relational home in which it can be held.”
Robert StolorowOn paper, you made it. You got through what happened, kept working, kept showing up, maybe even built something impressive. People admire how strong you are. What they don't see is the cost: the vigilance that never fully powers down, the feelings that arrive muted or not at all, the sense of watching your own life through glass.
Your capability is real, and it was hard won. It is also how a nervous system protects itself after overwhelm, by shutting down feeling and staying ready for the next blow. It kept you safe then. Now it keeps you from the joy, closeness, and rest you have more than earned.
We don't ask you to relive the worst moments or tell your story before you're ready. Working with the body, we help your system discharge what it has been holding and gradually widen its capacity to feel, at a pace that stays tolerable. Clients describe the shift as: colors come back, laughter comes easier, and life stops feeling like something to get through.
Learn more about how we work with trauma here.
“It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?”
Henry David ThoreauFrom the outside, it works. The company, the title, the results. From the inside, there is a motor that never turns off. You wake at 3 a.m. with your mind already in tomorrow's meeting. Rest feels like falling behind. Even vacations become projects to optimize.
Here is what you never learned: Your nervous system is running on hyperarousal, which is a response to the early conditions that you experienced. This worked to get you to a better place, but if you stay in this mode, you will burn out, get sick and die young.
We are not here to dampen your success. We help your system learn that it can downshift without losing anything. Your intensity becomes a gear you choose and can disengage to take the needed pitstops. Once your engine is no longer red-lining, you lead with more clarity and conviction and can leverage the resources around you.
Learn more about how we work with the high-intensity type here.
“A sensitive child learns to sense and meet a parent’s emotional needs, giving up their own true self to secure love.”
Alice MillerYou are the one people call. The parent holding the family together, the nurse or therapist or teacher who gives all day and then comes home to give more. Somewhere along the way, your own needs became an afterthought.
You feel exhaustion, resentment, unspoken frustrations and guilt whenever you do step away. Eventually these untended feelings become chronic health conditions and physical pain.
Caring for others is not the problem. Caring for others from an empty tank is. You have trained yourself to override your own body signals.
Together, we build your capacity to tend to yourself, to ask and receive from others, to say “no”, and to maintain boundaries and a healthy sense of self.
Learn more about how we work with the highly sensitive person here and the under-investor here.
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
Maya AngelouThe work matters to you more than anything, which is exactly why it can hurt so much. The blank page that stares back. The project abandoned at eighty percent because finishing means being evaluated and judged. The suspicion that your best work came from your darkest seasons, so healing might cost you your voice.
Underneath the blocks, there is a simpler body story. Creating means being seen, and somewhere your system learned that being seen was dangerous. So it protects you with procrastination, perfectionism, and self-doubt.
We help you uncouple your creativity from this threat response. As your nervous system stops treating exposure as an emergency, the creative channel opens and flow states emerge. Clients are often surprised to find that regulation does not flatten art. It deepens it.
Learn more about how we work with tortured souls here.
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
Joseph Campbell“Your unconscious is currently working on the next stage of your life.”
John O’DonohueThe life you built was supposed to be enough. The career, the roles, the boxes checked. Then something shifted. A divorce, a loss, a milestone birthday, or just a quiet morning when you realized you have been living a script someone else wrote. Now the old life does not fit and the new one is still arriving.
This in-between is disorienting, and it is also sacred ground, or liminal space. The grief is real: for the years, for the lost identity. But so is the pull toward something fresh and true.
We accompany you through this middle ground. The body knows things about who you are becoming before the mind can name them. Rather than rushing you into a new identity, we help you stay present to the unfolding one, grieve what needs grieving, and build a life that is spacious enough for what is emerging.
“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”
Virginia WoolfYou spent years scanning the room before you could relax in it. Reading faces, editing yourself, deciding how much of you was safe to show. Even if you are out now, that early vigilance does not simply switch off. It lives in the body as a subtle guardedness that follows you into relationships, work and even your own mirror.
You are an expert in giving people what they want to hear. You carry the exhaustion of explaining yourself to people who still don’t get it. You are still finding the nuanced words for who you really are and you don’t want to have to educate your therapist or brace for the next wince.
