Angela Schellenberg Counseling/ Coaching

Angela Schellenberg Counseling/ Coaching Angela is a mental health Trauma, Grief, and Loss Therapist , LMHC. Mother Hunger Facilitator

Half a century of research. One sentence nobody ever said out loud to you. Comment HELP and I will send you what comes n...
04/30/2026

Half a century of research. One sentence nobody ever said out loud to you. Comment HELP and I will send you what comes next.

Some women can describe their inner world with surgical precision.They know exactly how they feel. How they come across....
04/29/2026

Some women can describe their inner world with surgical precision.

They know exactly how they feel. How they come across. What they're doing wrong. How others probably see them.

This gets praised as emotional intelligence.

In clinical work it often looks like hypervigilant self monitoring. A nervous system that learned to track itself before anyone else could.

Research from McCrory shows children from unsafe attachments develop heightened amygdala reactivity to threat. This happens outside conscious awareness. The adaptation was intelligent.

It is also exhausting to carry into adulthood.

Your nervous system needs new evidence. Not more insight.
U


Comment 15MIN and I'll send you it gives people a free 15 minute call with me so they can meet me and we can explore therapy options together. This warms people up to doing real sessions with me..

The guilt hits different when your mom is a narcissist.Your body remembers what love was supposed to feel like. Safe. St...
04/29/2026

The guilt hits different when your mom is a narcissist.

Your body remembers what love was supposed to feel like. Safe. Steady. Unconditional.

Instead you got conditional love disguised as care. Love that required you to be smaller. Quieter. Perfect.

Dr. Karyl McBride's clinical research shows daughters of narcissistic mothers have significantly higher rates of depression and anxiety. The impact is real. The wounds are real.

You were trained to manage her emotions instead of your own.

Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is protect your nervous system. Even on mother's day.



If you're tired of not knowing how to feel your own feelings after a lifetime of managing hers,

Comment WORTHY and I'll send you my free Emotional Starter Kit to help you begin recognizing your own feelings again.

Two things almost always come out of childhood trauma: shame, and frozen grief.Children are developmentally wired to mak...
04/28/2026

Two things almost always come out of childhood trauma: shame, and frozen grief.
Children are developmentally wired to make themselves the cause of what happens around them. A parent who is absent, sick, raging, gone. The child concludes: “I must be bad.” Eventually that calcifies into “I am bad.”
The grief that should have moved through the body gets stored instead, because there was no adult available to help metabolize it.
Then the nervous system improvises. Dissociation. Animals. Humor. Caretaking. Achievement. Whatever kept you functional.
None of that was a character flaw. It was survival intelligence in a body too small to do anything else.
What happened to you is not what’s wrong with you. Attachment wounds are healable.

Comment “book” if you’re ready to unpack your grief and trauma with a therapist who deeply understands this rupture and always believes healing is possible.

Ambiguous loss is the grief nobody taught you to name.It's mourning someone who is still alive.Or grieving someone who d...
04/28/2026

Ambiguous loss is the grief nobody taught you to name.

It's mourning someone who is still alive.
Or grieving someone who died but feels more present than ever.

Pauline Boss identified this in the 1970s. Two types. Physical presence with psychological absence. Or psychological presence with physical absence.

The 2023 Ambiguous Loss Inventory study found people experiencing this have significantly higher rates of prolonged grief disorder and PTSD compared to conventional grief.

Your nervous system doesn't know how to process something that has no resolution.
No funeral. No sympathy cards. No permission to fully mourn.

You're not stuck. You're undiagnosed.

If you need a place where people understand this specific kind of grief,



Comment BOOK and I'll send you the link to schedule a 1:1 session where we can work through the specific nervous system impacts of ambiguous loss using EMDR and somatic approaches.

The self help world keeps telling us we have to love ourselves before anyone else can love us properly.But attachment th...
04/27/2026

The self help world keeps telling us we have to love ourselves before anyone else can love us properly.

But attachment theory shows the opposite.

We learn to love ourselves through being loved by others first.

