Therapy After Sexual Assault, Available Online
Therapy after sexual assault works with what the experience left in your body and in your sense of yourself, at whatever pace you set.
No matter when it happened, therapy can help
Therapy does not require you to describe what happened, and it does not require the assault to have been recent, reported, or witnessed by anyone.
People arrive at this page at very different distances from the event. Some are a few weeks out. Others are thirty years out, having decided this year that the thing they had been calling a bad situation has a different name.
I see clients over secure video in California, Illinois, Texas, Washington, D.C., Virginia, and Maryland. Sexual assault recovery has been central to my clinical work since I started
If you are in immediate danger or acute distress, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or reach the RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-4673.
You do not have to tell me what happened
This is the question I get first, usually phrased as an apology.
You can keep the account. Somatic and arts-based work does not run on narrative, and I can do my job with an outline — roughly when, roughly who, what it does to you now. Many people never give me more than that, and the work proceeds anyway.
There is a reason beyond comfort. Retelling a story in detail, before your system can stay present through it, tends to re-run the event rather than process it. So the order I prefer is capacity first, material second, and you decide how much of the second ever gets spoken.
Delayed recognition is the norm. Something shifts — a relationship gets serious, a child reaches the age you were, a news cycle runs for two weeks — and a thing you had filed away stops staying filed.
Late recognition can carry its own shame, usually some version of I should be over this or I let it go on for years. Both of those are the trauma speaking in the first person. Time does not reduce what you are entitled to work on, and a late start does not make the work slower.
When it happened a long time ago
What assault does to the body, and to trust
The symptoms that bring people in are often physical before they are emotional. Startling at touch from someone you love and chose. Going somewhere else during sex and coming back annoyed with yourself. Chronic tension with no orthopedic explanation. A sense that your read on people cannot be trusted, because it was wrong once at enormous cost.
Underneath, there is usually a question about self-trust. Can I trust my judgment, can I trust my body, can I trust relationships. Those are the questions I actually work on, and they are slower and more interesting than symptom reduction.
How I work, and how it runs over video
I draw on Brainspotting, expressive arts, somatic parts-work, guided imagery, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, in a sequence that puts stability ahead of processing.
Resourcing. We start by finding what settles you and making it reliable. Guided imagery does a great deal of the early work here. For some people this is the first time they have had deliberate access to a state that is not vigilance.
Processing, at your pace. Brainspotting lets us work with the felt residue of an experience while you stay oriented and in the room. Expressive arts give you a route when language either fails or arrives too polished. You make something, we look at it together, and you keep it.
Reconnection. Intimacy, boundaries, and the slow business of being in your own body on purpose. This part often involves a partner's patience, and sometimes a conversation about what you need from them.
Over video there are specific advantages for this work. You are in a space you control, which matters when control was the thing taken. There is no waiting room, no parking lot, no walking past strangers afterward with your face doing something you cannot manage. You can sit on your own floor with a blanket. Several clients have told me they would not have started this work in an office, and I believe them.
Questions people ask before starting
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I spent part of my career as a therapist and family advocate at a Child Advocacy Center, which means I have worked with sexual abuse disclosure in its rawest form, inside systems — forensic interviews, investigations, families coming apart in real time. I also carry specialized experience with sexual abuse by a family member, which has its own shape: the harm and the attachment in the same person, and a family that often requires you to choose.
My trainings most relevant here are Accredited Brainspotting Phase 1 (2026), Integrative Somatic Parts-work Levels 1 and 2 through The Embody Lab, and the Expressive Arts Therapy K Module at The Expressive Arts Institute San Diego. I teach graduate courses at Bastyr University on the mind-body connection and the fundamentals of counseling.What I notice most: people come in braced for me to need the details, and the relief when I do not ask is often the first thing that happens in the room.
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None of that changes what you are entitled to work on here. Freezing, appeasing, and returning are nervous-system responses with well-documented mechanics, and they are among the most common reasons people doubt their own experience.
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Yes, and most of the people I work with never did. Therapy and the legal process are separate, and nothing here requires a report, a case, or any corroboration.
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My practice is adults and older teens, more often with women, and my teen work is older teens and young women.
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California, Illinois, Texas, Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., all over secure video. I am out-of-network by design with three-tier pricing — $160, $200, or $250 — and you pick the tier that is sustainable. Superbills provided, Thrizer partnership for reimbursement, first consultation free.