Livia Adia Budrys, LCSW, C-IAYT, SEP

Somatic Trauma and Yoga Therapy Educator

Livia Budrys, LCSW, C-IAYT, SEP, also professionally known as Livia Adia Budrys, is a licensed clinical social worker, Certified Yoga Therapist, Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, clinical consultant, and professional educator. Her work integrates psychotherapy, somatic awareness, neurobiology, contemplative practice, yoga therapy, attachment theory, and trauma-informed care. She is the founder of Yoga Informed, an educational model designed to help mental health professionals incorporate selected yoga-based principles and practices into psychotherapy with clinical purpose, appropriate consent, and respect for professional scope.

Livia’s teaching focuses on how trauma can influence cognition, emotion, physiology, movement, boundaries, identity, relationships, and the ability to remain present during stress. She helps clinicians recognize patterns of activation, shutdown, dissociation, avoidance, and relational disconnection without assuming that every physical sensation contains a hidden trauma memory. Her approach encourages therapists to consider embodied responses alongside client history, culture, medical factors, behavior, meaning, and the therapeutic relationship.

Her professional work extends beyond individual treatment. Livia has developed clinical programs, trained behavioral health teams, contributed to trauma-informed organizational initiatives, and held leadership roles within intensive treatment settings. Her education is relevant to social workers, counselors, psychologists, yoga therapists, addiction professionals, eating-disorder clinicians, clinical supervisors, and organizations seeking a more embodied and ethically grounded approach to trauma care.

Professional Background

Livia earned a master’s degree in social service administration from the University of Chicago. Her professional credentials include Licensed Clinical Social Worker, Certified Yoga Therapist through the International Association of Yoga Therapists, and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner. Her current professional biography also identifies her as an assistant trainer with the Somatic Training Institute, supporting Somatic Experiencing education internationally.

She completed a two-year residency at the Himalayan International Institute of Yoga Science and Philosophy and pursued extensive advanced and therapeutic yoga education. In 2007, she developed and facilitated a trauma-informed 200-hour yoga teacher training, and in 2012 she launched the Yoga Informed training model. Her professional development has also included mindfulness and contemplative practice, ecopsychology, anti-oppressive psychodynamic psychotherapy, and clinical training connected with DBT, DBT Prolonged Exposure, ACT, and Exposure and Response Prevention.

Through Yoga Informed, Livia teaches an integrative framework that brings yoga philosophy and practice into conversation with Western psychotherapy, neurobiology, somatic models, behavioral treatment, and psychodynamic theory. The training does not position a psychotherapy session as a conventional yoga class. Instead, clinicians learn to evaluate whether practices involving breathing, grounding, sensory awareness, mindful movement, values, posture, or contemplative reflection are appropriate for a particular client and treatment goal.

Her professional history includes clinical leadership roles at Timberline Knolls, Insight Behavioral Health Centers, and Eating Recovery Center. In these settings, she contributed to programs serving people experiencing trauma, eating disorders, mood and anxiety disorders, addiction, and co-occurring clinical concerns. She has also consulted with behavioral health organizations on trauma-informed programming, staff education, treatment protocols, and the integration of somatic approaches into higher-acuity care.

Livia’s work recognizes that trauma-informed care must extend beyond the language clinicians use in sessions. Organizational policies, leadership behavior, staff support, physical environments, referral procedures, supervision, and responses to client acuity all affect whether a treatment system feels predictable, collaborative, and safe. Her consultation and training therefore address both direct clinical interventions and the wider systems in which care occurs.

Areas of Expertise

Somatic Trauma Therapy. Livia helps clinicians observe how distress may appear through breath-holding, muscular tension, restlessness, collapse, numbness, changes in voice, reduced eye contact, rapid movement, or difficulty sensing physical needs. These responses are explored collaboratively rather than interpreted as proof of a particular trauma history. Clinical Events’ guide to somatic therapy techniques provides complementary discussion of orienting, grounding, interoception, resourcing, titration, pendulation, movement, and co-regulation.

Somatic Experiencing. As a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, Livia draws on a body-oriented framework for understanding trauma physiology, chronic stress, activation, and protective responses. Somatic Experiencing International describes its professional program as an experiential training that combines theory, demonstration, guided practice, case material, personal sessions, and consultation. Livia’s application of the model emphasizes careful pacing, present-moment awareness, client agency, and the development of greater flexibility around activation.

Yoga-Informed Psychotherapy. Livia’s Yoga-Informed model integrates selected yoga concepts with clinical assessment and psychotherapy. Possible interventions may include breath awareness, grounding, mindful movement, sensory orientation, reflection on values, compassionate observation, and carefully adapted contemplative practice. These methods should remain optional, culturally responsive, physically appropriate, and connected to the client’s treatment goals. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health’s overview of yoga identifies potential benefits for stress and aspects of mental well-being while also emphasizing research limitations and appropriate safety considerations.

