Reclaiming Autonomy from Coercive Control

SOMA uses Dr. Aday's Emotional Sovereignty and Decentering frameworks to gently unwind coercive control and restore your sense of self. Recovery is not simply boundary-setting. In narcissistic abuse, your internal emotional landscape can become occupied and governed by another person's needs and narratives, until your own signals feel out of reach. Decentering is the step-by-step, neuroscience-informed process of reclaiming that internal territory so you can trust your own perceptions, feelings, and worth again.

Emotional Sovereignty is Dr. Reyna Aday, PhD, LMHC's framework for the felt sense of owning your own inner world, shaped through more than a decade of clinical work with narcissistic abuse survivors. In coercive control, one person's perceptions and narratives can take over another's emotional life, until the survivor is left uncertain of their own feelings and worth. Restoring emotional sovereignty means reclaiming that inner territory so your perceptions, choices, and self-trust belong to you again. Naming this pattern is often the first step toward reclaiming it.

This is one of the most common experiences survivors bring to SOMA. You may have left the relationship, yet the internal critic still sounds exactly like the person you left. That is how coercive control takes hold: the other person's reality became embedded in how you evaluate yourself. Decentering works to retrain the nervous system to trust its own signals again, so that borrowed critical voice loses its authority over your choices.

Yes. SOMA's narcissistic abuse work is not couples therapy and it is not generic support. It is a structured clinical framework for survivors who need more than validation. Coercive control and gaslighting leave people doubting their own memory and seeking external validation before every decision. Our approach combines reality-testing, boundary architecture, somatic sovereignty restoration, and identity reconstruction, grounded in the understanding that the nervous system itself must be retrained.

You might recognize yourself if you frequently question your own memory of events, feel responsible for everyone else's emotional states in an exhausting way, carry a persistent low-grade shame with no clear origin, or struggle to make decisions without outside approval. These patterns often reflect systematic psychological subjugation rather than personal weakness. SOMA offers a clinical framework, not just reassurance, to help you understand and reverse them.

Yes. SOMA sees adult clients (18 and older) in person at our Coral Gables office and virtually by telehealth. We are licensed to provide telehealth to residents of Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Indiana. SOMA is private pay and out of network. We can provide a superbill for possible out-of-network reimbursement, and HSA and FSA funds are often eligible. Rates are shared during your consultation.