What Lisa Arrigo talks about

The Neurobiology of Early Trauma: how attachment and development shape adult patterns

Trauma has become part of everyday language, yet Lisa believes much of the conversation still leaves people confused about why they react the way they do and risks pathologising normal adaptations to…

Shame and Survival Responses: why adaptive protection gets misread as personal defect

Lisa Arrigo spends much of her clinical work undoing one sentence: "What is wrong with me?" A New York Licensed Clinical Social Worker with 26 years in private psychotherapy practice, she holds that…

Life After Survival Mode: what changes when a nervous system is no longer organised around threat

Lisa Arrigo asks the question most trauma conversations never reach: what happens after the danger passes and nobody tells the body. A New York Licensed Clinical Social Worker with 26 years in…

Trauma Without a Catastrophe: how chronic overwhelm shapes the nervous system and why it gets dismissed

Lisa Arrigo spends her clinical hours with people who apologise for being in the room, convinced their history was never severe enough to explain how they feel. A New York Licensed Clinical Social…

Shame in Addiction and Recovery: how secrecy deepens the patterns people are escaping

Lisa knows both sides of shame: the clinician helping people understand trauma and addiction, and the woman staring into a hospital mirror after an overdose thinking she had destroyed everything she…

Relapse After Long Recovery: why survival patterns persist beneath professional knowledge

After more than 17 years of sobriety and decades working as a trauma therapist, Lisa experienced a cocaine relapse that nearly cost her life and left her waking in a Manhattan hospital unable to…