Insight Family Therapy Group, Inc.

Insight Family Therapy Group, Inc. Psychotherapy practice for couples, individuals, groups & families. Additional offerings include trauma informed yoga & somatic groups.
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Specialities inclide: Somatic, Gestalt, Perinatal, Eating Disorders, Emotionally Focused Couples, EMDR & Yoga Therapy. Insight Family Therapy Group is a psychotherapy practice offering mental health services to: individuals, couples, and families. Areas of speciality are: eating disorders, trauma, anxiety, dissociative disorders and depression. This practice uses a variety of techniques and treatm

ent modalities. These include: relational Gestalt therapy, EMDR therapy, and exposure based methods. Mary Ortenburger is EMDR certified and an approved EMDR consultant, a Certified Eating Disorder Specialist (CEDS) and supervisor (CEDS-S). She is also a certified Gestalt therapist and runs a consultation group for therapists seeking certification. Mary Ortenburger, LMFT, owner of Insight Family Therapy Group, is a Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT) and actively training as a Certified Trauma Informed Yoga Therapist.

07/27/2026

One of the hardest parts of healing isn’t learning to survive the bad.

It’s learning to receive the good.

Trauma teaches the brain and nervous system to anticipate danger. When you’ve spent months or years adapting to unpredictability, criticism, abandonment, or fear, your system becomes incredibly skilled at detecting what might go wrong.

So when life finally becomes quieter, healthier, or more stable, that doesn’t always feel immediately comforting.

It can feel unfamiliar.

You may find yourself waiting for the other shoe to drop. Doubting someone’s kindness. Feeling uneasy when things are going well. Even moments of peace can create anxiety because your nervous system has learned that calm isn’t always synonymous with safety.

This isn’t because you’re “choosing negativity.”

It’s because your brain has become highly efficient at predicting threat. As researchers like Bessel van der Kolk have described, trauma changes more than memory—it influences how we perceive the present. Stephen Porges’ work reminds us that safety is not simply an idea; it’s a physiological state. And Rick Hanson has written extensively about how the brain often requires intentional repetition to fully take in positive experiences.

Healing isn’t simply about reducing fear.

It’s about helping your nervous system revise its expectations through repeated experiences of genuine safety, connection, and stability. In Somatic Experiencing®, this isn’t about forcing yourself to feel safe. It’s about gradually increasing your capacity to notice cues of safety, allowing moments of ease, connection, and regulation to become embodied rather than fleeting.

Over time, those moments begin to matter.

You start noticing that not every silence means rejection. Not every mistake leads to abandonment. Not every good moment is followed by catastrophe.

Healing isn’t just learning to survive painful experiences.

It’s learning to let safety, joy, love, rest, and connection actually land.

Sometimes the bravest thing you can do isn’t preparing for the worst.

It’s allowing yourself to believe that this good moment might be real. ❤️‍🩹

Audio

Sometimes your nervous system needs stillness. Sometimes it needs support. Sometimes it just needs to play.I’m excited t...
07/26/2026

Sometimes your nervous system needs stillness. Sometimes it needs support. Sometimes it just needs to play.

I’m excited to share a new season of small-group classes at Insight Yoga Therapy.

Whether you’re looking to slow down with Yin Yoga, experience the deep rest of Yoga Nidra, explore supported inversions using the Yoga Wall, or connect with your child or teen through movement, there’s something for you.

One thing you’ll notice is that these aren’t “typical” yoga classes.

As the season unfolds, I’ll be incorporating more of the Yoga Wall, straps, chairs, bolsters, and therapeutic props into my restorative offerings. My goal isn’t to make the practice harder—it’s to make it more supportive, giving your body opportunities to soften, release tension, and experience movement and rest in ways that aren’t always possible on the floor alone.

✨ Current schedule:
• Aug. 30 – Yin Yoga: Soften & Settle
• Sept. 9 – Yoga Nidra + Restorative Yoga
• Sept. 13 – Parent–Child Yoga Wall Workshop
• Sept. 27 – Supported Inversions: Yoga Wall Workshop
• Oct. 11 – Yin Yoga: Soften & Settle
• Oct. 14 – Yoga Nidra + Restorative Yoga
• Oct. 25 – Parent + Teen Yoga Wall Experience

All classes are intentionally small to allow for individualized guidance.

Registration is now open. I’d love to practice with you.

07/21/2026

Some childhood experiences are so pervasive that they disappear into the background.

Many adults don’t recognize these experiences as adverse because they were ordinary in their family.

Developmental trauma is often less about a single catastrophic event and more about repeated relational experiences that shape the developing nervous system.

