Paula Timon, LCSW, has been a licensed clinician for twenty years – starting her career working with abused and neglected teenage clients living in group homes. She moved to inpatient psychiatric units, where she treated seriously, chronically mentally ill clients impacted by economic difficulties and a lack of community resources. Paula has worked in several PHP/IOP programs for substance abusing and dual diagnosis clients, seeing dramatic growth and healing through these programs. Paula’s true passion lies with trauma, sexual abuse/sexual assault survivors, and C-PTSD. She began working with borderline personality disorder just as Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) became an effective treatment and decreased the chronic self-injury and frequent suicidality co-occurring with this population. She has been trained in DBT since the early 2000’s and has seen drastic improvement in clients utilizing this treatment modality. Paula has been an adjunct professor at two different graduate schools of social work, and this work, along with training social work/MFT interns, honors her commitment to training the next generation of therapists.
Paula sees clients with struggles ranging from more straightforward parent-child relational issues to longstanding trauma, speaks at local schools on a variety of clinical topics, and provides support for parents coping with changes related to COVID-19.
In the past several years, Paula has synthesized her passion for trauma-informed work into working with the devastating effects of narcissistic abuse, a pervasive mental health issue only recently gaining notoriety in the larger psychological community. Paula guides clients in leaving these relationships, rebuilding their lives, and helping clients resolve trauma, codependency and self-love issues that make survivors vulnerable to this form of abuse.
Paula lives in the Pasadena area with her three teenage daughters and her rescue dog, Blue. In her spare time, she is a marathon runner, backpacker, and photographer. She loves live music and is an avid collector of vinyl.