Five Ways In, One Clear Next Step
Whatever brought you here, we go deeper.
Integrative and trauma-informed: psychodynamic and depth psychotherapy, Jungian and relational therapy, real soul work. EMDR reaches what talk alone can’t, so old wounds loosen their hold. CBT and DBT are skills in service of that deeper work, never a substitute for it.
Interactive
What a life carries
Walk one life forward. Mark what landed, and watch what gets carried.
Early childhood. What was in the room?
Nothing marked yet.
Nothing here is saved, scored or sent anywhere. It stays in this browser.
Healing Trauma
What you learned to survive, you can finally put down.
Tending to the deep wounds of complex trauma, PTSD, and pain carried across generations.
Trauma is not only what happened to you. It is what your body learned to do about it, and what it never got to finish. That is why insight alone often is not enough. You can understand a pattern completely and still find yourself inside it.
Childhood trauma rarely stays in childhood. It shows up later in who you are drawn to, what you will tolerate, and how hard it is to trust someone who is actually safe. Sexual trauma carries its own weight, in the body and in how safe closeness ever feels again. Relational trauma and narcissistic abuse leave a specific kind of confusion behind: you learn to doubt your own perception before you doubt theirs. We name that directly, instead of treating it as a footnote to “family stuff.”
We work at depth, with psychodynamic and Jungian approaches that go underneath the symptom, and with EMDR for the material that will not respond to talking alone. Where a nervous system is still braced for something that ended years ago, EMDR gives it somewhere to put that down.
Working with generational trauma is core at Sunray. It gets named here rather than implied. Patterns rarely skip a house.
- Complex trauma and childhood trauma, including trauma with no single incident
- Relational trauma and survival of abuse
- Sexual trauma
- Generational and inherited patterns
- EMDR for trauma that talking has not reached
Inner Pressures
From the outside you seem fine. Inside, something feels off.
Quieting the relentless inner critic and finding freedom from perfectionism and overwhelm.
You have learned how to hold it all together. The success, the pressure, the constant expectations. The performance is convincing enough that people ask you for advice.
What brings high achievers here is rarely a crisis. It is the cost of the standard, the voice that treats rest as evidence of weakness, the sense of being an impostor moments after being praised, the exhaustion that sleep does not touch.
Perfectionism is usually a strategy that once worked. We go looking for what it was protecting you from, because a habit built for survival does not respond to being told it is irrational. Several of our clinicians know the weight of a high-stakes career from the inside.
- Perfectionism and the harsh inner critic
- Burnout that rest does not resolve
- Imposter syndrome in people who are demonstrably competent
- High achievers and high-pressure careers
- Anxious people-pleasing
Stressors of Life
The year that knocked things loose.
Grief, illness, transition, and the kind of loneliness that does not announce itself.
Not every reason to start therapy is a diagnosis. Sometimes a person arrives because someone died, or a chronic illness changed everything, or a life that worked stopped working and there is no old routine left to go back to.
We work with grief that refuses to follow the stages, with chronic pain and illness that other people keep expecting you to be over, and with transitions that look fine on paper and still take the floor out from under you.
We also sit with substance misuse and process addictions without judgment, and with the sadness and isolation that can be the loudest thing in a full and busy life.
Parenting adds its own kind of stress, the low hum of always being needed with no real time off. The same is true of high-stress environments and jobs that do not let up. Overwhelm is not always a crisis. Sometimes it is just what happens when there is no space left to feel anything.
- Grief and loss, including the losses nobody names
- Chronic pain and complex health conditions
- Life transitions, the wanted ones and the unwanted ones
- Parenting stress and the exhaustion of always being needed
- High-stress environments and demanding careers that do not let up
- Overwhelm, even when nothing is technically wrong
- Substance misuse and process addictions
- Sadness, loneliness and isolation
- The exhaustion of holding it together for everyone else
Relationships and Family
Love and conflict are often the same thread.
Partnership, parenting, and the tangled threads of family across generations.
No family is simply good or simply bad. It is where you were shaped, which is exactly why real love and real damage can sit in the same relationship, without one cancelling out the other.
We work with ruptures and estrangement, enmeshment, the specific loneliness of being the one who left, and the exhaustion of complicated family dynamics that are hard for anyone outside them to understand.
