About Erica Berman, LMFT
Therapy rooted in embodiment & healthy relationship.
Hi, I’m Erica Berman, LMFT (she/her). I’m a queer trauma therapist, and I believe healing happens in a healthy connection, where we feel safe, seen, and understood.
My work is grounded in the understanding that our minds and bodies are woven into the context of our lives: our relationships, families, identities, communities, cultures, and the systems we move through. The patterns we struggle with in our day-to-day lives are often ways we once learned to survive, belong, protect ourselves, or stay connected.
Therapy with me is collaborative, curious, and human. I bring training in trauma treatment, EMDR, relational somatic psychotherapy, attachment, and parts work, but I don’t believe a modality or intervention should ever become more important than the person I am sitting with.
I want therapy to be a place where you can bring all of your complexity: contradiction, humor, grief, anger, uncertainty, identity, protective parts, and all of who you are.
Why I do this work
I became a therapist because I believe deeply in our capacity to heal through relationship, community, embodiment, and greater connection with ourselves. I have made my way through the fire, and would like to extend a hand to help you make your way through yours.
Trauma can disconnect us, from our lives, from other people, from our sense of safety, and sometimes from parts of ourselves. Healing, to me, is not about returning to some version of ourselves that existed before. It is about creating greater freedom in how we live now.
That is one reason relationship matters so much in my work. Therapy is not something I do to you. We are paying attention together: to what your body is communicating, to the patterns and protections that developed for good reasons, to what happens between us in the room, and to the places where something new becomes possible.
I also don’t separate personal healing from the world we live in. Systems have real psychological and bodily consequences. Good therapy creates enough safety in the relationship to make room for whatever emerges: grief, joy, anger, fear, numbness, uncertainty, and the parts of ourselves we may have learned to hide.
Ultimately, I want the people I work with to become more connected to themselves and to trust who that is.
How I work
I don’t believe there is one right way to heal. Therapy with me is responsive and collaborative. We pay attention to what is happening in the moment and let your needs, your embodied experience, and your own knowing help guide the work.
I bring knowledge, training, and experience into the room, but I don’t assume that makes me the expert on you. Part of our work is helping you listen more deeply to yourself and discover what becomes possible when we can have greater curiosity, choice, and trust.
Relationship is part of the therapy
The relationship between us isn’t simply the setting where therapy happens; it is part of the soil of healing.
I pay attention to what unfolds between us with curiosity and care. Therapy can become a place to experience being known, have boundaries respected, navigate rupture and repair, and discover new possibilities for connection without having to abandon yourself in order to stay connected to someone else.
That means I might bring myself into the room, too, if it supports your process. I don’t believe in being a blank screen or an impersonal expert. I want you to experience me as human while keeping the focus of our work on you.
The body is more than a nervous system
Our experiences live through us; in sensation and movement, breath and tension, impulse and emotion, and in the subtle ways we experience and respond to the world, sometimes before we have words for what is happening.
Somatic work, for me, is about becoming curious about this whole human experience rather than trying to make our bodies feel differently.
The goal is not to force yourself into calm. It is to develop a deeper relationship with yourself and greater freedom in how you respond to what you find.
Protection deserves respect
I approach symptoms, protective patterns, and parts with curiosity rather than judgment.
Dissociation, avoidance, hypervigilance, shutting down, people-pleasing, perfectionism, or feeling disconnected from yourself often developed for good reasons. They may have helped you survive, stay connected, remain safe, or navigate circumstances in which other options weren’t available.
Rather than beginning with “How do we get rid of this?” I’m often more interested in “How has this been helping you?”
When we get to know and respect our strategies rather than fighting them, something different can become possible. Parts of us that have been working very hard may no longer need to carry quite so much.
The method serves the person
I draw from EMDR, relational and somatic psychotherapy, attachment work, and IFS-informed parts work. I value these methods deeply, but no model matters more to me than meeting the whole person where they are.
Sometimes healing involves focused trauma processing. Sometimes it means slowing down and listening to what our system is communicating. Sometimes we need to get to know a protective part, notice what is happening in the present moment, grieve, get angry, laugh, experiment with something new, or stay with an experience that has never had enough room before.
Good therapy requires enough structure to help us go somewhere and enough flexibility to recognize when it is time to pay attention to what is happening right now.
A little more about me
I’m reaching a point in my life where I find myself thinking about what it means to become a queer elder.
I came of age during the AIDS crisis, and I have watched our queer and trans communities live through profound loss, stigma, political hostility, and repeated attempts to erase us. I have also watched us create family, culture, resistance, humor, care, dance floors, and extraordinary forms of belonging.
I came to this work with lived experience of survival and transformation long before I came to it with degrees and professional credentials. Your journey might not look anything like mine, but I respect what it takes to keep finding your way through.
That history matters to how I sit with people now, particularly people navigating identity, activism, marginalization, and the exhaustion of living through a time when our hard-won liberation is again under threat.
Perhaps one of the gifts of getting older is having lived long enough to know that the hardest chapter is not necessarily the last one.
Becoming a therapist did not erase the person I was before I became one. I’m grateful for that. She is part of who I bring into the room.
Training & professional background
My work has been shaped by my years of study in trauma, relational and somatic psychotherapy, attachment and developmental trauma, IFS-informed parts work, working with dissociative responses, and experiential approaches to healing.
I earned my master’s degree in Counseling Psychology with a specialization in Somatic Psychotherapy from John F. Kennedy University. My graduate training gave me a foundation in understanding psychotherapy as an embodied and relational process, an orientation that continues to shape how I work today.
I am an EMDR Certified Therapist™ and EMDRIA Approved Consultant™. I use EMDR as part of a broader relational approach to trauma treatment and also provide consultation to therapists developing their own EMDR practice.
Some of the approaches that have most deeply shaped my work include Relational Somatic Healing and Hakomi, along with study of attachment and developmental trauma, working with dissociative responses, IFS-informed parts work, and advanced approaches to EMDR and trauma processing.
I am also a Certified Ecotherapist through The Earthbody Institute, and ecotherapy is one of the influences that shapes my whole-person approach to healing.
I continue to study because I’m genuinely curious about how people heal. Training gives me more ways to understand and respond to what may be happening; it does not give me a formula for who you are.
Professional Credentials
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist
California LMFT #125492
EMDR Certified Therapist™
EMDR International Association
EMDRIA Approved Consultant™
EMDR International Association
Clinical Foundations & Influences
Somatic Psychotherapy
Hakomi
EMDR
Attachment & Developmental Trauma
IFS-Informed Parts Work
Ecotherapy
Curious about working together?
Finding the right therapist is personal. If something about my approach resonates with you, we can start with a free 20-minute consultation and talk about what you’re looking for, what you need, and whether working together feels like a good fit.