When a child repeatedly learns that:
• their needs are dangerous,
• love is unpredictable,
• emotions are punished,
• safety depends on pleasing others,
• or connection requires abandoning themselves…

their brain and body adapt.

These adaptations are remarkably intelligent. Hypervigilance, people-pleasing, emotional numbing, perfectionism, caretaking, and chronic self-doubt often begin as survival strategies—not personality flaws.

Research in attachment, developmental neuroscience, and trauma consistently shows that early caregiving environments influence how the nervous system predicts safety, organizes emotion, and approaches relationships across the lifespan. These patterns are largely procedural—they become ways of being rather than memories we consciously recall.

The encouraging news is that the nervous system remains capable of change.

Through corrective relational experiences, body-based therapies, and increasing capacity to notice and tolerate new experiences of safety, many of these implicit predictions can gradually update. Healing is often less about “getting over the past” and more about helping the nervous system discover that the present is no longer the same as the past.

Which one surprised you the most?

• Siegel, D. J. (2020). The Developing Mind (3rd ed.).
• Herman, J. L. (2022). Trauma and Recovery.
• Fisher, J. (2017). Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivor.

Audio Jerry Wise | Master Self-Differentiation & Finally Break Free

07/21/2026

Most people think challenging movement begins with challenging poses.

It doesn’t.

It begins with learning how to organize the body, use support effectively, and develop strength with awareness rather than force.

In this two-day Somatic Yoga Wall Masterclass, we’ll explore how the yoga wall can become a tool for traction, stability, progressive strength, mobility, and optional inversions. Each practice is intentionally layered, beginning with accessible foundations and gradually building toward more complex movement patterns.

This isn’t about performing impressive poses. It’s about understanding the mechanics that make them possible—and discovering how support, choice, and intelligent progression can transform the way you move.

Whether you’re looking to deepen your personal practice, refine your teaching, or explore movement through a nervous system-informed lens, this weekend is designed to challenge and support you at the same time.

✨ August 15–16
📍 Insight Yoga Therapy
🔗 Registration link in bio

07/20/2026

You may be highly attuned to subtle shifts in the people around you—a pause before someone answers, a change in facial expression, breathing, posture, or tone of voice.

For some individuals, this reflects sensory processing sensitivity (SPS), a temperament trait characterized by deeper processing of environmental and social information. Research suggests that approximately 15–20% of the population demonstrates higher levels of this trait (Aron & Aron, 1997; Greven et al., 2019).

However, heightened perception can also emerge through a very different pathway.

Following chronic or unpredictable stress, the nervous system often becomes organized around anticipating potential threat. Attention becomes biased toward detecting subtle cues that may signal danger—a process commonly described as hypervigilance. From a predictive processing perspective, the brain is not passively recording reality; it is continuously generating predictions based on prior experience and updating those predictions with incoming sensory information. When survival has depended on anticipating danger, neutral or ambiguous cues may be interpreted through the lens of past learning.

This is one reason hypervigilance can sometimes feel like intuition.

Healing is not about becoming less sensitive.

It is about increasing the nervous system’s capacity to remain regulated long enough for present-moment information to update past predictions. As regulation improves, perception often becomes more flexible and accurate. You begin responding more to what is actually occurring in front of you rather than to what your nervous system has learned to expect.

Sensitivity is not the problem.

The question is whether your nervous system has the capacity to distinguish between prediction and perception, memory and present experience, protection and possibility.

People often praise hyper-independence as resilience.But sometimes what looks like strength began as adaptation.When a c...
07/19/2026

People often praise hyper-independence as resilience.

But sometimes what looks like strength began as adaptation.

When a child’s bids for comfort, protection, or emotional attunement are repeatedly unmet, the nervous system doesn’t simply “get over it.” It reorganizes. It learns to rely on itself because reaching for others no longer feels effective—or safe.

Over time, this can become an identity:
“I don’t need anyone.”
“I’ll handle it myself.”
“I don’t want to be a burden.”

These aren’t character flaws. They may be survival strategies that once made perfect sense.

Healing isn’t about becoming dependent on others. It’s about expanding your nervous system’s capacity to receive support, ask for help, and experience connection without it feeling threatening.

Healthy independence is the freedom to choose solitude.

Hyper-independence is the belief that you have no other choice.

Attachment research, developmental neuroscience, and trauma theory remind us that humans are biologically wired for co-regulation. The goal isn’t to lose your strength—it’s to no longer have to carry everything alone.

❤️ Which slide resonated with you most?

07/18/2026

Some adults become remarkably skilled at taking care of everyone else.

They anticipate needs before they’re spoken. They notice subtle shifts in mood. They smooth over conflict. They become the emotional organizer in relationships.

