Hannah Nicolaci is a California licensed marriage and family therapist at Ash & Blooms Holistic Psychotherapy, seeing clients in Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, and by telehealth throughout California. Her public profile centers trauma therapy for survivors of abuse, sexual and domestic assault, toxic relationships, anxiety, attachment wounds, self-doubt, and low self-worth.
Nicolaci describes a trauma-informed and attachment-based approach, with specialized training in EMDR and Internal Family Systems. Her work focuses on helping clients rebuild trust in their instincts, establish boundaries, regulate fear-based patterns, and recover a more grounded sense of voice and agency.
Specialties
Depth orientation
EMDR and IFS-trained trauma work with explicit attention to attachment wounds, internalized critical voices, fear-based relational patterns, embodiment, and self-trust. Her profile fits Seba's EMDR lane while retaining a depth-oriented concern for how trauma organizes inner life and relational expectation.
Hannah Nicolaci is a licensed marriage and family therapist practicing in Santa Monica, California, whose work centers on EMDR therapy and the recovery from sexual assault, domestic violence, and the longer shadows of childhood and relational trauma. She came to this work through Peace Over Violence, a nonprofit serving survivors of domestic and sexual abuse, where the stakes were immediate and the clinical education was shaped by real consequence. What she encountered there — and what has guided her practice ever since — was the particular way assault and violation strip people not only of safety but of embodiment itself: their sense of being at home in their own skin, their capacity for self-trust, their belief that they were, as she puts it, strong all along.
In the room, Nicolaci begins wherever the body begins. If it is a wall, she starts with the wall. If it is numbness, she starts with the numbness. She understands these responses not as obstacles to clear away but as the most important information in the space — protective parts, in the language of internal systems work, whose intentions are "typically so loving" even when they are heavily shamed. What she is listening for, beneath the impatience for a solution that most clients naturally feel, is the logic of a nervous system that did exactly what it had to do. The harshest voice in the room, she has found, is rarely about what happened; it is about how someone responded — the "why didn't I leave sooner," the self-betrayal layered on top of the original wound.
The people who tend to find Nicolaci are navigating toxic or narcissistic relationships, carrying generational patterns of emotional, physical, or sexual abuse, or arriving at a moment when serving or surface-level functioning are no longer enough. They are, she might say, looking to go somewhere real. The early sessions are a kind of triage — seeing, as she describes it, "what fires are in the house" — beginning with any acute trauma responses disrupting daily life, then moving into the client's own understanding of what brought them in, and offering psychoeducation on how trauma lives in the nervous system. That last piece matters more than it sounds: having language for why the body does what it does is often the first step toward a person finally stopping the work of pathologizing themselves.