Weaving modern science with ancient wisdom
You are not here because you need someone to fix you. You are here because something in you knows that what you are most fundamentally has never been broken — and you are ready to find experience that sense more fully.
I am Sunyata Kopriva (they/them), MSW, LCSW, RYT — a global trauma psychotherapist specializing in culturally responsive relational attachment and dissociation across the lifespan. I weave the clinical science of trauma with over 30 years of training in psychotherapy, contemplative practice, and cross-cultural healing traditions, including 25 years as a dedicated student within an authentic Tibetan Buddhist lineage. I have been rigorous about this path — studying, investigating, testing, and searching without compromise, across clinical rooms and cultures on every continent — because the people who walk through this portal deserve a guide who has actually walked the terrain. (Curious how that path shaped my approach? Read my personal story.)
What I bring is not just a set of methods. It is a quality of presence forged from everything I have lived, tested, and refused to look away from. The framework I developed — Dynamic Trauma Integration — and its clinical instrument, the Dynamic Processing Method, emerged from that. Not from a desk. From the room. (Learn more about my philosophy and method.)
These principles and methods are what you will find here — held within a therapeutic relationship built on coregulation, attachment, and the kind of steady presence that makes the unknown navigable. I don’t just see the you that you show me, I see the you that you don’t have words for yet.
My approach is comprehensive and holistic, supporting trauma healing both in its acute stages and as it resurfaces in unexpected ways across a lifetime. I specialize in the journey from complex trauma and dissociation towards presence - because coping and safety matter most when trauma is acute, but staying present requires something more as you keep moving forward. I draw on evidence-based and complementary practices to treat the whole person and not just the symptom.
I work with single incident trauma (car crashes, medical trauma, physical assault), complex and developmental trauma (childhood abuse, racial trauma, poverty), ancestral, intergenerational, spiritual/religious, attachment, and collective trauma. I treat PTSD, dissociative disorders, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, major depression, generalized anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorders, substance use disorders, and psychosis - with individuals, couples, families, and communities. I treat people ages 5 and older.
Treatment is individually designed in a collaborative therapeutic relationship.
Evidence-Based psychotherapy methods utilized with Dynamic Trauma Integration
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT)
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
Eye-Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT)
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT)
Trauma Center Trauma- Sensitive Yoga (TC-TSY)
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT)
Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training (ASIST)
Sexual Assault Response Team (SART)
complementary healing methods utilized with Dynamic Trauma Integration
Meditation
Dreamwork
Breathwork
Chanting
Sacred sexuality
Energy hygiene
Nutrition
Shamanic journeying
Art
Sound healing
Extended Professional Experience
My clinical and professional work spans three decades and three countries, across every sector of the helping professions.
Prior to founding Dynamic Trauma Integration, I founded another successful private practice, Healers Hive, and served as a psychotherapist and DBT Intake Director at St. Louis DBT. I was a clinical social worker at Hawthorn Children's Psychiatric Hospital — the last remaining high-security state psychiatric hospital for youth in Missouri — providing evidence-based treatment to high-risk adolescents in long-term residential psychiatric care. I was a clinical supervisor at a children's community mental health center in one of the most disenfranchised communities of St. Louis, managing clinical staff and a full caseload across complex trauma, dissociation, and severe mental illness populations. I currently volunteer as a psychotherapist through the EMDR Humanitarian Assistance Program. I am an active member of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation, and EMDR International Association.
As a Gender-Based Education Specialist with the U.S. Peace Corps in Burkina Faso, West Africa, I developed a participatory photography advocacy and research program with women and girls, and then extended my service to partner with local psychiatrists, traditional healers, and schools on mental health assessment and treatment for children with persistent mental illness. Given my fluency with the local cultures, the Peace Corps also brought me on to establish 30 new volunteer sites nationally.
I co-founded the Translating Identity Conference at the University of Vermont — one of the first student-led conferences on gender identity in the country, now one of the largest in the Northeast.
I established and directed a youth poetry program in under-resourced D.C. communities, producing a published youth anthology in collaboration with the Corcoran School of Art and Design.
My research background includes positions at the Washington University Schools of Social Work and Public Health and the Department of Psychiatry — where I co-authored a peer-reviewed publication in BMC Psychology — and at the University of Maryland's Center for the Study of Assessment Validity and Evaluation. As part of my study abroad at the School of International Training in Durban, South Africa, I conducted field research in post-apartheid South Africa on identity transformation in developing townships, supervised by a local psychiatrist, resulting in an undergraduate thesis.
I have supported LGBTQ+ refugees through the Organization for Refuge, Asylum and Migration, and was the Outreach Director for LGBTQ+ youth in Vermont with Outright Vermont.
I designed a self-directed MSW emphasis in developmental and complex trauma from Washington University in St. Louis, hold undergraduate degrees in Anthropology, Psychology, and Photography from the University of Vermont, and an Associate's degree in Photography from Montgomery College.
Every role, every community, every system navigated and fought from the inside — none of it was accumulation for its own sake. It was preparation. For this work of guiding people through the passage from what they think they are to what they have always been.
“Grateful for the time together. I have learned/remembered such amazing things. So fortunate to have completely changed the trajectory of my life. A huge right turn to a beautiful path. So, so blessed. Such fullness in this life. Thanks for helping me see it.”