about Clara Mackinlay
Somatic Trauma Therapist in Long Beach, california
Therapist, Entrepreneur, Ceremonialist
Clara is an integrative therapist who works with adults and couples seeking holistic, body-based, emotionally focused, and spiritually grounded trauma and relationship healing.
Her work is shaped by lived experience with Complex PTSD and informed by advanced training in Somatic Experiencing®, EMDR, Internal Family Systems (IFS), the Gottman Method, Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP), shamanic rituals, and therapeutic touch.
In addition to her clinical training, Clara is a certified yoga instructor (RYT-250), Reiki Master, certified Psychedelic Integration Specialist, cacao ceremony facilitator, and international ceremonialist. These modalities support the embodied, relational, and spiritual dimensions of healing that many of her clients are seeking, and are held within her lived experience as a first-generation bilingual American of Argentinian and Indigenous descent.
Before becoming a therapist, Clara built and led businesses across multiple industries, including six years serving as Business Operations Manager for Dr. Nadine Macaluso, trauma therapist and author of Run Like Hell, to which Clara contributed as a writer and editor. “Dr. Nae” is widely known for her public story as the former spouse of Jordan Belfort (The Wolf of Wall Street).
Clara’s entrepreneurial background spans nonprofit leadership, startup operations and strategy, high-level business coaching, hospitality and event production, professional organizing, and digital design—including website development, branding, and marketing strategy. This breadth of experience reflects her own history of over-functioning as a trauma response and continues to inform her work with high-functioning, driven clients navigating both personal and professional complexity.
The mark of a great therapist isn’t just their training—it’s a commitment to their own ongoing healing.
There are many therapists with impressive training and credentials—and those things matter. Still, no one has it all figured out, no matter how polished they may appear.
In my experience, the therapists who create the safest and most effective spaces are those who remain students of their own healing: curious, humble, and engaged in ongoing personal work. A therapist can only take their clients as far as they’ve been willing to go themselves.
Professional QUALIFICATIONS
In addition to 25+ years of personal psychotherapy, countless medicine journeys, weekly supervision, and ongoing consultation with accomplished experts across a variety of disciplines, I also bring formal clinical training and credentials recognized within Western therapeutic frameworks, including:
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Associate Marriage & Family Therapist
California Board of Behavioral Sciences, #149677Master of Arts, Clinical Psychology
Antioch University, Los AngelesBachelor of Arts, Psychology
University of California, Los Angeles -
*Please note this list is not exhaustive. I value lifelong learning and continually engage in trainings, certification programs, practice, and consultation with industry experts. These are just a few highlights.
Somatic Experiencing Advanced Practitioner (in progress)
Somatic Experiencing® InternationalEMDR Basic Training
Trauma Therapist InstituteGottman Method Couples Therapy, Levels 1 & 2
The Gottman InstituteKetamine-Assisted Psychotherapy
Journey Clinical | FluenceAyahuasca Mystery School
Plant Medicine PeopleRelational Movement & Touch for Attachment Trauma
Leah Smith, LMFT, SEPIntroduction to Developmental Movement
Debra Clydesdale, SEP
Unfreezing the Fawn with Somatic Experiencing®
Shideh Lennon, SEP, PhDSomatic Trauma Therapy Certificate
Dr. Abi Blakeslee, SEPTrauma-Focused CBT Certificate
The Medical University of South CarolinaCertified Reiki Level I, II, and III
Mikao Usui lineage; attuned by Justin RandolphCertified RYT-250, Vinyasa & Yin Yoga
SolSeek, Manhattan BeachCertified Plant Medicine Integration Coach
Plant Medicine People -
Somatic Experiencing® (SE)
Eye-Movement & Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR)
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP)
The Gottman Method
Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT)
Psychodynamic Therapy
Attachment & Relationally-Oriented Therapy
NeuroAffective Touch & Kathy Kain’s Somatic Approach
Embodied Integration
Somatic Yoga & Movement
Reiki & Pranic Energy Healing
lived experience shapes how we hold others.
Hi, I’m Clara – I’m just as human as you.
Resilient Survivor + Recovering Overachiever
Before I was a therapist, I was a kid trying to survive a home that looked polished on the outside but felt unpredictable and unsafe on the inside.
I grew up in a family system shaped by narcissism and co-dependency— my father was a 6’6” former professional rugby player from Argentina who was authoritarian and terrorizing at home, but charismatic and charming in public. My mother was a deeply traumatized child of an alcoholic mother and a narcissistic father; she was conflict-avoidant and survived by appeasing. That dynamic taught me early how to read the room, anticipate moods, and over-function. It also taught me how to disconnect from myself. Still, I was a strong-willed, mouthy, defiant, rebellious child who put up her best fight (and got grounded, a lot).
At fourteen, I nearly died in a car accident. I left the hospital injured, dissociated, and confused, then returned to school like nothing had happened. Everyone else moved on but my nervous system didn’t. It couldn't. The world felt so deeply unsafe.
I spent the next decade living with undiagnosed PTSD that manifested as anxiety, OCD, depression, trichotillomania, perfectionism, and overachieving. These symptoms quickly became labels that shaped my emerging identity.
I spent my teen years in and out of doctors’ offices. No one really knew what to do with me, so they just kept prescribing medications and useless coping skills. No one understood trauma and it felt like no one cared about my experiences. I felt hopelessly broken.
