Michelle Roberts, PhD. Licensed psychotherapist specializing in complex trauma and narcissistic abuse recovery, certified by the Trauma Research Foundation, and among the first clinicians in the world licensed to provide legal psilocybin therapy.
The women I see arrive at very different points on the same road. Some are fluent — they can name every dynamic in the family they came from, cite the research, and tell you the year it started. Some are still in the part where the whole thing is fog, and the only clear fact is exhaustion they cannot account for.
Neither is a prerequisite. What brings them here is the same underneath: harm that was repeated, relational, and hard to escape. Childhood abuse. Neglect no one intervened in. Developmental trauma laid down before there were words for it. Years inside a relationship that taught them to distrust their own account of it. It leaves a specific residue — the vigilance that never fully switches off, the sleep that will not come, the thing that started as the only reliable way to get to sleep, the sense of being simultaneously too much and not enough, the body that runs the arithmetic on a mood before anyone has spoken.
None of that is a character flaw. None of it is evidence that you have failed to try hard enough. It is what a nervous system does after it has been asked to survive something for a long time.
You do not have to arrive with the whole thing figured out, or even well-worded. You have to be believed accurately, and then met at the layer where the harm actually settled. That is the work.
Complex Trauma Treatment
Trauma care has advanced considerably in the last two decades. These are the approaches with the strongest evidence behind them, and having all of them available means the treatment can be built around what you actually need rather than around the one method a practitioner happens to know.
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Bilateral stimulation lets the brain finish processing what it could not finish at the time, so the experience can be stored as memory instead of relived as a present threat. The attachment-focused adaptation, developed by Laurel Parnell, builds internal resources first — the protective figure, the nurturing one — because complex trauma is often the absence of anyone who came, and the processing needs something to stand on. Learn more.
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Parts work grounded in the understanding that we are all made of many selves — protectors, exiles, the core Self that leads when the parts step back. IFS gives the parts that have been carrying the burden a way to be met, heard, and finally allowed to rest. Learn more.
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Trauma therapy that works with the nervous system rather than the narrative. Repeated harm leaves a physiological imprint — chronic activation, collapse, the startle that fires before thought. Somatic work in the lineage of Peter Levine addresses that imprint directly, at the layer where insight has no jurisdiction.
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An approach grounded in Stephen Porges's research on the autonomic nervous system and how it reads safety and threat. For complex PTSD, this is the clinical explanation for why a woman feels braced in a life where nothing is wrong — and the framework for teaching a nervous system, gradually, that the danger it is tracking is over.
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Specialized clinical care for the long aftermath of narcissistic parents, partners, or family systems. My doctoral dissertation focused on narcissistic abuse survivors, and rebuilding trust, perception, and self-knowing after sustained gaslighting is its own particular art.
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Legal, clinically held psilocybin therapy under Oregon's Measure 109 program. Among the first licensed practitioners in the world, with 180 sessions and counting. Held in a three-phase clinical protocol — preparation, session, integration — for trauma resolution and treatment-resistant depression.
Complex PTSD Recovery
Dr. Michelle Roberts
Parts Work — Internal Family Systems
Somatic and Body-Centered Therapy
EMDR Therapy
Childhood (Developmental) Trauma Recovery
Journal
Offerings
