Christina Dee
Online & In-PersonAccepting New Clients
About Christina
Whether you're starting therapy for the first time or returning to the work, I look forward to meeting you where you are. I support individuals and couples navigating a wide range of psychological and emotional challenges, including trauma, grief, stress, anxiety, panic, depression, burnout, relational wounds, and the impact of abuse, misconduct, coercion, and other harmful experiences. In addition to working through emotional pain and past experiences, I help clients strengthen self-connection, navigate life transitions, establish healthy boundaries, and cultivate a deeper sense of internal security, resilience, and self-trust.
In our work together, we'll take the time to understand where you are in your life and the experiences that have shaped you. My aim to create a space where you feel seen, understood, reassured, and genuinely supported. No matter what brings you to therapy, I'm here to support you in your healing and help you reconnect with yourself and those around you.
My approach is collaborative, compassionate, and grounded in fostering insight, resilience, and meaningful change. I offer a warm, nonjudgmental space and hold deep respect for each person’s innate capacity for growth and healing. It’s an honor to walk alongside you and support you in this process.
Out-of-Network Cost
$125 - 165 per session
Sliding scale
Top specialtyDepression
How do you work with clients with depression?
When we are depressed, frightened, or angry, cascades of unskillful thoughts will tempt us with their stories: “I can’t possibly get through this.” “It will always be this way.” “I’ll never have a good relationship.” These thoughts create a painfully limited and false sense of self. Our work together can help support not only feeling the pain that these thoughts and feelings produce, but also to release them, and substitute a wiser perspective. Exploring the cracks in the heart can create a deeper relationship with ourselves as well as our relationship with being human. How these cracks have changed the way we understand life supports the ability to carry wounds gracefully. Together, we can explore the roots in order to then begin focusing on alleviating the depression through emotional engagement or reconnection with life purpose and action.
Top specialtyTrauma and PTSD
How do you work with clients with trauma and PTSD?
Human beings have an innate ability to overcome the effects of diverse traumas. Because trauma destabilizes the nervous system, life can be experienced with a tremendous amount of stress and reactivity (hyperarousal) as well as numbness and indifference (hypoarousal). When we address the emotional and energetic aspects of trauma, our higher-self can re-engage with the distressed body to nurture recovery and rebalancing. The practice of resourcing (the ability to use internal and external resources to constructively achieve a relaxed but alert state of being) builds up and restores long-term resilience. Resourcing anchors our nervous system with calm and ease, enhances our ability to respond to spontaneous stress and refreshes our sense of self, connections to others, and feelings about the world.
Specialties · Anxiety
How do you work with clients with anxiety?
Anxiety is both an emotional, mental and physical experience. It could be related to our thoughts in the form of habituated storylines dominating our head space, or we might feel anxiety in the body without really knowing why. By building and strengthening our mental, emotional and somatic self-regulating capacities to uncouple to physical symptoms of anxiety from the thinking mind, skillful action arises bringing more space, aliveness and possibility into your life.
About Me
For people that are hesitant to try therapy, what do you wish you could tell them?
I understand that asking for help is hard and starting therapy can feel daunting if not overwhelming. Together, we will start where YOU are and focus on what matters to YOU. Call me now for a free 20-minute phone consultation.
Specialties · Grief
How do you work with clients with grief?
Grief rearranges the landscape of our life often disorienting and painful. It’s important to know how to attend to your grief and give it the time and space it needs. I have extensive clinical experience supporting individuals grieving a death or coping with a life-limiting illness as well as providing individual and group support for those healing from PTSD and death related trauma issues such as suicide bereavement, child loss, overdose and partner loss.
Approaches · Internal Family Systems (IFS)
How does internal family systems (IFS) work, and what do sessions look like?
Internal Family Systems (IFS) is an approach that explores the different inner voices, patterns, and protective responses that shape how you relate to yourself and others. You might recognize these as the part of you that is highly self-critical, the part that works hard to please others, or the part that stays guarded to prevent you from being hurt.
Rather than trying to silence or eliminate these parts, IFS invites you to approach them with curiosity and compassion. As you develop a deeper understanding of what these parts are trying to protect, you can begin to respond to yourself with greater choice rather than being pulled into familiar reactions.
Over time, this work can help soften shame, self-doubt, and fear while creating more room for clarity, confidence, and emotional flexibility. IFS offers a way to reconnect with a deeper sense of self and develop a more trusting relationship with your emotions, needs, boundaries, and inner experience.
Approaches · Somatic
How does somatic therapy work, and what do sessions look like?
Somatic Therapy brings attention to the relationship between your body, emotions, and nervous system. Rather than relying solely on talking through difficult experiences, we gently notice how stress, trauma, and emotional patterns show up physically—and learn ways to work with those experiences safely and at a pace that feels manageable.
