Marina Compean, LCSW

Marina Compean, LCSW Psychotherapy and consulting services. Trauma-informed, resiliency focused somatic therapy. Integrated behavioral health specialist.

Somatic work was never just about learning to calm the body.Some of my earliest somatic training—and later, teaching—was...
09/01/2026

Somatic work was never just about learning to calm the body.

Some of my earliest somatic training—and later, teaching—was in the Trauma Resiliency Model (TRM). It gave me an important somatic foundation: neuroception, neuroplasticity, autonomic regulation, co-regulation, interoception, and practical ways of helping people notice and work with what is happening in the body.

I still carry that foundation. But my practice has continued to evolve beyond a skills-based understanding of regulation. Because a nervous system does not exist separately from relationship, culture, health, history, environment, community, or belonging.

Sometimes what gets called “dysregulation” may also contain an intelligent adaptation to overwhelming, cumulative, intergenerational, relational, medical, or social load. So the clinical questions also become:

What has this nervous system been responding to? What has it had to adapt to? What resources, relationships, meanings, and conditions have been available—or missing? And what might make recovery more possible now?

More recently, I’ve been intentionally deepening this work through Two-Eyed Seeing and ancestral/Indigenous perspectives—holding contemporary neurobiology alongside ways of understanding healing that have long located human wellbeing within relationship, land, culture, community, reciprocity, and belonging.

Not using neuroscience to validate ancestral knowledge. And not abandoning the useful biological scaffolding that somatic models have given us. Rather, widening the lens beyond a “window:”

Body + relationship.
Biology + context.
Interoception + meaning.
Regulation + belonging.
Clinical knowledge + ancestral wisdom.

Years of clinical work, lived experience, relational practice, and continued learning have helped me see beyond the somatic foundations…because sometimes the work is not simply helping a person become better at tolerating the conditions around them.

Sometimes healing also asks us to understand the conditions to which the body has been responding. And to remember that the relationship isn’t separate from the intervention.

This post started with a conversation with a close friend and medical professional who works closely with patients livin...
09/01/2026

This post started with a conversation with a close friend and medical professional who works closely with patients living with MCAS, POTS and other complex chronic conditions.

Our conversation left me thinking about the medical and psychosocial complexity of living in a body that can become unpredictable—and about where psychotherapy can be genuinely useful without psychologizing what is physiological.

It brought me back to a distinction I think matters:

Not everything that alters regulation is psychological. But almost anything that repeatedly alters our capacity to move through the world can eventually have psychological, relational, behavioral and meaning-making consequences.

That feels like an important conceptual bridge between trauma treatment, chronic illness, medical trauma, TBI/neuro-recovery, grief and life reintegration.

Today is National Grief Awareness DayA reminder that grief doesn’t always come with a funeral, flowers, or a death certi...
08/30/2026

Today is National Grief Awareness Day

A reminder that grief doesn’t always come with a funeral, flowers, or a death certificate.

We grieve people. But we also grieve health, relationships, identities, belonging, abilities, communities, imagined futures, and versions of our lives we thought we’d get to live.

Some grief is collective. Some is ambiguous. Some is barely acknowledged by anyone except the person carrying it.

And sometimes we’re grieving because the world itself no longer feels like the one we knew.

Grief doesn’t have to look tragic enough to someone else to be real.

May we make a little more room for what people are carrying today. 🤎

Loneliness isn’t a diagnosis. But connection—or the lack of it—can profoundly shape mental health.Our brains and nervous...
08/29/2026

Loneliness isn’t a diagnosis. But connection—or the lack of it—can profoundly shape mental health.

Our brains and nervous systems weren’t designed to do everything alone. Sometimes what looks like anxiety, depression, exhaustion, poor concentration or difficulty coping is also happening in the context of not having enough support, belonging or places to exhale.