Developmental Trauma and Attachment. Livia’s work examines how early relational experiences may shape emotional regulation, expectations of safety, boundary formation, trust, proximity, withdrawal, dependency, and responses to conflict. She encourages clinicians to understand attachment-related behaviors as adaptations that may once have protected connection or reduced danger. Treatment can then help clients develop greater awareness, flexibility, relational choice, and capacity for repair without shaming the original protective response.

Nervous-System Regulation and Relational Safety. Her training helps clinicians recognize patterns associated with heightened activation and states of withdrawal or shutdown. Regulation is not treated as an instruction to remain calm at all times. Instead, the therapeutic goal is greater capacity to notice internal experience, remain connected to the present, recover from activation, and respond with more choice. Clinical Events’ guide to Polyvagal Theory in trauma therapy offers a related framework while cautioning clinicians against using nervous-system language as a complete explanation for complex behavior.

Mindfulness and Contemplative Practice. Livia’s professional development includes sustained engagement with mindfulness and contemplative traditions. Her clinical application emphasizes adapting these practices to trauma history and client readiness. Closing the eyes, focusing on the breath, remaining silent, or scanning the body may be grounding for one client and destabilizing for another. Clinical Events’ resource on integrating mindfulness into trauma therapy provides additional guidance on pacing and trauma-sensitive modification.

Eating Disorders, Addiction, and Co-Occurring Conditions. Livia’s previous leadership experience in intensive behavioral health settings informs her understanding of cases in which trauma intersects with eating-disorder symptoms, substance use, mood concerns, anxiety, dissociation, and medical risk. Her approach supports integrated assessment and collaboration rather than assuming that one somatic or contemplative intervention can replace specialized multidisciplinary care.

Clinical Ethics and Level-of-Care Decisions. Embodied and relational treatment must remain connected to ethical judgment. Clinicians need to recognize when outpatient care no longer provides sufficient structure, medical oversight, safety planning, or multidisciplinary support. Livia’s education addresses consultation, documentation, professional competence, countertransference, treatment limitations, and compassionate referral conversations. Clinical Events’ guide to ethical practice in therapy offers related discussion of boundaries, competence, transparency, and professional responsibility.

Organizational Consultation and Trauma-Informed Leadership. Livia supports behavioral health organizations seeking to translate trauma-informed principles into everyday operations. Her work considers clinical programming, leadership, staff support, supervision, policies, client choice, cultural awareness, referral systems, and responses to high-acuity situations. This broader perspective helps organizations move beyond symbolic trauma language toward practices that more consistently support client welfare and workforce sustainability.

Sarah Buino, LCSW, RDDP, CADC, CDWF

Trauma, Addiction, and Ethical Leadership Educator

Sarah Buino, LCSW, RDDP, CADC, CDWF, NMT, is a licensed clinical social worker, therapist, educator, consultant, speaker, and organizational adviser whose work connects developmental trauma, addiction treatment, shame resilience, therapist self-awareness, ethical leadership, and systems-level change. She founded Head/Heart Therapy and Head/Heart Business Therapy and now concentrates much of her work on helping clinicians, group-practice leaders, and healthcare organizations build more relationally responsible and psychologically sustainable ways of working.

Sarah Buino, LCSW, RDDP, CADC, CDWF, NMT, brings a deliberately integrative perspective to behavioral healthcare. Her current professional biography identifies her as a Registered Dual Diagnosis Professional, Certified Alcohol and Other Drug Counselor, Certified Daring Way Facilitator, and NARM Master Therapist. These areas of training support work with complex trauma, substance-use concerns, shame, perfectionism, relational disconnection, and the protective patterns people develop when safety, belonging, or emotional expression has been threatened.

Sarah Buino, LCSW, RDDP, CADC, CDWF, NMT, is also the creator and host of Conversations With a Wounded Healer, a podcast examining how therapists’ personal healing, professional identities, organizational roles, and social environments influence the care they provide. Her teaching invites helping professionals to consider their own humanity without romanticizing impairment or weakening ethical responsibility. The central question is not whether therapists have wounds, but whether they engage those wounds with enough honesty, support, and accountability to keep clients from carrying them.

Professional Background

Sarah Buino, LCSW, RDDP, CADC, CDWF, NMT, earned her master’s degree from Loyola University Chicago and completed undergraduate study at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Loyola University Chicago has identified her as an alumna and adjunct faculty member in its School of Social Work, while her current professional biography reports that she has taught substance-use coursework to developing social workers. Her academic work complements clinical experience in addiction treatment, trauma therapy, professional education, and practice leadership.

Sarah Buino, LCSW, RDDP, CADC, CDWF, NMT, created Head/Heart Therapy, a Chicago group practice serving adolescents and adults affected by complex trauma, addiction, shame, guilt, mood concerns, anxiety, and relationship difficulties. The practice’s current website identifies her as its original creator and notes that she continues to hold a small individual caseload while focusing more extensively on groups and organizations. The site now lists Rayell Grayson as owner and president, so Sarah should be described as the founder rather than the current owner.

