Beneath the Surface Therapy is a California telehealth practice offering kink-affirming, sex-positive psychotherapy for adults, couples, polycules, and other consensual relationship systems. The practice is founded by Jillian Ellison, LMFT 156597, an EMDRIA Certified Therapist™. Clients do not have to translate, defend, or sanitize their sexuality, kink identity, desires, or relationship structure to receive thoughtful clinical care.
Services may address sexual trauma and erotic agency; attachment injuries; shame and dissociation; intimacy and sexual communication; recurring patterns of pursuit, withdrawal, pleasing, control, or self-abandonment; boundaries, trust, betrayal, rupture, and repair; BDSM and consensual power exchange; dominant, submissive, switch, and other kink identities; consensual non-monogamy and polyamory; and LGBTQIA+-affirming relationship care.
Kink does not have to be the presenting concern. Some clients simply want a therapist who understands this part of their life and will not turn consensual kink into the problem. Consensual kink is not presumed to be caused by trauma or treated as pathology. When trauma and sexuality do intersect, the work explores that relationship without collapsing one into the other, while centering consent, choice, agency, embodied boundaries, and each client’s stated goals.
Jillian’s approach integrates EMDR, the Flash Technique, attachment-informed therapy, relational therapy, and careful nervous-system pacing. Therapy may include assessment, preparation, trauma processing, relational work, consent and boundary exploration, and integration following emotionally or sexually significant experiences. The clinical foundation is organized around safety, trust, power, choice, connection, and agency.
Therapy does not include sexual contact, physical kink activities, restraint, impact play, or scene facilitation. Secure telehealth and private-pay EMDR intensive options are available to adults located in California.
Jillian is an AASECT Member and is completing formal sex-therapy education through the Modern Sex Therapy Institutes AASECT CST pathway. She does not represent herself as an AASECT Certified Sex Therapist unless and until that certification is awarded.
