What are the opening hours?

Monday 8am - 4:30pm Tuesday 8am - 3:30pm Wednesday 8am - 3:30pm Thursday 8am - 4:30pm Friday 8am - 4:30pm

Insight Family Therapy Group, Inc.

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United States
Claremont, CA
Insight Family Therapy Group, Inc.

Psychotherapy practice for couples, individuals, groups & families. Additional offerings include trauma informed yoga & somatic groups.
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Specialities inclide: Somatic, Gestalt, Perinatal, Eating Disorders, Emotionally Focused Couples, EMDR & Yoga Therapy. Insight Family Therapy Group is a psychotherapy practice offering mental health services to: individuals, couples, and families. Areas of speciality are: eating disorders, trauma, anxiety, dissociative disorders and depression. This practice uses a variety of techniques and treatment modalities. These include: relational Gestalt therapy, EMDR therapy, and exposure based methods. Mary Ortenburger is EMDR certified and an approved EMDR consultant, a Certified Eating Disorder Specialist (CEDS) and supervisor (CEDS-S). She is also a certified Gestalt therapist and runs a consultation group for therapists seeking certification. Mary Ortenburger, LMFT, owner of Insight Family Therapy Group, is a Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT) and actively training as a Certified Trauma Informed Yoga Therapist.

12/09/2025

As the year winds down, I’m offering two final practices to help your body soften and your system reset.

🕯️ Yoga Nidra — Wed, Dec 10 at 6pm
A guided journey into deep rest, clarity, and nervous system repair.

🧘‍♀️ Yoga Wall: Hips Unbound — Sun, Dec 21 at 10am
A hip-focused practice to release old holding, create mobility, and welcome more freedom into your body.

If you’ve been needing a pause… these final classes are for you. ❤️‍🩹

12/08/2025

No one prepares you for the moment in healing when you meet the anger you never had permission to feel.

So many of the “personality traits” we grew up believing were us were actually survival patterns — appeasing, shrinking, hyper-independence, staying quiet to stay safe.

Beneath those adaptations is often a contained rage:
the energy of boundaries that were never allowed, grief that was never validated, and instincts that had to shut down.

This isn’t anger that explodes.
It’s anger that was never allowed to exist.

And when it finally surfaces, it needs titration, support, and a regulated container so the body can release what it held in silence.

Anger isn’t a setback in healing.
Sometimes it’s proof you’ve finally stopped abandoning yourself.

Audio

12/07/2025

Fear grows in silence. Regulation grows in naming.

There’s a reason verbal grounding is used across trauma therapy, crisis stabilization, SE, EMDR, and even high-stress medical and first-responder settings:

Putting internal experience into words decreases limbic activation.
Research from Lieberman et al. (UCLA) shows that affect labeling reduces amygdala activity and increases prefrontal engagement — meaning your brain regains access to clarity, orientation, and decision-making.

Naming sensation interrupts the fear cascade.
When you describe what you’re experiencing (“My chest feels tight,” “My feet are on the floor”), the nervous system reorganizes around the present moment instead of the stored past.

Affect labeling — the process of putting internal experience into words — has been shown across multiple fMRI studies to reduce amygdala activation and increase prefrontal engagement (Lieberman et al., 2007; Torre & Lieberman, 2018).

In Somatic Experiencing and polyvagal-informed work, this is a foundational skill:
noticing → naming → orienting → settling.

Because when the mind goes quiet under stress, the body often gets louder.
That’s why silence can amplify panic, dissociation, or a sense of “disappearing.”

Naming brings you back into the room.
Back into your body.
Back into now.

This is not positive thinking.
Not affirmations.
Not bypassing.

It’s simply giving language to what is real, which is one of the fastest ways to lower physiological arousal and restore a sense of safety.

If your system tends to shut down, spiral, or lose orientation under stress…
this is a practice worth learning.

12/06/2025

Healing isn’t about becoming “mean.”
It’s about becoming regulated enough to pause, interpret what’s actually happening, and respond with intention instead of instinct.

As your nervous system integrates, you stop confusing urgency for importance.
You stop reacting to every cue as if it’s a threat.
You stop over-functioning, over-explaining, and over-accommodating in places where your younger self felt she had to.

This isn’t meanness.
It’s discernment.
A sign that your system is no longer scanning for danger in the same way.
A sign that you can tolerate the space between stimulus and response.
A sign that your boundaries now reflect reality—not fear, not attachment injuries, not the pressure to stay small or pleasing.