Sarah Buino, LCSW, RDDP, CADC, CDWF, NMT, subsequently developed Head/Heart Business Therapy to support therapists and healthcare workers navigating the intersection of care, power, money, leadership, workplace culture, and professional integrity. Her consultation treats organizations as relational systems in which attachment patterns, conflict avoidance, overfunctioning, authority, compensation, and unspoken expectations may shape daily decisions. This perspective challenges leaders to examine whether their policies support ethical practice or simply require clinicians to absorb increasing systemic strain.

Sarah Buino, LCSW, RDDP, CADC, CDWF, NMT, helped launch the NARM Training Institute podcast Transforming Trauma in 2019 and served as host through 2021. In that role, she facilitated conversations about developmental trauma, relational disconnection, shame, agency, and the therapeutic importance of clinicians examining their own internal responses. NARM remains one influence within her broader integrative approach; it should not be presented as the only framework informing her work or as universally appropriate for every client.

Sarah Buino, LCSW, RDDP, CADC, CDWF, NMT, has also collaborated with Sarah Suzuki through The Sarahs, an education and consultation initiative focused on antiracism, liberation, accountability, and organizational change. Their work asks behavioral-health professionals to examine how racism, hierarchy, access, institutional culture, and professional power affect treatment and workplace experience. Her official biography also documents recognition from the Illinois Certification Board, NASW-Illinois, the Illinois Association of Addiction Professionals, and Sierra Tucson.

Areas of Expertise

Developmental Trauma and Relational Healing. Sarah Buino, LCSW, RDDP, CADC, CDWF, NMT, helps clinicians understand how early relational environments may shape self-protection, shame, emotional disconnection, perfectionism, difficulty receiving care, and fear of dependence or rejection. Her work emphasizes curiosity about the purpose of a protective pattern instead of treating it as evidence that a client is resistant or defective. Clinical Events’ Trauma Therapy for Clinicians provides complementary guidance on assessment, stabilization, treatment selection, and evidence-informed trauma care.

Shame Resilience and Authenticity. Buino explores how shame can appear through withdrawal, self-criticism, overachievement, defensiveness, people-pleasing, substance use, or the pressure to perform competence. Effective work with shame requires attunement and accountability rather than reassurance that dismisses the client’s experience or confrontation that increases exposure. Clinical Events’ Healing Shame in the Therapy Room discusses how respectful therapeutic relationships can help clients develop a less punitive relationship with hidden parts of themselves.

Addiction and Co-Occurring Concerns. Her RDDP and CADC credentials support education involving substance-use disorders and co-occurring mental-health concerns. Buino encourages clinicians to examine what a substance or compulsive behavior does for the person—such as reducing activation, interrupting shame, creating belonging, or producing temporary emotional distance—while still addressing risks and consequences. This approach supports individualized treatment rather than moral judgment or a single explanation for addiction.

The Wounded Healer and Therapist Self-Awareness. Buino is closely associated with the idea that therapists participate in their own ongoing healing while caring for others. This does not excuse impaired practice. It highlights the need for personal therapy, supervision, consultation, boundaries, rest, and honest reflection when grief, trauma, illness, financial stress, countertransference, or professional isolation begins to affect judgment. Her podcast creates space for these conversations without making clients responsible for the clinician’s emotional needs.

Ethical Leadership and Organizational Systems. Through Head/Heart Business Therapy, Buino examines how workplace structure affects care. Productivity pressure, unclear authority, exploitative compensation, inadequate supervision, discrimination, and chronic understaffing cannot be repaired through self-care alone. Ethical leaders need the capacity to discuss power, receive feedback, clarify roles, make defensible decisions, and repair harm without collapsing into shame or defensiveness. Clinical Events’ Therapy Ethics: Boundaries, Confidentiality, and Competence offers related guidance on power, professional judgment, and client protection.

Anti-Oppressive Practice and Accountability. Her collaborative training addresses racism, privilege, access, and structural inequity within mental-health and addiction services. Buino distinguishes shame-driven paralysis from responsibility. Accountability requires listening, examining impact, changing behavior, redistributing authority where appropriate, and continuing the work after a training ends. The objective is not to claim moral perfection, but to develop organizational practices that reduce avoidable harm and create more equitable participation.

Professional Boundaries and Sustainable Practice. Buino’s work recognizes that therapists’ capacity is shaped by both personal and systemic conditions. Clear boundaries, fair expectations, reliable consultation, and psychologically safer workplaces support competent care. Clinical Events’ Professional Boundaries Every Therapist Should Know provides additional examples involving role confusion, boundary drift, digital communication, and ethical risk management.

Professional Education, Speaking, and Podcasting. Her workshops, consultation, teaching, and podcast conversations translate complex clinical and organizational questions into practical reflection. Buino’s work is especially relevant to therapists, addiction professionals, supervisors, practice owners, and healthcare leaders seeking to connect personal insight with ethical action inside rapidly changing systems.

Authored Publications Review

[Certain] An Authored Publications section has not been added. Sarah Buino has created podcasts, articles, webinars, workbooks, and professional training resources, but I did not verify an independently published book, peer-reviewed journal article, or formally published book chapter that clearly lists her as the author. These materials should not be presented as authored publications merely to fill the section.