This approach can be particularly helpful when you feel overwhelmed by your emotions, disconnected from your body, or caught in patterns of tension, shutdown, or hypervigilance. Through increased awareness of bodily sensations, movement, breath, and other forms of embodied experience, you can begin to develop a greater sense of safety and choice within yourself.
Whether you’re navigating anxiety, chronic stress, the effects of trauma, or simply feel disconnected from yourself, Somatic Therapy can offer a pathway toward greater self-awareness, regulation, and connection.
At its heart, somatic work is an invitation to listen to what your body may be communicating and develop a more trusting relationship with yourself—so that you can move through life with greater presence, flexibility, and a sense of being at home within yourself.
Specialties · Self Esteem
How do you work with clients with self esteem issues?
The inner critic is a common obstacle that most people face at some point in their meditation practice. When self-critical thought patterns creep into our mind, we can easily become consumed with feelings of shame that sometimes pushes us towards a relentless striving for self-improvement. As we loosen the grip of self-doubt through the cultivation of self-compassion, the voice of inner wisdom naturally emerges to take its place. I’ll support you in recognizing your inherent worth and developing more compassionate ways to meet your inner critic, so you can grow a more authentic, grounded relationship with yourself.
Approaches · Trauma Focused
How does trauma focused therapy work, and what do sessions look like?
Trauma therapy isn’t just about coping—it’s about healing at the root. It’s for the parts of you that have had to armor themselves to survive and are now ready, gently, to soften into something new. Whether you’ve experienced emotional abuse, childhood neglect, relational betrayal, or spent years shape-shifting to earn love, safety, or belonging, trauma therapy offers an opportunity to experience yourself differently—more grounded, whole, and no longer defined by survival mode.
Approaches · Attachment-based
How does attachment-based therapy work, and what do sessions look like?
Attachment-Based Therapy explores how early relationships and experiences can shape the way you connect, communicate, and seek safety in relationships today. It can help you understand patterns such as fear of abandonment, difficulty trusting, people-pleasing, emotional withdrawal, or feeling anxious about closeness.
In sessions, we’ll explore your relationship history and identify attachment patterns as they emerge in your current life. Through conversation, reflection, and the therapeutic relationship itself, you’ll have an opportunity to experience a safe, consistent connection while developing new ways of responding to your emotions and relationships.
Over time, this work can help you build greater emotional security, strengthen self-trust, and create relationships that feel more connected, balanced, and fulfilling.
Specialties · Domestic Abuse
How do you work with clients with domestic abuse issues?
Psychological, sexual, physical and emotional abuse as well as betrayal trauma, coercive control and neglect are often not given the weight they deserve. DV can be both overt and subtle, deeply damaging, often leaving invisible scars that affect your self-worth and relationships. Coercive control and abuse can cut the sense of yourself, your self-esteem, and your self-worth. The impact of this is significant, often limiting career opportunities, relationships with self and others, and emotional experiences. If you have survived abuse and/or neglect, it is possible to finally heal these wounds and find yourself again. I will help you untangle the complexities of your experiences, develop healthy boundaries, and restore self-esteem.
Specialties · Narcissistic Personality (NPD)
How do you work with clients with narcissistic personality (NPD)?
I treat narcissistic abuse and survivors of traumatic narcissism. I can support you with protecting yourself psychologically from harmful people as well as help you emerge from dissociation and recover their health, strength and sense of self-worth.
Approaches · Relational
How does relational therapy work, and what do sessions look like?
Relational Therapy explores how your relationships—past and present—shape the way you understand yourself, communicate, connect, and respond to others. It can be especially helpful when you notice recurring patterns in relationships but aren’t sure how to change them.
In our work together, we’ll pay attention not only to what you’re experiencing, but also to how you experience connection in the therapy relationship itself.
Through a collaborative and supportive process, we can gently explore patterns such as people-pleasing, difficulty trusting, fear of rejection, emotional withdrawal, or challenges with boundaries.
Therapy may include reflecting on significant relationships and formative experiences, identifying patterns as they emerge in the present, and practicing new ways of communicating and relating. The therapeutic relationship itself becomes a place to experience greater safety, honesty, and mutual understanding while developing skills you can carry into your relationships outside of therapy.
Over time, relational therapy can help you build greater self-awareness, strengthen boundaries, communicate more authentically, and develop relationships that feel more secure, reciprocal, and fulfilling.
Location
1042 Pacific Street Suite E
San Luis Obispo, California 93401
Specialties
Trauma and PTSDDepressionGriefIndividual TherapySexual AbuseSpiritual or ReligiousStressWomen's Issues
Client Focuses
AdultElders (65+)WhiteStraight / Heterosexual
Approaches
Attachment-basedInternal Family Systems (IFS)RelationalSomaticTrauma Focused