Trauma Therapy for San Francisco Bay Area Healthcare Workers

Heal from Burnout, PTSD and Moral Injury

When Success Feels Like Survival

Working at a world-renowned San Francisco hospital means excellence is the minimum expectation. Add in the crazy Bay Area traffic and the Silicon Valley belief that the right app or optimization hack can fix anything, including trauma, and you have a recipe for burnout.

You're grateful for the opportunity to work at UCSF, Stanford, or Kaiser. Of course you are. But gratitude doesn’t erase:

Critical decisions from UCSF's trauma bay from replaying on an endless loop
The faces of every patient you've lost at Children's Hospital Oakland from accumulating in your memory
The distress of choosing who gets care at SF General when there isn't enough for everyone
The exhaustion of performing "excellence" when you're running on empty

Your colleagues seem fine, or at least busy enough to avoid feeling. They're training for marathons, earning another certification, posting about work-life balance while pulling 80-hour weeks. The wine helps. The Peloton helps. The next achievement helps.

For a while.

But at 3am, when you're staring at the ceiling again, none of it touches the real problem.

You give your patients your absolute best. Time to give yourself that same level of care.

Working at UCSF, Stanford, or Kaiser Permanente means operating at the edge of medical innovation. It also means carrying home the weight of life-or-death decisions, the faces of patients you couldn't save, and the crushing reality of knowing exactly what your patient needs but being unable to provide it because of staffing ratios, insurance denials, or budget cuts.

The Bay Area celebrates its medical excellence: the breakthrough surgeries at UCSF, the cutting-edge research at Stanford, the pioneering treatments at Zuckerberg SF General.

But no one talks about the ICU nurse who hasn't slept through the night since that pediatric code. Or the resident who made a split-second decision at hour 23 of their shift. Or the attending who became numb to everything after years of absorbing other people's worst days.

Learn more about my approach to trauma treatment for healthcare workers here.

Beyond the UCSF Wellness Seminars and Kaiser EAP Programs

You've tried the hospital's wellness initiatives, the mindfulness app, and the peer support groups that meet when you're on shift. Maybe even the therapist your insurance covers who keeps asking "how does that make you feel?" about experiences that don't live in your feelings, they live in your body: the way your shoulders tense when you hear anything resembling a code alarm, how your heart races at Whole Foods when the intercom sounds like the hospital PA system, the constant knot in your stomach that formed during residency and never left.

I use methods that work differently. EMDR and ART that helps your brain process what it couldn't process in the moment. Brainspotting that lets you release trauma without narrating it play-by-play. Somatic approaches that help your body remember it's safe, even after years of high alert in the ICU.

Trauma Methods that Work Differently

Traditional therapy assumes trauma lives in your thoughts. Change your thinking, change your life, right? But you're smart; you already understand why you feel this way. You can explain the physiology of trauma better than most people. Yet understanding hasn't freed you from it.

That's because trauma doesn't actually live in the thinking part of your brain. It lives in your nervous system, in the parts that control your heart rate, your sleep, your startle response. The same parts that make you an excellent clinician, like your ability to stay calm in chaos or to make split-second decisions, are the parts holding onto every code, every loss, every moment when you had to override your own humanity to get through your shift.

EMDR and ART work by helping your brain reprocess traumatic memories while you're awake and safe, thought to be similar to what REM sleep is supposed to do naturally. Except trauma often gets "stuck" before that natural processing can happen. These methods unstick it. The facts remain, but the images, sounds, and memories stop triggering your whole nervous system.

Brainspotting uses your visual field to access the subcortical brain where trauma is stored. No need to tell the whole story again. Your brain knows where it hurts; we just help it finally heal those spots.

Somatic approaches recognize that your body is keeping score of every traumatic moment. That chronic shoulder tension isn't just stress; it's your body still bracing for the next emergency. We work directly with these body memories, teaching your nervous system that the danger has passed, that it's safe to let go.

These aren't coping strategies. This is a neurological change. Your amygdala stops firing at every hospital-adjacent sound. Your vagus nerve remembers how to help you rest. Your body stops living in a trauma bay that you left hours, days, or years ago.

This therapy is efficient. You don't need years of weekly sessions. When we work at the nervous system level, change happens faster because we're addressing the root, not just managing symptoms.

