About

Cheri McDonald, PhD, LMFT, founder and Clinical Director of A Place to Turn, serving patients in and around Westlake Village, Pasadena and Los Angeles, California. As a trauma expert, Dr Cheri has interwoven her 35+ years of psychotherapy and hypnotherapy training and intuitive coaching skills to help her clients overcome the complexity of losses and challenges that hinder life wholeness and happiness. She received her Bachelor of Science in family sciences at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, in 1983. Dr. McDonald continued her education at California Lutheran University where she obtained her Master of Science in marriage and family therapy in 1987. She then received her doctoral degree in philosophy of clinical hypnotherapy at Pacific University in Culver City, CA and Hawaii in 2007. Dr Cheri is the creator of Holistic Integral Therapy (HIT), an approach that guides the client toward integrating the inner healing intelligence and engaging the mind, body and spirit for complete evolution and true wholeness. Together she moves the client through the shadows of trauma armoring her clients with the tools, insight, and wisdom needed to break free and embrace life-altering healing. She also created DrCheriBreakFree™, a consulting program aimed to help individuals take their life- altering changes into their family and community ensuring success and continuation of the integration work achieved in rising from their unresolved trauma. Dr Cheri is most excited about her most recent addition to her many tools of integration is her certification in Psychedelic-assisted therapy. This has proven to weave together all her other specialties of hypnotherapy, EMDR, energy work, trauma-informed yoga, IFS to expedite and accentuate the healing journey. Dr Cheri has empowered clients to become the best versions of themselves. She has helped thousands of individuals unbury from the avalanche of complex PTSD to find healing and sustainable recovery.