We offer affirming care where the whole of you is welcome from the first minute. Together we work with the body's old habits of hypervigilance, fawning, bracing, and avoidance, so that the safety you have been striving for can finally land in your nervous system.
Learn more about how we work with LGBTQ issues here.
“The world needs all kinds of minds.”
Temple GrandinWhether it’s ADHD or autism or sensitivity, your mind does not run on the standard operating system, and the world rarely lets you forget it. Sensory input that others filter out hits you at full volume. You may mask all day and collapse at home. The exhaustion of translating yourself is another kind of trauma. All this overexertion accumulates in the body as tension, fatigue, anxiety, and shutdown.
We do not treat your brain as a problem to fix. Actually, every single brain is unique and quite different. We work with your nervous system, helping you recover from the strain of masking to find self-regulation strategies that fit.
Our clients have described somatic work as permission to let go of performing “normal” and the encouragement to embrace their true selves.
Learn more about how we work with ADHD here.
“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”
Helen KellerEveryone keeps asking what your plan is, as if you are supposed to have one already. Friendships shift under your feet, and your phone is a highlight reel of what you’re missing out on.
Maybe the anxiety shows up as stomach pain before school, maybe it is numbness, where nothing feels like much of anything. Adults keep offering advice when what you deeply crave is to be understood better.
Our work with teens and young adults starts there: no lectures, no fixing you. We provide an open space for you to find out who you are and we build tools for the spiral moments.
For parents: we keep you in the loop in ways that respect your young person's trust and help with some basic parenting frameworks.
Learn more about how we work with teens and young adults here.
“The quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life.”
Esther PerelThe same argument keeps resurfacing and a reasonable conversation can go sideways in thirty seconds. You may be seriously contemplating whether this is a good fit or not.
We help to create a safe zone where the surface content of the arguments can provide access to the deeper attachment and nervous system patterns. You learn to catch the moment where things start to escalate, to down-regulate, and to express the vulnerable feelings beneath the attacks. Conflict becomes survivable and then useful. Intimacy returns, not through grand gestures, but through two systems learning to feel safe together again.
Learn more about how we work with couples here.
You may not realize your pain, stress, anxiety & burnout can be shifted in a repeatable & reliable way.
Learn more about our approach here.
Meet our Somatic Therapists
Bodyworkers
Care Coordinator
Clinical Supervisors
Medical Advisory Board
*Registered Associate Marriage and Family Therapist, employed by Beyond Psychology Center and supervised by licensed clinicians.
Somatic Therapy does not include touch. Bodywork is touch-based. Psychotherapists may work as coaches for clients located in states and countries in which they are not licensed, provided there is no mental health diagnosis. In these cases, they are not working under their psychotherapy license, but are working as a health coach.
In person in Los Angeles and the Bay Area
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Brentwood Brentwood and West LA
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Santa Monica Santa Monica and Venice
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Sawtelle Sawtelle and Westwood
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Beverly Hills Beverly Hills and WeHo
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Los Feliz Los Feliz and Silver Lake
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Echo Park Eastside and DTLA
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Studio City Studio City and the Valley
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Pasadena Pasadena and Glendale
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San Francisco Downtown and the Financial District
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San Jose Campbell and the South Bay
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Online Online therapy in California and coaching worldwide
Now offering virtual breathwork classes
A great way to get started for just $35 per class
Our small-group classes teach a three-part breath practice that releases trapped energy and reconnects your body
Virtual one-hour classes led by Justin Baker, LMFT 135106:
Tuesdays at 6:30pm PT
Fridays at 9:00am PT
Let’s get started!
1
Share some info (2 mins)
Fill out our quick form. Choose between being matched by our Care Coordinator or picking out a therapist directly.
2
Enjoy a free consultation (20 mins)
Receive an email immediately that let’s you schedule a time slot.
You describe what you’re looking for and together we map a path forward.
3
Schedule a session (5 mins)
You schedule a 50-minute paid session and complete a 5-min intake.
You pick a frequency that works best with no ongoing commitment.