And yes, connection can happen in therapy, too. In cooler weather, Milo and I offer Walk & Talk sessions. ☀️🐕
In this heat? We also enthusiastically endorse air conditioning, cold (healthy 😉) beverages, and meaningful human connection from the safety of a Zoom room. 😂

Co-regulation does not require heat stroke.

Connection is part of care. 🌿

Healing from trauma can bring relief, growth, and strength—and grief.Grief for who you were before.For time lost to surv...
08/26/2026

Healing from trauma can bring relief, growth, and strength—and grief.

Grief for who you were before.
For time lost to surviving.
For relationships, opportunities, and versions of life that changed along the way.

Healing isn’t about becoming your “old self” again. Trust me, that has been a loss I’m grieving myself! So, I’ve worked to focus on integrating what happened while continuing to become who I am now. You can too. I can help.

There is room for both recovery and grief. 🌿

In my therapy specialty, we talk a lot about medical trauma in patients.We talk much less about what can happen to the p...
08/25/2026

In my therapy specialty, we talk a lot about medical trauma in patients.

We talk much less about what can happen to the people who love them.

Partners, parents, adult children, siblings, close friends and caregivers can spend days or months in states of uncertainty, vigilance and helplessness while someone they love is seriously ill or injured. Then the immediate danger passes—and everyone is expected to return to normal.

But relationships don’t always return to baseline that easily.

One person may emerge from the experience desperately needing connection and accompaniment.

Another may find themselves avoiding reminders of a period when they were terrified, helpless or overwhelmed.

Understanding that dynamic doesn’t mean excusing relational harm. It means recognizing something our healthcare system often misses:

A medical crisis happens to a patient.
But its psychological consequences can happen within an entire relational system.

Trauma-informed recovery deserves to make room for both.

&belonging

Real talk…cortisol is getting a bad name! Here’s my take on how therapy can support your physiology to help maintain a h...
08/24/2026

Real talk…cortisol is getting a bad name! Here’s my take on how therapy can support your physiology to help maintain a healthy HPA feedback loop for managing stress. Short answer, cortisol I not your enemy.

Instead of the frustration in repeatedly asking, “Does this therapist take my insurance?” I invite you to also ask:“Is t...
08/19/2026

Instead of the frustration in repeatedly asking, “Does this therapist take my insurance?” I invite you to also ask:

“Is this someone who understands what I’m dealing with, has the experience I need, and feels like someone I could actually do meaningful work with?”

Because yes, affordability matters.

And so do expertise, availability, relationship, cultural understanding, and fit.

I don’t want therapy to require stretching your finances beyond what is genuinely sustainable. And I don’t believe private-pay therapy is automatically better therapy.

I want you to find the right therapist at a cost you can realistically manage. That’s also why I’ve been rethinking how I structure my own practice.

Rather than pretending everyone can comfortably afford the same fee, I’m building a small practice with different levels of financial participation—an attempt to make room for accessibility while also creating a practice I can sustain.

I keep coming back to these two things:

Therapy should be more accessible.

And therapists should be able to make a sustainable living providing it.

I believe we can make room for both.

Can we build enough safety, curiosity, and accompaniment to be with what your body is already doing?”Not every sensation...
08/18/2026

Can we build enough safety, curiosity, and accompaniment to be with what your body is already doing?”

Not every sensation needs to become a release.
Not every activation needs to become calm.
Not every protective response needs to disappear.

Sometimes embodiment begins with:

I can notice myself here.
I can stay in relationship with myself here.
And I don’t have to do it alone.

There is good evidence that trauma and chronic stress can produce persistent changes in autonomic regulation, interocept...
08/10/2026

There is good evidence that trauma and chronic stress can produce persistent changes in autonomic regulation, interoception, muscle tone, pain processing, movement, defensive responses, and sensory prediction. There is also increasingly interesting research on fascia as a richly innervated sensory/interoceptive structure. Trauma affects autonomic regulation and circumstances that feel like chronic threat can affect attention and cognition

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