Your body reacts before your brain can explain why. A tone of voice, a certain kind of silence, a crowded room — and suddenly your heart is racing and you’re scanning for exits you know intellectually aren’t necessary.
Conditions We Treat
Trauma & PTSD
A door closes too hard, a tone shifts mid-sentence, a familiar smell catches you in the cereal aisle — and your body is gone before your brain can catch up. Your nervous system learned to protect you a long time ago, and nobody sent it the memo that you’re safe now.
Our Los Angeles trauma therapy is grounded in trauma-informed care for adults — PTSD treatment that respects how ADHD and trauma share the same nervous-system real estate. Pasadena office, serving adults across the LA metro.
The reality
Trauma and ADHD share an uneasy overlap that is rarely discussed. Both affect your nervous system’s baseline. Both make you more reactive to stress, more sensitive to rejection, and more likely to feel like your emotions are happening to you rather than within your control. And for many adults with ADHD, the experience of growing up undiagnosed — being told you were lazy, careless, or “not living up to your potential” — is itself a form of accumulated trauma. You may carry both a specific event and the slower, quieter trauma of a lifetime spent being misunderstood. Both deserve attention.
Recognize the pattern
What this can feel like
You replay conversations and events not because you want to but because your brain has decided that if it reviews the footage enough times, it can prevent the next bad thing from happening.
ADHD already makes it hard to stay present. Trauma makes it hard to feel safe when you are. Together, they can make it feel like you’re never fully here and never fully relaxed.
You startle at things other people don’t notice, and then you feel embarrassed for reacting. The startle isn’t the problem — it’s your nervous system doing exactly what it was trained to do. But it feels like you should have outgrown it by now.
Trust is complicated. You want to let people in. You also have a highly sensitive radar for inconsistency, and ADHD gives you excellent memory for every time someone let you down. The math doesn’t always work in connection’s favor.
You can go from feeling fine to feeling completely flooded in under thirty seconds, and trying to explain the trigger feels pointless because it doesn’t make logical sense even to you.
Our approach
How group therapy can help
Healing happens in relationship
Trauma recovery happens in relationship. That’s not a poetic statement — it’s a neurological one. The same nervous system that learned to go into overdrive in the presence of threat can learn to settle in the presence of safety. Group therapy provides a consistent, predictable, boundaried environment where your nervous system can practice being around other people without needing to be on guard. For adults with ADHD, whose rejection sensitivity and emotional intensity already amplify the impact of trauma, this is especially important: you need a space where you can learn to regulate alongside others who understand that regulation is harder for you than for most.
Trauma-informed, ADHD-aware
We use trauma-informed CBT and grounding techniques that work with your ADHD brain rather than against it. Mindfulness practices are adapted for shorter attention spans. Emotional regulation skills from DBT are taught in concrete, repeatable steps you can actually remember and use in moments of distress. We also draw from acceptance and commitment therapy to help you build a relationship with your trauma history that doesn’t require you to be fully “over it” before you can live a meaningful life. The goal is not to erase the past. The goal is to reduce its control over your present.
Among people who get it
There is a particular kind of healing that happens when you share space with other trauma survivors who also have ADHD. You don’t have to explain why you can’t “just let it go” or why your brain keeps circling back to the same memory. Everyone in the room knows that trauma lives in the body, not just in thought, and that recovery is a process of rewiring rather than willpower. Our Los Angeles trauma therapy group provides a safe container for this work — one that moves at your pace, respects your boundaries, and never asks you to share more than you are ready to share.
Ready when you are
You don’t have to figure this out alone
If you’ve been carrying something heavy for a long time, and you’re not sure how to set it down, you deserve a space that was designed for exactly this. You don’t need to have the words for what happened. You just need to be willing to show up.
Common questions
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a formal PTSD diagnosis to join this group?
No. Many of our members have experienced trauma without meeting full diagnostic criteria for PTSD. If you recognize yourself in the patterns described above — hypervigilance, emotional flooding, difficulty with trust, intrusive memories — you are welcome here. We meet you where you are, not where a diagnostic manual says you should be.
Will I have to talk about what happened to me?
You are never required to disclose details of your trauma. Our approach focuses on understanding how trauma affects your present-day functioning and building skills to manage those effects. You can do deep healing work without narrating the traumatic event itself. Many people in the group never share the specifics of what happened to them, and that is fully respected.
What if being in a group triggers me?
This is a valid concern and one we take seriously. The group is facilitated by therapists trained in trauma-informed care who know how to help you stay grounded if activation occurs. You will learn grounding skills early on, and you are always free to step out, take a break, or simply sit quietly. The group environment is designed to be predictable and safe, not overwhelming.
How does ADHD make trauma recovery different?
ADHD affects working memory, emotional regulation, and stress reactivity — all of which are also affected by trauma. This means that standard trauma treatment sometimes needs adaptation: shorter exercises, more repetition, stronger emphasis on body-based regulation, and recognition that your attention may wander even during important work. Our facilitators understand this and build it into the approach rather than treating it as a problem.
