Mackenzie Steiner

Mackenzie Steiner

I am a transgender clinical psychologist practicing in California (and virtually in Texas) who has centered my 20+ year practice around healing and recovery from a broad array of complex traumatic influences; from those arising from the toxic impacts of the rigid gender binary... to abuse and neglect in one’s family and broader community... to the impacts of war.   I have a passion for serving members of the trans, non-binary, two spirit and gender-expansive community as well as members of the broader queer community.  I am deeply invested in helping queer folx to explore the impacts of and heal from cisnormative and heterosexist cultural forces that have and continue to pressure us to conform to ideologies and value systems that are incongruent with the realities of our bodies and authentic identities. As Emelie Zola noted “If you shut up truth, and bury it underground, it will but grow.”  The imposition of alien ways of (1) relating to ourselves and (2) moving through the world is a form of denial or suppression of our “truth” and a source of great suffering.

Additionally, I have spent many years of my practice serving veterans from countless different gender, sexual, racial, and spiritual backgrounds who were recovering from the impacts of complex trauma and addictions.  I have deeply specialized in the complex interrelationship between trauma and the addictive behaviors that often arise out of efforts to cope with the associated mental health impacts of that trauma.  I have particularly focused on understanding trauma and addiction through the lens of interpersonal neurobiology and how traumas of various sorts can lead to long-term problematic reshaping of the survival functions (fight, flight, freeze and fawn) of our nervous system.   This has naturally included diving into the depths of understanding the dissociative impacts of trauma including it’s associations with experiences of plurality.

Over many years of practice I have built a therapeutic mosaic that feels authentic to me, but more importantly one that seeks to balance the essential tension between our need for safety, rest, familiarity and ease with growth and expansion into activating and intense experiences that can be challenging and yet critical to face for our growth and healing.  Our systems have an inherent capacity to heal themselves and the job of therapy is largely to reveal and remove the obstacles that are preventing that process from unfolding. At the core of my work I am inspired most by ecological approaches arising from the deep wisdom of nature...

(1) Attachment-informed psychodynamic perspectives  and their emphasis on the critical importance of early relationships with caregivers on our development, attunement to our emotional experience, and safety in present relationships as a precursor for the courage to explore and heal old wounds and explore new territory…

(2) Mindfulness with it’s emphasis on helping a wayward mind return to present-moment experience and thereby help us deeply discern truth from intrusions of the past, artifice & distractions…

(3) Somatic Experiencing for it’s nuanced understanding of the survival-based (autonomic) nervous system and how to harness this knowledge in order to renegotiate the impacts of smaller and larger traumatic experiences and find wholeness…

(4) Parts-work approaches for their capacity to help us understand and respect the burdens and gifts of many different facets of our complex inner ecology towards helping them work more in harmony… and

(5) Nature-based therapeutic principles, practices and ceremonies which can help us step outside of conventional western pathologizing perspectives; thereby more directly and deeply accessing the capacity and elements that promote healing.

Specialties

• Active Duty Military
• Addiction
• ADHD
• Adolescents
• Adults
• Adults abused as children
• Anger Management
• Anxiety Disorders
• BIPOC Populations
• Complex PTSD
• Depression
• Developmental Trauma
• Dissociative Disorders
• Families of Veterans
• Gender Dysphoria
• Grief and Loss
• Homelessness
• LGBTQIA+
• Intergeneration Trauma
• Racial Trauma
• Anti-Oppression Trauma Resolution
• Systemic Trauma
• Veterans