Danelle Riles

My path to becoming a therapist grew from my own experience of healing and transformation through therapy. I know firsthand how powerful it can be to feel deeply seen, heard, and compassionately understood. Therapy has helped me to reconnect with parts of myself that carried pain, fear, grief, and old survival patterns. Through this process, I have discovered that lasting change is possible and continual. Helping others on this journey, is my greatest joy. I believe healing begins when we are able to tell our stories in a safe and attuned relationship. Together, we create space for the parts of you that may feel overwhelmed, anxious, stuck, protective, wounded, or unseen. Rather than judging these inner experiences, I help clients develop compassion, curiosity, and connection toward themselves. I believe we heal through compassionate reflection. We come to see ourselves in new ways that open doorways to endless possibilities. I specialize in Internal Family Systems (IFS) because it is the most powerfully transformative modality I have encountered. IFS offers a deeply respectful and non-pathologizing way to understand ourselves. It is a path to transformation that is gentle, compassionate, and intuitive. What continues to excite me about parts work, is that clients often engage with it as a way of life--using it outside of sessions to respond to life circumstances in more skillful ways and to cultivate deeper care for oneself. At this stage in my work, I can confidently say that we cannot truly love others beyond our own capacity to know and love ourselves. Loving ourselves must be part of the equation. And it is often the hardest part until we learn practical ways to do this. Then everything changes. We discover our inherent gifts and purpose in life. We find that we truly want to be here. Life becomes rich and purposeful. And this growing self-love has a ripple effect into the world. The world around us changes in undeniable ways. In recent years I have become immersed in grief tending through the work of Francis Weller. Through attending communal grief rituals and eventually becoming trained to lead grief rituals, I have developed a passion for supporting people to move from holding grief in private, to sharing the weight of grief with others. We were never meant to grief alone. For me, grief is the way home. It points us back to what matters most to each of us: to our very hearts, our souls, and ultimately authentic connection to each other and the natural world. Tending to grief in safe containers allows us to inhabit the qualities we all seem to want in our lives: joy, creativity, gratitude, and purpose. Grief and gratitude are close companions. I facilitate communal grief rituals and run grief tending groups online. My work also integrates somatic awareness, attachment-focused therapy, and depth-oriented approaches to support healing on emotional, relational, and nervous system levels. I work with teens and adults throughout California via online therapy and specialize in trauma, grief, anxiety, life transitions, relationship struggles, and non-ordinary states of consciousness/mystical/anomalous experiences. My intention is to help clients move toward greater self-understanding, inner connection, resilience, and wholeness.