Maria Niitepold, PsyD

I am a licensed psychologist specializing in somatic and experiential trauma therapy. Using EMDR, Brainspotting, and the Comprehensive Resource Model, I help adults heal the developmental, attachment, and complex trauma that talk therapy alone often cannot reach.

If you have done significant work on yourself — read the books, tried the techniques, been in talk therapy, learned the language of your own trauma — and the patterns still are not moving the way you expected, you are not failing at healing. You are at the place where the next step requires a different kind of work.
I am Dr. Maria Niitepold, a licensed psychologist specializing in somatic and experiential trauma therapy. My practice focuses on adults who have reached the structural ceiling of self-directed work: high-achieving professionals, complex trauma survivors, veterans, and clients carrying childhood emotional neglect, narcissistic family dynamics, or attachment wounds that have proven resistant to insight alone.
I work primarily with EMDR, Brainspotting, and the Comprehensive Resource Model (CRM). These are not techniques I add on top of talk therapy. They are the central tools of my practice, chosen because they reach the subcortical levels of the nervous system where trauma is actually stored, below the reach of language, narrative, and conscious analysis. For clients with sleep disruption tied to trauma, I also integrate CBT-I and ACT-I, an acceptance and commitment-based protocol for insomnia.
The principle underneath the work is simple: the nervous system is a relational organ. It develops in relationship and it heals in relationship. The techniques are powerful, but they are delivered within a consistent, attuned therapeutic relationship that is itself a mechanism of change. For clients whose attachment history taught them that needing other people is dangerous, the relational container is often the most significant part of what changes.
My clients tend to share certain qualities. They are thoughtful, often analytical, often professionally accomplished. They have done their reading. They can explain their patterns with clinical precision and still experience those patterns at full intensity. They have sometimes been told they are "too complex" or "too defended" for therapy to reach. They are not. They have been trying to heal relational and developmental wounds with tools that cannot reach the level where those wounds live.
I am also a veteran and enlisted in the Marine Corps in 2010. That experience informs how I work with veterans, service members, and anyone navigating the particular terrain of post-military identity. I am credentialed through the VA Community Care Network and welcome veteran clients.
Sessions are conducted online via telehealth. I am licensed to practice psychology in Florida and New York, and authorized through PSYPACT to provide telehealth services to clients in over 40 participating states. Whether you are working with complex PTSD, childhood emotional neglect, narcissistic abuse recovery, perfectionism, dissociation, relationship trauma, or the particular kind of high-functioning anxiety that looks like success from the outside, the work is available.
If something here resonates, I offer a free 15-minute consultation. There is no pressure to commit. The conversation is simply to find out whether the fit is right and what becomes possible from there.