MEET Lashauna Cutts, LCSW
This isn’t just what I do. It’s my life’s work.
My commitment to trauma recovery is both professional and deeply personal. For nearly two decades, I've devoted my career to helping people recover from trauma, gain control over overwhelming emotions, break painful patterns, and build lives they genuinely want to be living.
What Recovery means to me
Recovery is getting your life back.
My understanding of recovery comes from both sides of the work: nearly two decades of helping people recover from trauma and my own experience recovering from PTSD through evidence-based treatment. Both have shaped what I believe recovery can look like—and what becomes possible when people receive treatment that works.
Recovery doesn't mean your past disappears. It means it no longer gets to decide your future.
Trauma can move into the background instead of controlling your choices, relationships, emotions, or sense of who you are.
Recovery also means knowing what to do when life gets hard. Old symptoms or patterns may occasionally show up, but you can learn to recognize what's happening, respond effectively, and trust yourself to handle what comes next.
To me, recovery is freedom: more freedom from the past, more confidence in yourself, and more ability to choose how you want to live, who you want to be, and what you want your life and relationships to look like.
HOW I WORK
Bring your whole self. Especially the big emotions.
You don't have to show up calm, polished, or with the right words. Bring the anger, fear, shame, grief, confusion, overwhelm—or the thing you haven't figured out how to say yet. We can work with all of it.
My approach is thoughtful and active. I'm interested in what you're telling yourself, what you've come to believe, and how those thoughts and beliefs may be creating or intensifying what you're feeling. Together, we'll get curious about where those patterns came from, whether they're still serving you, and what might change if you began responding differently.
That doesn't mean I'll try to talk you out of your feelings or convince you to “think positively.” Your emotions contain important information. We'll work to understand them, make room for them, and help you respond without automatically letting them run the show.
And none of this happens in a vacuum. Your identity, culture, family, relationships, and experiences matter. I want to understand you, not reduce you to a diagnosis or a collection of symptoms.
Therapy with me has room for depth and difficult emotions, but also honesty, humor, and real life. You don't need to have it all together here. We'll start with what's actually happening.
WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT FROM ME —
Honesty without judgment.
I’ll be direct about what I’m noticing, while staying curious about your experience and open to being wrong.
Expertise without rigidity.
I’ll bring deep clinical experience, thoughtful recommendations, and a clear rationale for how we approach your treatment. But good therapy requires flexibility—I’m treating you, not a protocol.
Steadiness when things get hard.
Big emotions, painful memories, difficult conversations, setbacks—you don't have to protect me from any of it.
WHAT I’LL ASK OF YOU —
Make space for yourself—and for this work.
It can be easy to put your own needs behind work, family, relationships, and everything else demanding your attention. I’ll ask you to protect the time for therapy, attend consistently, and give yourself permission to make your own well-being important.
Be willing to get curious.
We may question long-held beliefs, look closely at familiar patterns, and try new ways of responding. You don't have to agree with me, but I'll ask you to stay open to considering things from a different perspective.
Practice between sessions.
Evidence-based therapy often includes practice assignments. Applying what we're working on in your everyday life is where new ways of thinking, responding, and relating begin to take hold.
My Background & Training
01
EDUCATION
Smith College School for Social Work
Master of Social Work
Columbia University, Columbia College
Bachelor of Arts in Political Science & African-American Studies
02
CLINICAL & ACADEMIC EXPERIENCE
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
11 years specializing in trauma & PTSD
Yale School of Medicine
Former Assistant Professor of Psychiatry
Nema Health
Former Senior Clinical Director · Clinical Advisor
Clinical leadership, programming, therapist development, and quality for a national specialty PTSD program—the largest provider of PTSD treatment outside the VA.
Marymount School of New York
Former Upper School Counselor
Adolescent & Family Mental Health
Extensive experience with adolescents and families across independent-school, residential-treatment, foster-care, and trauma-focused settings
03
ADVANCED CLINICAL TRAINING AND CERTIFICATION
Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT)
Certified Provider · Certified CPT Consultant
Prolonged Exposure Therapy (PE)
Certified Provider
Cognitive Behavioral Conjoint Therapy for PTSD (CBCT)
Certified Provider
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
Extensive Advanced Training
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
Clinical Expertise
Your past has shaped you.
It doesn't have to define what comes next.
If you're ready to make a change, I'm ready to help you do the work.