A Little About Me…

I’m Christina Ritchie, an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist and Board-Certified Music Therapist. My path to becoming a psychotherapist hasn’t happened in just one kind of room.

Over the past 13 years, I’ve worked in schools, community mental health, correctional psychiatric settings, arts-based programs, hospitals, and private practice. Across those spaces, I kept returning to the same questions: What happened to this person? What helped them survive it? And how can we create environments where people feel safe enough to heal?

That curiosity has shaped far more than my therapy practice. I’ve taught therapists, music therapists, teachers, social workers, and other helping professionals how to bring trauma-informed care and creative approaches into their own work. I’ve developed staff wellness programming around vicarious and workplace trauma, presented at national conferences and UCLA Arts & Healing, and published work on integrating trauma-informed care into music therapy in NICU settings. Through my work and study with Carolyn Braddock, I’ve also helped professionals explore how stress and trauma live in the body—and how creative, embodied experiences can help us begin to unwind them.

I received my graduate degree in Clinical Psychology with a specialization in Psychological Trauma Studies from Antioch University Los Angeles and have continued advanced training in EMDR, somatic, psychodynamic, and creative approaches to therapy.

All of these experiences have reinforced something I believe deeply: there is no single way distress looks, and there is no one-size-fits-all way to heal. My role isn’t to tell you who you should become, but to help you understand what shaped you, reconnect with what is already yours, and find your way back home to yourself.