Scottsdale, Arizona
PTSD treatment that starts with the nervous system.
The event is over, but your body is still learning.
Maybe you’ve already done “the work.” Talked it through, traced where it came from. Yet you still brace at a sound in the next room, go flat during a conversation, or notice gaps in memory.
Understanding what happened isn’t the same as being free of it. That’s not a failure of effort. It’s a sign to work from a different angle.
Acute PTSD and developmental trauma specialty
A clinician stays with you during treatment
Somatic Experiencing® trained clinicians
Adults 18+
Who we treat
When trauma outlasts the event
What happened matters. Your body’s new relationship to safety matters just as much.
Some people come to us after a single critical event. Others carry something slower: a childhood that required constant watchfulness, years of chronic stress, relationships where safety was never reliable.
Complex trauma rarely has a clean before and after. That’s part of why it goes unnamed for so long, and why people so often assume the problem is them.
What people tend to describe
Hypervigilance that won’t switch off
Numbness that showed up as protection, and stayed
Sleep that never quite restores
Some part of you still braced for something that is already over
Most trauma care asks you to talk about what happened. We’re more focused on what your body is still doing about it: trying to find safety, doing what it needs to stay alive.
Our approach
How trauma gets treated here
Trauma is held in the body, often out of reach of words. Healing means helping your nervous system experience safety again.
Every clinician on our team is trained in Somatic Experiencing®, a body-based approach to trauma and chronic stress. Dr. Michael Yasinski also works with Deep Brain Reorienting, which tends to the brainstem’s orienting response: the split second where the body registers threat before the mind turns it into a story.
Most places
Two offices
Prescriber
You
Therapist
A prescriber manages the medication. A therapist works with what sits underneath. You end up holding the translation yourself, usually when you have the least capacity.
Here
One conversation
Somatics
Internal Family Systems
Attachment repair
Deep Brain Reorienting
Psychiatric assessment
Medication
All of it sits in the same treatment plan, held by clinicians trained in both trauma work and psychiatry.
Trauma work isn’t something we refer out. It’s what the psychiatry is built on.
Depending on what you need and what you’ve already tried, that can look like trauma-informed psychiatry, ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, or both.
What to expect
What working with us involves
A full psychiatric evaluation
Care begins with a full evaluation. We review your current symptoms and pain, your medical and psychiatric history, what you’ve already tried, and what did or didn’t help.
We’ll also talk about
- Sleep
- Nutrition
- The stress you carry now
- The experiences that taught your system to respond this way
If ketamine becomes part of the plan
- 1Psychiatric assessmentThis is some text inside of a div block.
- 2PreparationPreparation sessions come before any medicine session.
- 3The medicine sessionA licensed psychiatric provider stays with you throughout.
- 4IntegrationThe work continues afterward.
Ketamine and PTSD
Ketamine for PTSD and complex trauma
Ketamine can create a window where the nervous system is more flexible than usual. For protective patterns that have held for decades (bracing, tension, constant anxiety, reactivity), that window may allow a different kind of contact with what sits underneath.
Before any ketamine session, every client completes a comprehensive psychiatric assessment to determine whether treatment is appropriate and medically safe.
That’s why we don’t offer ketamine without preparation, a clinician present, and integration.
Explore Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy
Dissociation
One word, two different things
People who already dissociate often ask whether ketamine is safe for them. It’s a fair question, and the confusion lives in the language rather than in the medicine.
As a trauma symptom
Trauma-driven dissociation
A defensive disconnection from an experience that became intolerable. It exists to protect your sense of self from further overwhelm.
As a medicine effect
What ketamine produces
A temporary loosening of the way the brain ordinarily holds together self, body, perception and memory.
In a session with thoughtful practitioners, that loosening can let someone who chronically disconnects meet a once-intolerable experience while staying connected to their body, to the room, and to another person in it.
What changes isn’t the memory. It’s how it feels to be near it.
Which is also why nobody here is left alone in a session.
Questions
What People Ask Us First
If something you need to know isn’t here, call and ask. It’s our job to get you answers.
Do you treat complex PTSD, or only PTSD?
Both. We work with acute PTSD after a single event, and with developmental and complex trauma built up over years of chronic stress or unreliable safety. The approach is the same in principle. The pacing can be different.
Is ketamine-assisted psychotherapy safe if I already dissociate?
The dissociation people live with as a trauma symptom, and the dissociation ketamine produces are different. Whether treatment is appropriate for you is determined by a psychiatric assessment before anything is scheduled, and a clinician stays with you for the full session.
Do I have to do ketamine therapy to be treated here?
No. Trauma-informed psychiatry, including evaluation and medication management, is a complete course of care on its own. Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy is one option among several, not a requirement, and plenty of the people we treat never have a session.
Can you work with the therapist I already have?
For psychiatric care, yes, and we do it often. For ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, no. The therapy inside a KAP session is held by one of our clinicians, so that part of the work happens here. Your own therapist stays in the picture, and we coordinate with them alongside it.
Do you see children or teenagers?
No. We work with individuals 18 and older.
Reach out
Wherever you are in this, a conversation is a reasonable place to start.
To ask a question or book an evaluation, call us. You can also email info@traumahealingjourneys.com.
Call Us (602) 842-9919We do not provide emergency psychiatric services. If you are in crisis, call the Arizona Crisis Hotline at 1-844-534-4673, dial 911, or go to your nearest emergency room.