Marina Compean, LCSW

Marina Compean, LCSW Psychotherapy and consulting services. Trauma-informed, resiliency focused somatic therapy. Integrated behavioral health specialist.

I too am quite conflicted about AI. I can see it’s an amazing manifestation of human ingenuity and at the same time, its...
09/18/2026

I too am quite conflicted about AI. I can see it’s an amazing manifestation of human ingenuity and at the same time, its threat to our environment and continued EXISTENCE! That being said, I know many people turn to it for its immediacy and accessibility to offer support. But it can never replace a real human connection that brings warmth, community, empathy, presence, and heart.

World Childless Week is a time to recognize a kind of grief that is still too often invisible: involuntary childlessness...
09/14/2026

World Childless Week is a time to recognize a kind of grief that is still too often invisible: involuntary childlessness and childlessness by circumstance.

Not everyone who is without children chose that life. For some, there was infertility or pregnancy loss. For others, the right relationship never came, a relationship ended, finances or health intervened, caregiving took precedence, time ran out, or life simply did not create the conditions in which becoming a parent was possible.

The grief can be about a child who never came—but it can also be about an entire imagined future. The family you thought you would have. The traditions you expected to pass down. The identity of becoming someone’s mother or father. The sense that there would be people who would carry something of you forward.

And then there is belonging. So much of adult social life is organized around couplehood, pregnancy, parenting, children, schools, sports…Being childless can quietly change friendships, holidays, family roles, conversations, and where you feel you fit.

You can deeply love the children in your life and still grieve the children you didn’t have.

You can build a meaningful, beautiful life and still feel the ache of the life that did not happen. Grief and gratitude are allowed to coexist.

To those who are childless not entirely by choice: you deserve spaces where your experience does not have to be minimized, reframed into a “silver lining,” or compared with someone else’s hardship.

Your grief is worthy of witnessing. Your identity is bigger than parenthood—and the loss of parenthood can still matter profoundly.

And you still deserve kinship, ritual, community, care, legacy, and belonging.

You are not alone. 🤎

AmbiguousLoss InfertilityGrief PregnancyLoss GriefAndLoss Belonging

Confession: I have always been a little incredulous about “manifesting.” 😜Maybe because it sometimes sounds like somethi...
09/12/2026

Confession: I have always been a little incredulous about “manifesting.” 😜

Maybe because it sometimes sounds like something privileged people get to do while the rest of us have to work, problem-solve, ask three people for help, appeal the insurance denial, and still hope the car starts.

Apparently, they “align with abundance.”

Some of us are aligning schedules, budgets, childcare, chronic illness, discrimination, limited capacity, and other people’s refusal to answer a damn email. 😂

Still, I don’t think the entire practice is useless.Envisioning what we want can make a future more perceptible. It can affect what we notice, what feels possible, and how we respond to opportunities.

But visualization alone cannot magically solve things for us. And thoughts cannot command success, health, or a fantasy partner into cooperating.

So I borrowed a process-improvement model from healthcare and made it less…hospital-y:

✨ ENVISION what you desire.
👣 ENGAGE reality through small manageable actions
🔍 REVISE your understanding based on what happens.
🧩 INTEGRATE what you learned into your next choice.

Hope matters. Our actions can improve the odds. And conditions—including privilege, access, resources, health, timing, luck, and other people’s choices—also are part of equation.

We don’t control every outcome. But what we contribute can build possibility—for ourselves, for one another, and over time. That feels like manifesting to me. Therapy can be a place to envision, engage, revise, and integrate TOGETHER.

Somatic Integration ConsultationFor clinicians | 60 minutes | $150You don’t need another modality to master. Sometimes y...
09/07/2026

Somatic Integration Consultation

For clinicians | 60 minutes | $150

You don’t need another modality to master. Sometimes you need another clinician to help you think.

I offer individual consultation for therapists who want to integrate somatic principles into the work they already do—or who are wondering how to work with the body and nervous system without overwhelming a client, imposing a protocol, or making “calm” the measure of successful treatment.

Bring a case, a clinical dilemma, or an integration question.

Together, we might explore load, adaptation, capacity, interoception, attachment, culture and context; identify a Point of Connection; and consider what somatic or relational intervention might be useful now—and when doing less may actually be more clinically appropriate.