We also sit with couples and families working through communication difficulties and generational differences, the ordinary friction that builds up over years together. That includes new couples building a healthy foundation from day one, long-term couples looking to find their spark again, and people coping with a separation with as much care as it deserves.
- Newlyweds and early partnership
- Divorce, separation and the loneliness of being the one who left
- Family ruptures, estrangement and reconciliation
- Co-parenting, single parenting, blended families
- Sex and intimacy
- Caring for aging parents while raising your own children
Generational Trauma: It doesn’t disappear. It gets smaller.
Cultural + Generational Trauma
None of us live in a vacuum. Cultural pain is collective, and it travels across generations.
We create space for minorities, immigrants, and those living between cultures.
Immigration is not a single event you recover from. It is a permanent negotiation, between the language you dream in and the one you work in, between what your parents sacrificed and what you are allowed to want.
First-generation clients often arrive carrying a debt no one ever named out loud. We do not treat that as a footnote to the real work. It goes hand in hand with the work.
Not everything was yours to begin with. Generational trauma is not a metaphor. Research on epigenetics has shown that the body can carry the imprint of what came before it, sometimes literally, in how genes express themselves. What your grandparents survived did not stay in the past. It shaped how your family loves, fears, protects and communicates long before you had any say in it. Drag the helix beside this and watch what the work does to what was handed down.
This is a female, immigrant and minority-owned practice offering Jewish-affirming care. Several clinicians know this road first-hand, and we offer services in five languages.
Group Therapy
Together, not alone.
Valuable psychoeducation, and a safe space to see that you are not the only one.
Running now
Grief
Rooted in Grief
An eight week grief group. A gentle, nonjudgmental space to carry what loss left behind, alongside people who understand it.
Read more about the group
Who holds it. Leslie Buckmaster, ASW. Grief is where Leslie does her deepest work, including widowhood and the loss of a parent.
What the eight weeks look like. The group meets weekly for eight weeks. Part psychoeducation, what grief actually does to a body, a mind, and a life, and part shared space to say the things that are hard to say anywhere else.
Who it is for. Adults carrying a loss, whether it happened recently or years ago and never had anywhere to go. You do not need to have been in therapy before.
How to join. Start with the complimentary connection call. We will tell you when the next group begins and talk through whether it is the right fit for what you are carrying.
Ask about joiningWhat Actually Happens
The scariest part is not knowing what happens next.
So here it is, plainly. Four steps, no surprises, and nothing you have to prepare for.
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Fill out the form
That is the whole first step: fill out the form to schedule a call. You do not need the right words yet. One or two lines is enough.
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Choose, or ask to be matched
Choose the provider you want to work with, or request a phone call to ask more questions and get matched.
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Your connection call, or calls
Schedule your complimentary connection call or calls. Finding the best fit for you, someone you connect with, is most important.
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Your first session
In person in Valley Village or Santa Ana, or virtually anywhere in California, Florida, Virginia or Idaho. You set the pace from here.
No pressure, no intake paperwork, no commitment. Twenty minutes to find out if this is right.
Investment FAQ
The part most practices leave you to guess.
Cost is the question people are most afraid to ask, so here it is, plainly. And some of our clinicians offer discounted slots for those with financial constraints, so please do not hesitate to ask.
What is the investment for therapy?
Our full-fee hourly rate ranges from $200 to $300 depending on clinician and the type of treatment (individual vs. family/couple). Some of our clinicians offer discounted slots for those with financial constraints, so please do not hesitate to ask if that is available.
Do you take insurance?
Choosing to work outside of insurance lets us give you real, non-pathologizing depth: no session caps, no diagnosis dictating your care, no third party deciding how long your healing should take. We’re an out-of-network practice, which means we don’t bill insurance directly. Many of our clients use their out-of-network benefits and we provide a superbill each month to make that easy.
Is the connection call really free?
Yes, we like to call it a connection call. Complimentary call with one or more of our clinicians, where you can have the space to ask questions, feel a connection, and feel empowered to start the journey.
You do not have to arrive with the right words.
Start with whichever door sounded like yours. We will take it from there.
Fill out the form to schedule a call. It takes about a minute.