Michelle Roberts, PhD. Licensed psychotherapist specializing in complex trauma and narcissistic abuse recovery, certified by the Trauma Research Foundation, and among the first clinicians in the world licensed to provide legal psilocybin therapy.
The women I see arrive at very different points on the same road. Some are fluent — they can name every dynamic in the family they came from, cite the research, and tell you the year it started. Some are still in the part where the whole thing is fog, and the only clear fact is exhaustion they cannot account for.
Neither is a prerequisite. What brings them here is the same underneath: harm that was repeated, relational, and hard to escape. Childhood abuse. Neglect no one intervened in. Developmental trauma laid down before there were words for it. Years inside a relationship that taught them to distrust their own account of it. It leaves a specific residue — the vigilance that never fully switches off, the sleep that will not come, the thing that started as the only reliable way to get to sleep, the sense of being simultaneously too much and not enough, the body that runs the arithmetic on a mood before anyone has spoken.
None of that is a character flaw. None of it is evidence that you have failed to try hard enough. It is what a nervous system does after it has been asked to survive something for a long time.
You do not have to arrive with the whole thing figured out, or even well-worded. You have to be believed accurately, and then met at the layer where the harm actually settled. That is the work.
Complex Trauma Treatment
Trauma care has advanced considerably in the last two decades. These are the approaches with the strongest evidence behind them, and having all of them available means the treatment can be built around what you actually need rather than around the one method a practitioner happens to know.
Attachment-Focused EMDR
01
EMDR in Laurel Parnell's model, adapted for trauma that happened inside relationships rather than in a single event. The protective and nurturing figures are built first, then brought into the memory itself, which is what moves material that years of talking have circled without reaching.
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Parts Work — Internal Family Systems
02
The inner critic, the perfectionist, the part that goes flat when someone gets close: none of it is a character flaw. Parts work meets those protectors directly, at the layer where they formed, and for the reasons they formed.
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03
Somatic and Body-Centered Therapy
Trauma organizes posture, breath, and the reflexes that fire before thought arrives. This work goes to that layer — tracking what the body is doing in the room, not only recounting what happened years ago.
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04
Polyvagal-Informed Therapy
Hypervigilance and shutdown are not choices. They are states an autonomic nervous system enters when it has learned that vigilance is safer than rest, and this work is the precise business of recognizing them and building a way back.
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Narcissistic Abuse Recovery
05
Chronic self-doubt, memory trouble, the settled conviction of being the unreasonable one — the aftermath of coercive control and its slow rewriting of what is true. The work begins by naming the injury accurately: not a communication problem, not a personality defect, but complex trauma.
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06
Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy
The medicine session is the part people picture, but the work happens on either side of it — the weeks of preparation before, and the slower work afterward of turning what surfaced into something a life can actually hold. Some clients do all three parts here. Others journey elsewhere and come for the clinical hours before and after, which are trauma therapy, not facilitation.
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Complex PTSD Recovery
Somatic and Body-Centered Therapy
Childhood (Developmental) Trauma Recovery