From the outside, these qualities are often praised as empathy, selflessness, or generosity.

Sometimes they are.

But sometimes they are adaptations.

Children who grow up in unpredictable, emotionally demanding, or inconsistent environments often develop extraordinary sensitivity to the people around them. Their nervous systems learn that paying close attention to others may help preserve connection, reduce conflict, or increase safety.

Over time, this pattern can become automatic. You may know exactly how everyone else is feeling while struggling to identify your own emotions, needs, or limits.

Healing doesn’t mean becoming less compassionate.

It means expanding that compassion to include yourself.

It means recognizing when caring for others is a genuine choice—and when it’s a survival strategy your nervous system no longer needs to rely on.

Your capacity to care for others is a strength.

The goal isn’t to lose that strength.

It’s to build relationships where you no longer have to disappear in order to belong.

07/17/2026

What if the greatest betrayal of your life wasn’t what someone else did to you…

What if it was every moment you abandoned yourself to keep someone else comfortable?

Every time you ignored the knot in your stomach.

Every time you silenced your needs.

Every time you said “yes” when your body was pleading for “no.”

Every time you made yourself smaller to preserve a relationship.

For many trauma survivors, self-abandonment isn’t a character flaw. It’s an adaptation.

When relationships have felt unpredictable, unsafe, or conditional, your nervous system may learn that protecting connection is more important than protecting yourself. Over time, your own feelings, boundaries, and instincts can become secondary to maintaining attachment.

Healing isn’t about becoming less caring.
It’s about no longer requiring your own disappearance to stay connected.

Your nervous system can learn that authenticity and connection don’t have to be opposites.

Sometimes the deepest repair isn’t learning to trust other people.
It’s learning to trust yourself enough to stop leaving yourself behind.

Props from

Audio

-trauma

07/17/2026

What if the greatest betrayal of your life wasn’t what someone else did to you…

What if it was every moment you abandoned yourself to keep someone else comfortable?

Every time you ignored the knot in your stomach.

Every time you silenced your needs.

Every time you said “yes” when your body was pleading for “no.”

Every time you made yourself smaller to preserve a relationship.

For many trauma survivors, self-abandonment isn’t a character flaw. It’s an adaptation.

When relationships have felt unpredictable, unsafe, or conditional, your nervous system may learn that protecting connection is more important than protecting yourself. Over time, your own feelings, boundaries, and instincts can become secondary to maintaining attachment.

Healing isn’t about becoming less caring.
It’s about no longer requiring your own disappearance to stay connected.

Your nervous system can learn that authenticity and connection don’t have to be opposites.

Sometimes the deepest repair isn’t learning to trust other people.
It’s learning to trust yourself enough to stop leaving yourself behind.

Props from GYMNASTICS WITH BROTHERS

-trauma

07/16/2026

Many people assume that avoiding difficult memories or emotions reflects a lack of readiness, motivation, or commitment to healing.

From a Somatic Experiencing perspective, another possibility is that the nervous system has organized itself around survival.

In the Advanced SE curriculum, unresolved trauma is described as creating patterns of interwoven under-coupling and over-coupling, contributing to states of physiological incoherence rather than simple “avoidance.” The therapeutic goal is not to force connection, but to support a gradual return to coherence—a state in which physiological systems begin functioning together in a more integrated and self-regulating way. Advanced 1 Manual .pdf

Under-coupling can be understood as aspects of experience becoming insufficiently linked. Thoughts, sensations, emotions, movement, autonomic responses, and meaning may no longer work together as they ordinarily would. As a result, someone may be able to describe an event with little emotion, or become emotionally overwhelmed without understanding why. This is one way trauma can alter the organization of experience rather than simply its content. Advanced 1 Manual .pdf

Healing, then, isn’t about pushing harder or uncovering every memory.

It’s about increasing coherence and containment so the nervous system can safely reconnect what once had to remain separate. As coherence grows, integration becomes possible—not because someone tried harder, but because the physiology no longer has to organize itself around overwhelming threat. Advanced 1 Manual .pdf

This is one reason trauma therapy is often slower than people expect. The work isn’t simply remembering. It’s helping the nervous system regain the flexibility, organization, and capacity that trauma disrupted.

Somatic Experiencing® is a registered trademark of Peter A. Levine, PhD. The concepts discussed here are intended for educational purposes and are one framework for understanding trauma, not the only one.

Address

219 North Indian Hill Boulevard Suite 201
Claremont, CA
91711

Opening Hours

Monday 8am - 4:30pm
Tuesday 8am - 3:30pm
Wednesday 8am - 3:30pm
Thursday 8am - 4:30pm
Friday 8am - 4:30pm

Telephone

+15622817752

Website

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