Brianda Torres Conley

Approaches and areas of focus: I work primarily with women and femmes of color and LGBTQ2S+ identified folks who have experienced sexual violence, childhood abuse, and intergenerational trauma. My areas of focus include life transitions, traumatic stress (including C-PTSD), cultural and racial identity, gender and sexuality, anxiety, grief, body image, and relationships with food and eating. I enjoy work that fosters reconnection with pleasure, joy, the ancestral, environment and our unique gifts, relationships, and work in the world. My approaches are relational and strengths-based. A lot of my experience has been about witnessing and holding space around our stories, as well as building practices that facilitate shifts in our patterns and narratives. I am increasingly moving toward therapeutic work that centers somatics and the knowing and wounds carried in our bodies as well as how to support healing around sex and sexuality. Also foundational to my approach is critical examination of the ways that colonial and oppressive systems and over-culture land in our bodies and our psyches. I draw from parts work (including Internal Family Systems), EMDR, somatics, Compassionate Bereavement Care, Body Trust, and the works of many teachers within and beyond fields of social work and psychology. Currently I am training in: Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy (Embody Lab), Body Trust (Center for Body Trust), and Sex and Relational Life Therapy (Relational Life Institute). Professional and personal background: My graduate education was completed with the University of Denver Graduate School of Social Work and my undergraduate degree with the University of Washington Department of Geography in Seattle. Prior to becoming a therapist, my professional experience included school-based work with refugee families, shelter-based work with women and children fleeing high lethality-risk domestic abuse, hospital-based work with children who have experienced sexual violence and physical abuse, and public policy work related to housing, homelessness, and community spaces. On a personal level, I identify as a mixed race cisgender woman. I grew-up in river and farm country in the pacific northwest (lands of the Yakama, Cayuse, Umatilla, Walla Walla, Snoqualmie, Muckleshoot, Duwamish). My patrilineal roots are Afro-Boricua of northern urban coastal Puerto Rico (Bayamón, Santurce, Trujillo Alto) and my matrilineal are of Northern European settler colonial patterns across the midwest and northwestern interior (Spokane, South Dakota). There is a lot about life that energizes me: music, dancing, basketball, big ideas, playing with clay, sewing, sitting at rivers, growing greens and squash, cooking ancestral foods. Much of my time outside of this work is devoted to running around with my kids and with chosen family. Please get in touch with any questions or schedule an initial consultation call if you feel that I could be a good fit for you.