Elle Saunders
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist
Soul-Centered Healer
Retreat Facilitator
Myth-Tender
Writer
Ancient story as medicine. Modern therapy as ground. Twenty years in the room.
You know the language. You have done the work — the somatic sessions, the parts work, the nervous system tracking. And something still hasn't landed. Something older than your diagnosis. Something that lives in the body's memory and the stories you carry from long before you were born. This is where that something gets a name. I am a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist with over twenty years of clinical experience. I work with individuals, couples, and groups who are ready to go beneath the symptom — into the body, the lineage, the unlived self. We follow the nervous system. We follow the story. We see what the earth has to say about all of it. You do not have to commit to years. You have to be willing to feel.
You are Welcome to Enter
The Threshold
For individuals and couples ready to inhabit a more embodied, intimate life.
The Hearth
Somatic, mythic, earth-based retreats, to remember what the body already knows.
The Altar
Essays where ancestral story, somatic wisdom, and the collective feminine meet.
You've done enough work to know there is more.
Something in the body holds what the mind has already understood. Something in the lineage runs deeper than the personal wound. Something in the relationship still hasn't opened — or opened once and then quietly closed. You are not looking for management. You are looking for the unlived self. You have found the right room.
Meet Elle
For over twenty years I have sat with people at the threshold of what they already know and what they have not yet been able to feel. I am a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist, a retreat facilitator, a myth-tender, and a writer — and I work at the intersection of somatic healing, ancestral story, embodied intimacy, and the earth's long wisdom. I founded Trinity Star Family Counseling to hold both clinical rigor and soul permission in the same room. I work with individuals, couples, and groups who are ready to follow the nervous system all the way down — past the familiar wound and into the unlived self. I live and practice in Sonoma County, California. The nature-attuned work started here, where the sensory aliveness of this land makes it impossible to pretend the wild isn't teaching something.
"The unlived self doesn't go away. It waits in the body, in the lineage, in the places the intimacy hasn't reached yet."
The body that remembers. The wild that teaches. The old stories, made new. Essays and retreat invitations from The First Altar — for people on the long returning.