My early somatic foundation included extensive training and teaching in TRM. My practice has evolved into a more relational, collaborative and BIPOC-centered approach informed by somatic and attachment work, relational neuroscience, and my ongoing study of Indigenous/ancestral perspectives.

60 minutes · $150

Somatic work was never just about learning to calm the body.Some of my earliest somatic training—and later, teaching—was...
09/01/2026

Somatic work was never just about learning to calm the body.

Some of my earliest somatic training—and later, teaching—was in the Trauma Resiliency Model (TRM). It gave me an important somatic foundation: neuroception, neuroplasticity, autonomic regulation, co-regulation, interoception, and practical ways of helping people notice and work with what is happening in the body.

I still carry that foundation. But my practice has continued to evolve beyond a skills-based understanding of regulation. Because a nervous system does not exist separately from relationship, culture, health, history, environment, community, or belonging.

Sometimes what gets called “dysregulation” may also contain an intelligent adaptation to overwhelming, cumulative, intergenerational, relational, medical, or social load. So the clinical questions also become:

What has this nervous system been responding to? What has it had to adapt to? What resources, relationships, meanings, and conditions have been available—or missing? And what might make recovery more possible now?

More recently, I’ve been intentionally deepening this work through Two-Eyed Seeing and ancestral/Indigenous perspectives—holding contemporary neurobiology alongside ways of understanding healing that have long located human wellbeing within relationship, land, culture, community, reciprocity, and belonging.

Not using neuroscience to validate ancestral knowledge. And not abandoning the useful biological scaffolding that somatic models have given us. Rather, widening the lens beyond a “window:”

Body + relationship.
Biology + context.
Interoception + meaning.
Regulation + belonging.
Clinical knowledge + ancestral wisdom.

Years of clinical work, lived experience, relational practice, and continued learning have helped me see beyond the somatic foundations…because sometimes the work is not simply helping a person become better at tolerating the conditions around them.

Sometimes healing also asks us to understand the conditions to which the body has been responding. And to remember that the relationship isn’t separate from the intervention.

This post started with a conversation with a close friend and medical professional who works closely with patients livin...
09/01/2026

This post started with a conversation with a close friend and medical professional who works closely with patients living with MCAS, POTS and other complex chronic conditions.

Our conversation left me thinking about the medical and psychosocial complexity of living in a body that can become unpredictable—and about where psychotherapy can be genuinely useful without psychologizing what is physiological.

It brought me back to a distinction I think matters:

Not everything that alters regulation is psychological. But almost anything that repeatedly alters our capacity to move through the world can eventually have psychological, relational, behavioral and meaning-making consequences.

That feels like an important conceptual bridge between trauma treatment, chronic illness, medical trauma, TBI/neuro-recovery, grief and life reintegration.

Today is National Grief Awareness DayA reminder that grief doesn’t always come with a funeral, flowers, or a death certi...
08/30/2026

Today is National Grief Awareness Day

A reminder that grief doesn’t always come with a funeral, flowers, or a death certificate.

We grieve people. But we also grieve health, relationships, identities, belonging, abilities, communities, imagined futures, and versions of our lives we thought we’d get to live.

Some grief is collective. Some is ambiguous. Some is barely acknowledged by anyone except the person carrying it.

And sometimes we’re grieving because the world itself no longer feels like the one we knew.

Grief doesn’t have to look tragic enough to someone else to be real.

May we make a little more room for what people are carrying today. 🤎

Loneliness isn’t a diagnosis. But connection—or the lack of it—can profoundly shape mental health.Our brains and nervous...
08/29/2026

Loneliness isn’t a diagnosis. But connection—or the lack of it—can profoundly shape mental health.

Our brains and nervous systems weren’t designed to do everything alone. Sometimes what looks like anxiety, depression, exhaustion, poor concentration or difficulty coping is also happening in the context of not having enough support, belonging or places to exhale.

And yes, connection can happen in therapy, too. In cooler weather, Milo and I offer Walk & Talk sessions. ☀️🐕
In this heat? We also enthusiastically endorse air conditioning, cold (healthy 😉) beverages, and meaningful human connection from the safety of a Zoom room. 😂

Co-regulation does not require heat stroke.

Connection is part of care. 🌿

Address

1441 Huntington Drive #3440
Los Angeles, CA
91030

Telephone

+14242097606

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