What Your Life and Career Can Look Like After Effective Trauma Treatment

Imagine walking into your shift with steady hands and a clear mind… not because you're numbed out, but because your nervous system has finally processed and released what it's been holding all these years.
Sleep returns. Not just falling asleep from exhaustion, but actual restorative sleep. No more jolting awake at 2am, heart pounding, replaying that pediatric code from months ago. When you sleep well, your clinical judgment sharpens, you make better decisions, and you stop making those small errors that come from exhaustion.
Your body stops bracing for disaster. That constant tension in your shoulders releases. The knot in your stomach unwinds. You can drive past the hospital on your day off without your chest tightening. Your partner notices you're not jumping at every notification sound anymore.
You come back to your family. Instead of being physically home but mentally trapped in the trauma bay, you're actually present. You laugh at your kid's jokes; really laugh, not just going through the motions. You have energy for date nights again. Your relationships stop feeling like another thing to manage and start feeling like the reason you're working so hard in the first place.
Work stays at work. The patient stories stop following you home. You can shower without replaying conversations with grieving families. Grocery shopping doesn't trigger memories of that specific case every time you pass certain aisles. Your days off actually feel like days off.
You rediscover why you chose medicine. Once the trauma fog lifts, you remember the satisfaction of a successful diagnosis, the meaning in comforting a scared patient, the pride in teaching a resident something valuable. These moments start outweighing the heavy ones again.
You learn to protect your time and energy without guilt. When you're not running on survival mode, saying no to that extra shift doesn't feel selfish, it feels necessary. You stop automatically saying yes when asked to cover weekends, stay late, or take on extra patients. You stop volunteering for every holiday because you think you "should." You take your vacation days and enjoy them. You leave work on time without apologizing. You eat lunch away from your desk. These aren't acts of rebellion, they're acts of self-preservation that actually make you better at your job.

One of the most surprising changes for clients often is how much energy returns. Trauma is exhausting. When your nervous system stops spending all its resources staying on high alert, you suddenly have capacity for things you'd forgotten you enjoyed. Training for that half-marathon again. Reading books that aren't medical journals. Having opinions about something other than hospital politics.

The memories don't disappear, but they live in the past, where they belong. They become things that happened, not things that are still happening.

Telehealth that Works with Your Unpredictable Schedule

I understand what Bay Area medicine really means: watching venture capital transform patient care into profit metrics, working at SF General where you treat both tech executives and unhoused patients with the same resources, paying $4,000 monthly rent while your patients can't afford their medications, and being told to practice "self-care" when you're working 80-hour weeks just to live here.

Whether you’re:

An attending carrying years of accumulated losses
A resident questioning if you can survive another year
A nurse who's given everything and has nothing left
A healthcare worker who knows that getting help will make you even better at helping others

…You need more than surface-level coping strategies. You need actual healing.

I offer telehealth for medical professionals throughout California.

An Investment in Your Nervous System’s Freedom

Specialized trauma and PTSD counseling that works at the body level, not just the thinking level.

Session Options:

50-minute sessions: $300
90-minute sessions: $450
4-hour intensives: $1,200

I'm a private-pay provider and don’t take insurance directly. I can provide documentation for out-of-network reimbursement (also known as a Superbill) if your insurance plan offers it.

All sessions are conducted via secure telehealth. You can meet with me from anywhere in California.

You don’t have to keep struggling with trauma or grief. Effective treatment is available throughout California, no commute required.

Contact Me or Schedule Here

CA LCSW 68507

Hi! I'm Summer

I'm a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with over a decade of experience, including years working in healthcare settings.

I specialize in trauma for medical professionals. I'm trained in EMDR, ART, Brainspotting, Somatic Therapy, Internal Family Systems, and Cognitive Processing Therapy, because I've seen these approaches create real relief for healthcare workers when traditional talk therapy hasn't been enough.

I work with physicians, nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists, psychotherapists, social workers, and other medical professionals who need direct, effective treatment that works with their schedule and addresses trauma at the nervous system level.

I offer telehealth in California and Idaho. Early morning and weekend appointments are available because I understand your schedule doesn't look like a typical 9-to-5.

More about Summer