Trauma-Informed Therapy for Black Women in Los Angeles
Therapy here is not about fixing what is broken or pushing toward a better version of yourself. It is about slowing enough to listen to what has been carrying you — often quietly, often alone — and creating the conditions for repair, meaning, and presence to emerge.
I offer a trauma‑informed, spiritually literate practice rooted in nervous system care, relational safety, and respect for the ordinary conditions of survival. This work honors the intelligence of the body, the context of lived experience, and the reality that healing unfolds in cycles rather than timelines.
You do not need to perform insight or arrive with clarity. We work at the pace your system allows.
My Orientation
I am a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) practicing in California and Texas, with training in trauma‑informed psychotherapy and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). My clinical work is grounded in an understanding of how systems — familial, cultural, economic, and institutional — shape nervous systems and constrain choice.
Alongside my clinical training, my work is informed by over twenty years of spiritual study, including tropical and sidereal astrology (as created by Dayna Lynn Nuckolls), tarot and oracle traditions, and human design. These frameworks are not used as clinical tools or prescriptive interventions. Rather, they inform how I listen for pattern, timing, and meaning — especially after long periods of survival.
Clients who already hold spiritual or symbolic ways of knowing often find that these perspectives are welcomed here, without being centered or imposed.
Who I Work With
This practice is for Black women.
Specifically: the ones who have been reliable for so long it has become a kind of invisibility. Who are competent, present, often the person others turn to — and privately carrying more than anyone around them knows.
You are not in crisis. You are not falling apart. You have, in fact, been holding it together with considerable skill. That is precisely what has brought you here.
What you are tired of is not your life exactly, but the distance between who you are in the world and who you actually are. The gap between what you produce and what you feel. The way survival has become a habit you cannot quite put down, even when the immediate threat has passed.
You may have tried therapy before. Perhaps it helped in places. Perhaps you spent more energy than you expected translating your experience — making it legible, making it palatable — rather than being met in it.
The work here does not require that of you.
You do not need to arrive with clarity or a tidy account of what happened. You do not need to perform readiness. You need only a willingness to slow down long enough to listen to what has been carrying you.
This work is also for women navigating spiritual transitions, identity renegotiation, or the long aftermath of chronic stress, including those who hold spiritual or symbolic frameworks as part of how they make meaning, and who have not always found clinical spaces that honor that.
If you find yourself reading this and thinking this sounds like me — it probably is.
Ways We Work Together
EMDR Therapy
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is offered for clients seeking structured support in working with experiences, memories, or patterns that continue to hold intensity over time — including trauma, burnout, identity shifts, grief, and the longer-term impact of chronic stress.
This work remains grounded in relationship, pacing, and consent. EMDR is not used to accelerate healing or push toward resolution. It is introduced slowly and collaboratively, with attention to capacity, context, and your connection to yourself throughout the process.
Alongside the structured elements of EMDR, we continue to notice patterns shaped by survival, rebuild trust, and make meaning without urgency. The goal is not to eliminate distress, but to support integration — allowing experiences to be held with less intensity, more context, and greater internal freedom. $300/session
Spiritual & Psychedelic Integration
Not all openings arrive through therapy, and not all of what they ask of you can be held there. Spiritual and psychedelic integration is offered for clients navigating the aftermath of plant medicine ceremonies, non-ordinary states, or spiritual emergence: experiences that were revelatory, disorienting, or both, and that are still asking something of you.
This work is oriented toward what you received and what you intend to do with it. We attend to the gap between expanded awareness and daily life — how to protect what you were shown, build capacity to act on it, and locate yourself within the relationships and communities that can hold what a clinical hour cannot.
Integration, as I understand it, is not processing. It is an act of respect toward the intelligence that moved through you, and toward the life you are trying to build in integrity with what you now know. This work is harm reduction-grounded, decolonial in orientation, and non-pathologizing in approach. $250/session
Walk-and-Talk Sessions
Some work unfolds with less force and no less depth when we are not seated across from one another. Walk‑and‑talk sessions offer the option to meet outdoors, allowing the body and conversation to move together.
Walking side by side can reduce performance pressure, soften intensity, and strengthen trust with self, with others, and in shared space — particularly for clients navigating trauma, burnout, identity shifts, grief, and the long aftermath of survival.
This is still depth-oriented talk therapy, simply held in motion. We attend to patterns shaped by survival, support capacity and choice, and make meaning at a pace that does not require urgency.
These sessions are not about productivity or processing faster. They are about creating enough safety for reflection and presence to settle in their own time. $250/session
a few principles infused into every session:
Trauma-Informed
Trauma-Informed
Trauma-Informed
You are the expert of your life. You are already resilient. You need someone who is sensitive to and understanding of the events that made you you. I am not here to tell you what to do - I'm here to join you in creating safe, supportive relationships and environments for the rest of your life, on your own terms.
Self-Compassion
Trauma-Informed
Trauma-Informed
Lots of us are great at extending kindness and understanding to others when they're struggling, or when they've made a common mistake. But when it comes to ourselves in the same situations, we often choose harsh self-judgement. Self-compassion involves acknowledging our own humanity and inherent worth to promote overall well-being and mental health by reducing feelings of shame and isolation and strengthening emotional resilience.
Mindfulness
Trauma-Informed
Mindfulness
You've heard of it, maybe you love it, maybe you're more meh. I facilitate mindfulness as a practice of accepting what we're noticing, without trying to immediately change it. Many people apply mindfulness to their external worlds, which is great! But here, we bring that noticing to our internal worlds to foster self-validation, reduce self-gaslighting, learn what our needs are and how to meet them, and strengthen self-trust.
Get Started
ZAAKIRAH DANIELS CA LCSW#122377
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