Dana Roebuck,
MPS, LCAT, ATR-BC

(She/Her/Hers) 
Expressive Trauma Psychotherapist

Dana Roebuck is an Expressive Trauma Therapist in Henrico, VA. She utilizes a somatically-informed, parts-based approach to expressive therapy. Dana's work allows access to nonverbal trauma states without having to relive the narrative. Through the use of expressive modalities, clients connect to their unique creative processing, which activates internal signals of safety and realigns them with their life energy. Through creative processing, clients can reprocess trauma safely, gain deeper insight into themselves, achieve a sustained sense of calm in their nervous systems, and increase their confidence.

 

Dana offers a warm, empowering, and collaborative approach to helping others. She enjoys working with folks who are experiencing challenging life circumstances, relationship stressors, anxiety, depression, and compulsive behaviors. She uses a client-centered and trauma-informed approach, along with elements of humanist and attachment theory to support clients as they process life experiences, develop new skills and perspectives, and work toward their goals.

 

Over her clinical career, Dana has provided services in community mental health, education, outpatient/inpatient and residential settings, in the US and Africa, with extensive experience in substance use recovery. She received a masters in creative art psychotherapy in New York City and finds the use of creativity as a cornerstone to the healing process. Her fine arts background in sculpture and fiber arts helps to inform her work within the expressive nature of art as a physical, tactile, and therapeutic experience. 

 

Over her lifespan, Dana has used her expressive nature with visual art, cooking, sewing, weaving, metal work and costuming as an integral part of her healing process through family drama, addiction, illness, and loss. Her interest in art therapy began with understanding that the process of making art can be therapeutic in its own right without seeking to achieve a satisfying aesthetic outcome. Her exploration in undergraduate art school helped to give voice to her own inner experience and into the lives of the neurodivergent loved ones she sought to understand. 

 

Her personal experiences inform the compassionate approach clients crave in a new and exploratory path though their own past. Having seen and experienced the medical model’s near sided approach to trauma treatment, Dana values a collaborative goal setting process that is kind, organic, and rooted in self actualization. 

 

Creative expression has the unique quality to express traumatic memories housed in the brain in ways that words cannot articulate. The sounds, textures, and colors of our implicit memories are externalized, allowing us to have a more insightful and intentional relationship with our past. Holding space for the past invites us to move forward by stepping out of old behavioral patterns and becoming the best version of ourselves.