Lilliana Dunbar

Lilliana Dunbar is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in Nevada City, working with children, teens, young adults, and adults in person and by telehealth across California. Her clinical focus is early adversity — trauma, toxic stress, and attachment injuries that arrive long before a child has words for them — and the behavior that grows out of it.

Before she was a therapist she was a behavioral specialist, providing one-to-one support to children in homes, schools, and the community. That history is why her work starts somewhere other than the behavior itself. What reads as defiance is usually a nervous system doing its job under conditions no one would choose, and her stated premise is that all behavior makes sense.

With younger clients she works through play therapy, sandtray, EMDR, and relational neuroscience, aiming at regulation from the inside out rather than compliance managed from the outside in. She also draws on attachment theory, CBT, DBT, family systems, and trauma-informed strategies. She describes herself as directive, playful, and collaborative about how therapy is approached, and names the goal plainly: that clients and their families come out of it feeling confident and empowered.

Alongside her work with kids she supports adults healing from their own trauma, particularly as they move through pregnancy, postpartum, and parenting or co-parenting relationships. Adoption, foster care, blended families, behavioral concerns, and life transitions are all part of her caseload. A transracial and transnational adoptee herself, she has written that this work is deeply meaningful to her on a personal level.

Lilliana earned her Master of Social Work, with a specialty in trauma, from the University of Denver, and is licensed as a Clinical Social Worker in California. She completed EMDR training through the EMDR Institute. Outside her therapy practice she is the founder of The Connected Response, a behavioral support company through which she provides parent coaching, professional development trainings, and workshops for parents, clinicians, educators, and behavioral teams.