When healing deepens, your responses become fewer but more accurate.
Your silence becomes intentional.
Your “no” becomes clearer.
And your energy becomes reserved for relationships and situations that are truly reciprocal.

This is what nervous system healing looks like.
Not harshness—capacity.

Audio

12/05/2025

We grew up in homes and systems where dysregulation was mislabeled as “discipline,” and where emotional misattunement was so normalized that many of us didn’t realize it wasn’t safe.

Our nervous systems adapted before we even had words for what we were experiencing.
Hypervigilance became competence.
People-pleasing became connection.
Self-abandonment became the cost of belonging.

Most of us weren’t given a language for trauma — we were given rules about respect, silence, obedience, and endurance.
And the body learned to hold what the environment refused to acknowledge.

As adults, we’re discovering that so much of what we call “overthinking,” “over-giving,” or “being too sensitive” is actually our system trying to metabolize what never had support, co-regulation, or repair.

Healing isn’t about blaming our parents — it’s about understanding the conditions they were shaped by, and recognizing the cycles our bodies absorbed long before we could choose differently.

The real work now is slow and relational:
Rebuilding internal safety.
Relearning boundaries.
Grieving what we adapted to.
Tending to the child inside who still anticipates chaos.
And creating the nervous system stability that past generations could not provide.

Cycle breaking is not about perfection.
It’s about noticing your choices in real time and choosing, even in small ways, to not abandon yourself.

We are healing patterns we did not create.
We are repairing attachment wounds we did not cause.

And we are learning that safety isn’t a mindset —
it’s a sensation we get to reclaim in our bodies, over and over again.

12/04/2025

We can feel so solid and grown…
until our nervous system meets a place, person, or pattern that shaped an earlier version of us.

In Somatic Experiencing, this is implicit memory—the body recalling atmospheres, tones, and relational dynamics long before the mind catches up.

A younger self-state rises not because we’ve regressed, but because that version of us learned the choreography of survival.

This isn’t a setback.
It’s physiology.
And noticing the shift is the beginning of staying with yourself rather than collapsing into old reflexes.

If this landed, save it for the moments when familiar patterns feel louder this season.

12/03/2025

When you stop over-giving, the silence can feel unbearable at first.
For many trauma survivors, “selflessness” wasn’t a virtue—it was a survival strategy. A way to stay connected, to reduce conflict, to feel needed.

But when your identity has been shaped around meeting everyone else’s needs, tending to your own will feel foreign… even wrong.
That’s not intuition—it’s conditioning.

In SE and attachment-based therapy, we name this as a habitual adaptation: the body learned to offer without expecting anything in return. The work of healing is the slow, steady re-patterning toward reciprocity, toward relationships where your presence is not a resource to be extracted but something held with care.

If it feels quiet right now, that’s not loneliness—it’s the sound of your nervous system unlearning an old job.

Audio

12/02/2025

Complex trauma doesn’t just leave a psychological imprint — it reshapes the architecture and functioning of the brain. Research consistently shows three key regions are most impacted:

The Amygdala
Often becomes hyper-reactive, scanning constantly for threat. In CPTSD, this can look like chronic hypervigilance, startle responses, emotional overwhelm, and difficulty distinguishing present cues from past danger.

The Hippocampus
Can become underactive or structurally altered after long-term trauma. This area helps us organize memory, time-stamp experiences, and differentiate “then” from “now.” When impaired, memories can feel fragmented or timeless — making the past feel current.

The Prefrontal Cortex (PFC)
The part of the brain responsible for executive functioning, reflective capacity, and self-regulation often goes offline under chronic stress. This affects impulse control, emotional regulation, decision-making, and the ability to shift perspectives.

This triad is central in Complex PTSD (CPTSD) — a condition that arises not from a single event, but from repeated, chronic, relational or developmental trauma, often occurring in childhood, within attachment relationships, or over long periods where escape or safety wasn’t possible. CPTSD is characterized by difficulties with identity, emotions, relationships, shame, and chronic dysregulation — not just fear.

And here’s the hopeful part:
The same neural circuits that were shaped by trauma can be reshaped through therapy, somatic regulation, and safe relationships.

Therapeutic work (SE, EMDR, parts work, trauma-informed yoga) helps the amygdala recalibrate, the hippocampus integrate memory, and the PFC come back online.

Nervous system regulation teaches the body to tolerate activation without shutting down or spiraling.

Safe relational experiences repair attachment patterns — literally re-patterning neural pathways that were formed in unsafe environments.

