Reach Back to Your Roots With Someone Beside You
Asking for Help Is Your First Act of Strength
This isn’t something you bring up with your friends or your family.
So you’ve kept it to yourself, and you’re tired in a way that sleep doesn’t touch.
What you want is someone who hears all of it without flinching. Someone who taps in and transmutes it into something that heals.
Reaching out for that takes more strength than everything you’ve been doing to keep it contained.
Feeling Safe in Your Own Skin Comes First
It’s hard to feel safe when you’re walking on eggshells with everybody.
You can’t remember the last time you felt comfortable around other people, or alone with yourself.
Imagine trusting someone, and trusting yourself while you’re with them. Someone who’s one hundred percent invested in you.
We start there, before anything else.
Find the Root, Access the Warrior
Root first, then warrior. That’s the order this work happens in.
Together, we’ll talk about your past and the root experiences that formed your personality. The influences, the environments, the genetics, the circumstances.
As we look at what came before, your present sharpens. Why you do what you do today starts to make sense, and so does what you want to change.
I want you to feel my support with your deepest hurts as well as your proudest moments. We all have a warrior in us. Let me help you find yours.
Your Creativity Has Been Speaking for You
A striking number of the women I work with are artists. Painters, musicians, writers, designers.
My theory is that the creative work has been doing the talking. When a girl grows up without permission to have a voice, the art becomes the voice.
Art therapy and music therapy sit at the center of my practice, right alongside the conversation.
You want to feel like you could shine and not dull yourself. We work toward that, session by session.
Reach the Past Without Reliving It
The worry I hear most is that going back means going through it all again.
I use Flash EMDR for exactly that reason. It’s a gentler form of EMDR that lets your brain process a memory without putting you back inside it.
Around that, I draw on attachment theory, family systems, Jungian and shadow work, inner child work, somatic approaches, and Seeking Safety. CBT and DBT are the foundation underneath.
The arc stays the same. We find what happened, we work with what it did to you, and we rebuild the parts of you that got quiet.
About Dr. Elizabeth Wise, LCSW
Hi, I’m Elizabeth. I was born in Massachusetts and studied Graphic Design and Painting at Syracuse University.
I saw my first therapist there, when presentations started bringing on more anxiety than I could talk myself out of.
After graduating, I moved to Los Angeles. Graphic designer by day, singer by night.
My second therapist helped me enormously with the anxiety and the shame of having an alcoholic father and a narcissistic mother.
Psychology Has Saved My Life More Than Once
Then a medical issue went undiagnosed for a year, and I spent most of that year bedridden. I read psychology constantly.
Reading psychology was something I’d always done, and it had always come out in my writing and my art. What I kept wondering was why I hadn’t studied it in college.
After an operation on a labral tear, I started grad school at the University of Southern California. Once again I had a therapist who took me back to my roots through Jungian work, and who became my mentor through graduate and doctoral school.
My focus is people with a trauma background, many of them recovering from narcissistic abuse. I’ve also written a novel based on true events, about childhood trauma and how it follows you into adult life and shapes your relationships at home and at work.
I Am SO Grateful I Get to Do This Work
Had I not had these incredible people beside me, I wouldn’t be who I am today, and I strive every day to be half as good as they were.
Getting to help people the way I was helped means the world to me.
I want my clients to feel safe enough to reach back to their roots with me as their partner and guide. I want them to find their strength in the looking back, and to love themselves as the warrior they become.
In the mornings before sessions you’ll find me hiking with my two beautiful big babies, Kioke and Prince (pictured here), doing yoga and meditating.
Take the First Step Toward Your Own Voice
I work online with individuals and teens across California, Oregon, and Idaho. I also run Root Warrior Retreat, a week-long trauma retreat by the ocean.
Start with a free 20-minute consultation. Text or call me today at (208) 435-8760.
You’ve had a voice this whole time. Let’s go get it back.
Let’s Find Out if I’m Your Person
You want this to stop hurting, and you want it to stop soon. That’s fair, and it’s a good reason to pick up the phone.
There’s a version of your life where you say the true thing on the first try, the door stays open, and your voice comes back without an apology attached to it.
We’ll find out together whether I’m the right person for this.