And then, because clearly things weren’t chaotic enough, my dad decided the solution was to ship me off to a Christian boarding school in Utah for “troubled teens.” (Yup, one of those.) That experience didn’t save me. It added more shame, fear, and trauma to a nervous system that was already fried.
By seventeen, I had dropped out of high school, reeling from depression so severe I was failing everything. Just Fs all the way down. I was a high-school loner who felt completely out of place and, frankly, didn’t see the point of academics. I just wanted to work, make money, and get as far away from my family as possible.
So I started building — the silver lining of being raised by two immigrant entrepreneurs.
Business became my way out. And then it became my identity.
I babysat, cleaned houses, organized closets, worked in hospitality, freelanced as a writer and copy editor, taught myself to code, designed websites, built brands, and eventually led strategy and operations in the wellness space. From the outside, it looked like ambition. In truth, it was survival. I had no one to fall back on, and I didn’t feel safe slowing down. I didn’t know how to “be.” I only knew how to “do.”
Excelling felt safer than feeling. Producing felt safer than grieving. Achievement became the thing that kept me from collapsing under the weight of everything I hadn’t processed yet. If I stayed busy, productive, impressive — I didn’t have to feel the terror or grief underneath it. I didn’t realize it then, but over-functioning wasn’t who I was. It was how I survived.
I spent my early twenties repeating familiar relational patterns — trauma-bonding to one narcissistic partner after the next. Making myself small and easygoing, believing that’s what made me desirable, while secretly carrying deep insecurities and fear of abandonment. That unraveling forced me to confront something I couldn’t outwork or out-achieve: my own attachment wounds.
I’d been in therapy since I was eight years old, but no one had ever pointed me back to my body. As a twenty-something, I was highly intellectual. I knew my trauma material inside and out, forward and backward. But that didn’t translate into change. It didn’t soothe my distress.
and Then, I found somatic therapy…
It was hard — like learning a new language that felt confusing and abstract. I hated it at first because it felt so slow and pointless. All this “noticing” and “being with the discomfort” … UGH. It was infuriating. But I stayed with it … and slowly, things began to shift. Like, really really shift. In BIG ways. My triggers weren’t as triggering, I had more capacity to respond instead of reacting, I was feeling things, not just emotions but physical sensations in my body.
And as I started finding my way back into my body, I experienced relief from years of pain. But I also began remembering deeply uncomfortable truths about what had happened to my body in childhood: sexual abuse. Which also led me to the realization that I’d spent more of my life dissociated and disconnected than I’d initially thought.
My over-functioning part wanted to “solve” the healing quickly, so I turned to plant medicine believing it might be a magical cure-all. It wasn’t.
Ceremonial Medicine work gives us what we need, not what we want.
What I learned instead was that before diving into deep trauma healing with medicine, I needed to build real safety in my nervous system first — somatic resourcing, titration, the capacity to witness my internal experience without dissociating. Without that foundation, deeper work wasn’t possible — it was overwhelming and re-traumatizing.
Working with plant medicines and psychedelics — particularly Ayahuasca and MDMA — in legal, safe, intentional, somatic, and well-supported contexts became a profound complement to therapy. Not as an escape. Not as a shortcut. But as a catalyst for deeper embodiment, allowing me to alchemize the terror and grief and reconnect with parts of myself I had abandoned in order to survive.
Ayahuasca didn’t fix me. Therapy didn’t fix me. Yoga didn’t fix me. Nothing “fixed” me.
It was the culmination of everything, together, over time, building on itself— somatic therapy, nervous system practices, yin yoga, cacao ceremonies, integration work, sacred medicine circles, community, ritual, intention, travel, love, intimacy, friendship, grief, laughter — they all helped me come home to myself.
Over time, I learned to soften the over-functioning parts that once kept me alive. I learned how to feel instead of perform. I learned that healing isn’t just cognitive — it’s relational, somatic, ancestral, and spiritual. And in many ways, I’m still learning.
My lived experience is not separate from my clinical work. It is the foundation Of What i do and how i do it.
Today, I blend evidence-based trauma therapies with body-based work, parts work, and — when appropriate — preparation and integration for psychedelic experiences. I support high-functioning adults and couples who look competent and successful on the outside but feel anxious, disconnected, or not-enough on the inside.
I don’t believe therapists need to have it all figured out. But I do believe we must remain in relationship with our own growth.
And I do.
When I’m not in session, I’m diving deep with plants, engaging in my own therapy, hosting community gatherings for therapists and healers, assisting in ceremonies, and leaning into the shadow parts my incredible partner Ben so lovingly reflects back to me.
And I’m resting.
Playing with my two kitties. Paddle-boarding. Bike riding. Tie-dyeing. Sweating it out in hot yoga. Dancing. Cooking. Blasting the Grateful Dead. Singing ceremony songs. Binging a new show.
Healing isn’t just doing the work. It’s living the aliveness. And the more we heal, the more alive we become.
So if something in my story resonates with you, if you’re ready to dive deep and engage with the messiness of trauma healing — let’s talk. I’d be honored to walk alongside you.
Long Beach
Hybrid
Virtual
Ready for deep healing? Start your journey with Somatic trauma Therapy
DEEPLY RELATIONAL • SUPER SOMATIC • KINDA WOO • ALWAYS AUTHENTIC