About Lisa Arrigo
Psychotherapist and Clinical Social Worker Specializing in Trauma, Attachment, and Addiction
25+ years Experience serving LGBTQ clients2 University degrees: BS & MSW4 Specialist certifications & training milestonesLicensed Clinical Social Worker New York
Lisa Arrigo has spent more than three decades helping people understand what trauma leaves behind long after the original danger has passed. A New York Licensed Clinical Social Worker and psychotherapist, her work sits at the intersection of trauma, attachment, addiction, neurobiology, shame, and the deeply human ways people learn to survive.
Her perspective is powerful because it comes from both sides of the therapeutic relationship. Lisa has devoted her career to helping others heal, while also confronting the impact of trauma, addiction, relapse, and recovery in her own life. After more than 17 years of sobriety, she experienced a cocaine relapse that nearly cost her life and left her waking in a Manhattan hospital unable to remember how she had arrived there. That experience challenged everything she thought she understood about healing and forced her to confront a difficult truth: we can have insight, language, and years of recovery behind us and still carry survival patterns that remain active beneath the surface.
That lived experience now sits alongside decades of clinical training. Lisa earned her BS from Trinity University and her MSW from Fordham University School of Social Work, followed by post-graduate study at the Westchester Institute for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy.
About this episode
Who are you when survival has shaped so much of who you learned to be?
For people who have lived through trauma, identity can become tangled with adaptation. The nervous system learns what it takes to stay safe. Shame can shape what feels possible. Desire can feel dangerous. Parts of the self can become disconnected, hidden, or pushed aside. And over time, it can become difficult to tell the difference between who you are and who you had to become.
In this conversation, psychotherapist and trauma survivorLisa Arrigoexplores the relationship between trauma and identity through the lenses of shame, nervous system responses, gender and sexuality, addiction, relapse, and fragmented parts of the self. Drawing from both her clinical work and her own recovery from cocaine addiction, she explains why healing requires more than understanding what happened to us.
It also requires becoming safe enough to get curious, reconnect with the body, build supportive relationships, and begin integrating the parts of ourselves that once had to survive separately.
What emerges is a conversation about moving from survival toward a more authentic relationship with yourself—and learning that healing does not mean erasing the parts that protected you. It means bringing them back into relationship with the person you are becoming.
Guest: Lisa Arrigo
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6+ podcast & stage appearances. Remote or in studio, broadcast-grade audio.