Lisa Arrigo

Lisa Arrigo has spent decades helping people make sense of the ways trauma shapes a life from the inside out. A New York Licensed Clinical Social Worker and psychotherapist, her work sits at the intersection of attachment, addiction, neurobiology, and the lived reality of survival.

What makes Lisa’s perspective distinct is that it was not built in theory alone. It was shaped by a chaotic early life, a long personal search for safety and belonging, and the hard-earned understanding that healing is not abstract work. It happens in the body, in relationships, and in the stories people finally learn to tell honestly.

That lived understanding is matched by years of clinical training. Lisa earned her BS from Trinity University and her MSW from Fordham University School of Social Work, then continued her post-graduate study at the Westchester Institute for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. Her work has also been shaped by specialized training in addiction and eating disorders through the White Institute, along with certification in EMDR and advanced study in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Levels I and II.

In the book she is now preparing to publish, Lisa starts at the very beginning, in utero. She traces how pre-birth conditions, epigenetics, developmental trauma, and attachment patterns can begin laying down the tracks for how people relate to themselves and others long before they have language for any of it. From there, she carries the story through her own developmental phases, showing how parts of the self form around adaptation, protection, and survival. Her aim is to make complex ideas such as structural dissociation, nervous system overwhelm, shame cycles, and the neurobiology of addiction feel clear, grounded, and recognizably human.

On podcasts, Lisa brings both clinical depth and lived experience to conversations about trauma, always with the hope of helping people understand themselves with more compassion and less shame. She has a deeply informed and deeply human perspective on trauma that invites audiences to reflect on their own lives with honesty, curiosity, and hope.