Research from Neff and Pommier found that self-compassion and compassion for others develop together, not sequentially. They're connected, not conditional.

The idea that you have to love yourself first keeps women isolated when they need connection most.

You don't have to fix yourself before you deserve love.
You don't have to be whole before you're worthy of care.
You don't have to love yourself before someone else can see you clearly.

Love was never meant to be a solo project.



If you've been carrying the weight of thinking you have to heal alone,

If you've been carrying the weight of thinking you have to heal alone, comment 15MIN and let's explore what it feels like to be seen by someone who gets it.

You don’t realize how traumatic something you lived through is until a horse mirrors it back to you 30 years later durin...
04/11/2026

You don’t realize how traumatic something you lived through is until a horse mirrors it back to you 30 years later during an equine therapy session.
I lost my father when I was 16 to gun violence. It was sudden, instant, and brutal.
In the aftermath, my focus wasn’t my horse. It was surviving. My entire family was torn apart and I was in the middle of coming of age with a brain that wasn’t fully developed and a grief too large to hold.
So I didn’t hold it. I buried it.
What I didn’t realize was how much I was still carrying until it was mirrored back to me in an equine session decades later.
Here’s what happens with grief like that. When we lose someone we love, especially a parent, during those formative years, our nervous systems do what they have to do. The grief gets shoved down. It freezes. And sometimes it turns into shame, because children always believe they should have done something. Could have done something.
That frozen grief doesn’t disappear. It waits.
Horses find it.
They access what’s so subconscious, so buried, that no amount of talking has touched it. They mirror back the parts of you that you didn’t even know you were still carrying.
That’s what we do at my Somatic Healing with Horses Grief Retreat in Malibu.
We don’t talk it out. We work it out.
Comment MALIBU if you want to know more.

Some hills are worth dying on.These are mine.If any of these landed, comment TRAUMA and I'll send you the reading list I...
04/04/2026

Some hills are worth dying on.

These are mine.

If any of these landed, comment TRAUMA and I'll send you the reading list I give every daughter in my practice.

Nobody tells you that spring is one of the hardest seasons to grieve through.The longer days. The flowers. The family ga...
04/03/2026

Nobody tells you that spring is one of the hardest seasons to grieve through.
The longer days. The flowers. The family gatherings with one less seat filled.
Your body remembers before your head catches up. That’s the trauma.
So if it’s hitting you hard right now, think about this time last year and try to identify what you remember and feel.
A few things that actually help:
Tell someone you’re struggling. Not a vague “I’m fine.” Actually say it out loud.
Talk about your person. Say her name. Tell a story. She deserves to be mentioned at the table.
Let your girls show up for you. That’s what they’re there for.
You don’t have to perform okayness this Easter weekend. You just have to get through it. And you don’t have to do that alone.
Comment “Circles” and find out how grief is an attachment trauma and find others who get this.

There is nothing like being seen by a horse.If you’ve carried grief and trauma your whole life, you know what it means t...
04/03/2026

There is nothing like being seen by a horse.
If you’ve carried grief and trauma your whole life, you know what it means to not fully trust your own worth. Childhood trauma does two things: it breeds shame and it freezes grief. And when both live inside you, loving yourself becomes almost impossible.
Horses don’t care about your defenses. They don’t respond to what you perform. They respond to your nervous system, your truth, your body in the present moment. And when a horse turns toward you, when it stays, something in you remembers it’s safe to exist.
That’s not magic. That’s regulation. That’s what equine assisted learning does for a nervous system that has been braced for decades.
If you’ve never experienced how a horse can meet you in your grief and trauma, I want you to come to Malibu.
April 30 through May 3. Four days at Shakti Ranch and the Malibu Beach Resort. I just opened up a handful of day passes for those who can’t make the full retreat.
Comment MALIBU and I’ll send you everything.

Address

7345 164th Avenue NE Te 145/386
Santa Monica, CA
90405

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 5pm
Tuesday 9am - 9pm
Wednesday 9am - 9pm
Thursday 9am - 5pm
Friday 9am - 5pm

Website

https://linktr.ee/angelaschellenberg

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