Chana Ceasar, LMFT provides specialized online trauma therapy for women and children in California and Florida, along with developmental and attachment consultation for parents, caregivers, and professionals.

At Centering Healing, I work with women who grew up unprotected, adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse and mother-daughter sexual abuse, children through age 14, and families seeking a deeper understanding of their child’s development, behavior, relationships, and nervous system.

I bring more than twenty years of experience working with children, adolescents, adults, and families. My training includes attachment trauma, childhood sexual abuse, mother-daughter sexual abuse, Somatic Experiencing, infant-parent mental health, developmental trauma, and the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics.

This page will help you determine which Centering Healing service fits your client or family and what they should do next.

Adult Trauma Therapy Referrals

I provide online attachment trauma therapy for adult women who are physically located in California or Florida during their sessions. The women I work with often grew up in families where their feelings were dismissed, boundaries were ignored, emotional needs were treated as burdens, or protection was inconsistent. They learned early that connection required vigilance and thus became skilled at reading the room, noticing changes in another person’s mood, anticipating what other people needed, and adjusting themselves to preserve connection. They learned which feelings were welcome, which needs created tension, and how to become quiet, helpful, agreeable, responsible, or deeply attuned to everyone around them. These adaptations helped the child maintain connection but in adulthood, the same attachment template may continue organizing her relationships, boundaries, work, decisions, and sense of self.

Who I Help

Adult therapy at Centering Healing may be a strong fit for women experiencing the lasting effects of:

• Attachment trauma
• Childhood emotional neglect
• Developmental trauma
• Parentification
• Chronic emotional invalidation
• Inconsistent or unpredictable caregiving
• Childhood sexual abuse
• Incest
• Mother-daughter sexual abuse
• Blurred family boundaries
• Family secrecy
• Relational trauma
• Experiences where their feelings, bodily cues, boundaries, or reality received limited protection

She may be a professional, therapist, physician, attorney, educator, business owner, caregiver, mother, or the person everyone turns to during a crisis. She is often seen as someone who is capable, dependable, perceptive, and composed, but internally, she feels exhausted from monitoring relationships and carrying responsibility for everyone else’s emotional experience, from always being strong and holding it all together for everyone else, and feeling deeply alone and burned out.

How Growing Up Unprotected Can Shape Adult Life

Growing up unprotected may show up in adulthood as:

• Replaying conversations and searching for what she did wrong
• Monitoring another person’s tone, expression, silence, or emotional energy
• Feeling responsible for keeping relationships stable
• People-pleasing
• Overfunctioning
• Freezing when she wants to speak
• Becoming quiet when something feels wrong
• Struggling to identify what she wants
• Feeling guilty when setting boundaries
• Questioning her feelings or bodily signals
• Bracing when someone is disappointed
• Feeling exposed when receiving attention, affection, praise, or support
• Remaining in relationships that require emotional labor and self-silencing
• Feeling disconnected from her body
• Experiencing shame or confusion related to childhood sexual abuse
• Struggling with touch, closeness, intimacy, or being seen
• Understanding her patterns intellectually while her body continues to brace, freeze, monitor, or shut down

These patterns developed inside relationships where the child needed connection and had limited control over the emotional environment. Her body learned to stay alert as her attention moved toward everyone else, making her internal signals became quieter as she focused on maintaining connection.

What We Work Toward In Therapy

Therapy helps her slow down the moments when her attachment template becomes activated and understand what her nervous system learned to do when protection was inconsistent. Through repeated experiences of being accurately seen, supported, and stayed with, she begins developing a different internal experience.

Over time, she may begin to:

• Recognize her feelings while they are happening
• Trust her internal signals
• Understand what belongs to the present moment
• Express a need while remaining connected to herself
• Set boundaries that reflect what she feels and wants
• Allow other people to carry their own emotional responses
• Make decisions with greater clarity
• Feel more grounded inside her body
• Take up space in relationships, work, and family life
• Experience connection that includes her needs, voice, and full presence
• Develop a felt sense that she matters and deserves protection

The unprotected child begins to experience something new. Her feelings carry information, her voice matters, her body belongs to her, and her needs can exist inside a relationship.

Attachment Trauma Therapy

Attachment trauma develops through repeated relational experiences that shape how the nervous system understands closeness, safety, boundaries, and connection. A woman may know that she is allowed to have needs while her body still tightens when she expresses one. She may understand that conflict can be repaired while her nervous system prepares for rejection, withdrawal, or abandonment.

In therapy, we slow these reactions down and notice how they unfold in real time. We pay attention to thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, movements, impulses, protective responses, and relational expectations.

The client begins to recognize when she is moving away from herself to maintain connection. She practices remaining present with her own experience while someone else has a feeling, reaction, or need.