Molly Mitchell-Hardt Field MA, LMFT & SEP
I am Molly Mitchell-Hardt Field, a depth psychotherapist, somatic experiencing practitioner, sacred motherhood guide, and workshop facilitator, offering a holistic mind-body approach to healing.
Like many in the healing profession, my path began in my own suffering. Much of who I am was forged in the dark cave of my inner sanctum—the place I have retreated to hide, gestate, collapse, dissolve and transform experience into medicine.
Youth
My early years as an elite gymnast taught me both discipline and the cost of perfectionism. Blessed with an exquisitely sensitive nervous system (though I didn't recognize this gift until much later), I navigated a double life—striving for athletic excellence while yearning for authentic connection.
My introduction to The Way of the Peaceful Warrior, a story of a college gymnast who encounters an unlikely spiritual teacher, opened me to concepts of presence, mindfulness, and transcendence that served as my first glimpse into the unseen and human potential.
College
Much of college I struggled with a sense of displacement, isolation, and lack of self-worth.
I chose to take a gap year and moved to Los Angeles to work for a non profit Americorps program called City Year. During that year I worked as a tutor and mentor in the South LA school system.
I finished my college education at USC and spent my senior year learning Swahili and preparing to travel to Tanzania to live and serve in a small village with no electricity or running water.
The times in my life that I have experienced the greatest shifts in perspective have been when I have stepped away from the rushing river of American life, unplugged, and planted my feet amidst people and places that were still connected to the slow rhythm of the Earth. It was hard to come back to my life as a college student in the intensity of downtown Los Angeles and not see the problematic aspects of our cultural values and behaviors.
During this time, I stole away every spare moment I had to my favorite yoga studio across town. It was in those yoga classes that I finally felt a sense of belonging, but not with any group, for the first time within myself. It was this experience that later inspired me to become a yoga teacher.
Seeking
After some time in existential paralysis, I traveled to India for yoga training and a subsequent harrowing journey through the country on a pilgrimage to Kumbh Mela.
I spent the next ten years learning, teaching yoga and determined to live a yogic way of life.
After a lifetime of overriding, my body and nervous system began to show signs of distress that impacted my digestion and resulted in hormonal issues and long term chronic fatigue. I was being asked to go deeper.
Depth
It was around then that I felt called to pivot and move my career in another direction. When I arrived at Pacifica Graduate Institute, I felt I had finally come home. I spent the next few years discovering and learning about the Depth Psychological and Jungian tradition with a voracious curiosity.
Beyond
After graduate school and my own initiation into the depths of my being through motherhood, I was introduced to somatic experiencing, which all but saved my life during this liminal time. I was so inspired by the depth of healing that transpired that I took up the three year training to become a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP).
Both the Depth/Jungian and Somatic lenses strongly influence my work with clients. The somatic in the resolution of trauma and nervous system healing and depth lens as a framework and cosmology to hold the meaning and complexities of life. Through everything, I have always been seeking a container large enough to it all, the whole human experience rich with complexity, full of messiness, confusion, grief, joy, and despair.
I work as a psychotherapist (LMFT #143845) in private practice virtually throughout California, in person in the Santa Barbara area and as a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner worldwide. Beyond all the practices and modalities, I believe that wellness comes from living a soul-centered, and soul-led life—one full of meaning, depth, courage, and connection.
Education and Training
Pacifica Graduate Institute - M.A. Counseling Psychology with and Emphasis in Depth and Jungian Psychology
Education Includes:
Psychodynamic, Humanistic, Psychoanalytic, Mythopoetic, Somatic, Expressive Arts, Imaginal, Archetypal Spiritual and Soul-based Perspectives
Jungian and Post-Jungian Psychological Theory
James Hillman, Marion Woodman, Marie-Louise von Franz, Edward Edinger, Joseph Campbell, Michael Meade and more
Somatic Experiencing Practitioner Certificate
Education Includes:
In depth expertise in working with both developmental or complex trauma and event trauma or PTSD
Tracking the nervous system and renegotiating repair and completion
Attunement on the levels of emotion and nervous system/somatic
Working with sexual trauma
Working with chronic illness/pain patterns
Somatic boundary work
Supportive touch work
Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR)
Yoga Alliance - RYT 200hr+
Additional training in Prenatal + Postnatal yoga
University of Southern California - B.A. Psychology
Photos by Erick Madrid