Healing from complex trauma is not about “thinking your way out of it.” It’s about helping the brain and body relearn safety, connection, and regulation — one stable experience at a time.

Audio

traumainformedtherapy

12/01/2025

We don’t repeat patterns because we “like the wrong people.”

We repeat them because our attachment system is wired around what it had to survive.

Sue Johnson writes about how we seek out the emotional landscapes that shaped us —
the tenderness we longed for,
and the emotional distance we learned to tolerate.

The nervous system calls it familiar.
The child in us calls it another chance.
Another chance to finally be chosen, seen, or soothed in the way we weren’t.

In somatic work, we don’t shame these patterns-
we understand them.
We slow them down.
We renegotiate the original wound in a way the body can finally metabolize.

Familiar isn’t the same as safe.
And you’re allowed to learn a new kind of love.

11/30/2025

“Change occurs when one becomes what they are, not when they try to become what they are not.” — Arnold Beisser

It’s been a long time since I’ve written an introduction. Trying to capture the evolution of my work in a few paragraphs feels impossible, yet this season of change deserves words.

I’ve been a therapist for 20 years. My path has taken me through work with the Deaf community, a county behavioral health agency, residential eating disorder treatment, and—for most of my career—private practice. Along the way, I’ve trained in modalities that have shaped me most deeply: Gestalt Therapy, EMDR, Yoga Therapy, Emotionally Focused Therapy, and Somatic Experiencing.

When I opened the studio in 2021, I could never have imagined how profoundly it would transform me and the way I practice. Looking back, it feels as though every step—Gestalt’s phenomenology and the body-based wisdom of yoga therapy—was preparing me for the somatic work I’m completing now.

As we move toward 2026, the studio will continue to grow and shift. I’ll be finishing my in-person SE training in Boston and working toward full certification. Hopefully I will head to Singapore again for a chair yoga teaching as well. I’m exploring CE offerings for therapists and yoga teachers, and the possibility of a 200-hour teacher training in 2027. No retreats this year—but space for something to emerge when the time is right. I’m still discerning what wants to unfold in 2025, but I trust the process. As doubt inevitablly creeprs in from time to time, I continue to remind myself that resistance keeps us in familiar patterns; change unfolds when we meet ourselves where we are.

I’m deeply grateful to each of you—those who practice with me in the studio, those who work with me in therapy, and those who walk alongside me from afar. Thank you for being part of this journey, in all its seasons of becoming.
Sending love, today and every day.

11/29/2025

Many trauma survivors learn to maintain connection by suppressing anger, dismissing their own needs, and performing “niceness” as a form of relational safety.

This pattern isn’t a personality trait—it’s an adaptive strategy shaped by early environments where self-assertion, protest, or boundary-setting led to disconnection, shame, or punishment.

As Gabor Maté highlights, chronic self-silencing becomes a form of self-abandonment that the body eventually carries.

From a somatic perspective, this reflects the inhibition of the healthy fight response—an autonomic pattern that, when thwarted repeatedly, reorganizes into compliance, fawning, or hyper-cooperation.

Over time, the cost is profound: diminished interoceptive awareness, difficulty recognizing one’s own limits, and physiological strain from holding unexpressed activation.

Healing involves reclaiming anger as an informational signal, not a threat; restoring boundaries as a relational right, not a risk; and rebuilding self-compassion as the foundation for authenticity rather than performance.

Audio

⸻

11/28/2025

Perfectionism is often misunderstood as a drive for flawlessness.
Clinically and somatically, it’s far more relational.

In trauma work, we see perfectionism as a protection strategy the nervous system builds when early environments were unpredictable, chaotic, or emotionally unsafe. The body adapts by tightening, predicting, scanning, managing — because certainty feels like survival.

The “perfect” self isn’t a performance; it’s a false self designed to keep closeness safe, prevent rejection, and reduce threat. Over time, the strategy calcifies, and the person is left managing everything while being cut off from themselves.

Somatic experiencing, parts work, and trauma-informed yoga help unwind these patterns not by removing them, but by giving the system experiences of safety, support, and co-regulation — so the body can finally stop bracing.

Healing perfectionism is never about doing more.
It’s about letting your system experience enoughness for the first time.

Address

219 North Indian Hill Boulevard Suite 201
Claremont, CA
91711

Opening Hours

Monday	8am - 4:30pm
Tuesday	8am - 3:30pm
Wednesday	8am - 3:30pm
Thursday	8am - 4:30pm
Friday	8am - 4:30pm

Telephone

+15622817752

Website

http://www.maryortenburger.com/contact-me/

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