About CFTE
CFTE is
redefining healing.
Not as a slogan. As a commitment we make every single day to move principles of trauma-care beyond the clinical setting and into the world where people actually live.
THE ORIGIN STORY
We didn't set out to build
an organization.
“We had a choice. We could stay, and quietly absorb it the way so many people do. Or we could leave, and try to build something that actually walks the walk.”
For years, before we founded CFTE, we worked inside larger institutions, doing work we believed in — developing one of the first yoga-based interventions for complex trauma, building research that would go on to be published in major clinical journals, training practitioners who brought this work into communities around the world.
The team at the Trauma Center in Brookline, 2008 — the year TCTSY received its
first NIH grant to study yoga as a treatment for trauma.
Left to right: Jenn Turner, David Vendetti, Dave Emerson, and Serena Chaudry.
We left. And in doing so, we inherited a question that still shapes everything we build: how do you create an organization that genuinely practices what it teaches?
We don't claim to have it perfectly figured out. We're transparent about that. But the commitment — to shared power, to honest accountability, to an ongoing process of learning and unlearning — is not incidental to our work. It is our work.
The Center for Trauma and Embodiment was formally established in 2018, and became an independent 501(c)(3) in 2025. What it was built on goes back much further, and what it is growing into is still being written.
OUR PHILOSOPHY
What we believe
01.
Healing happens in more places than we've been told.
Therapy offices matter. But so does the weight room, the yoga mat, the community center, the workplace, the improv stage. CFTE exists to expand the environments where trauma-informed principles can take root.
02.
Power dynamics matter — always.
Not just in the lives of the people we serve, but inside our own walls. We ask ourselves the same questions we ask our practitioners: Are we creating choice? Offering agency? Sharing power? We don't always get it right. But we keep asking.
03.
Trauma is not a personal failure.
It is a response to overwhelming conditions — interpersonal, relational, systemic. Understanding that changes everything about how we approach healing.
04.
Education is a lifelong commitment.
The practitioners who come through CFTE's programs don't just learn a methodology. They enter an ongoing relationship with evolving knowledge — in neuroscience, attachment research, trauma studies, and lived experience.
05.
The body is not separate from the mind.
It's where trauma lives. It's also where healing begins. Every program CFTE develops starts from the understanding that we are whole people, and that whole people need whole-person care.
THE RESEARCH AND THE REACH
Two decades of original clinical research.
CFTE's work is grounded in over two decades of original clinical research — some of the most rigorous ever conducted in the field of body-based trauma care.
Our flagship program, Trauma-Sensitive Yoga (TCTSY), has been featured in more than 40 peer-reviewed publications and academic journals since 2009. In 2023, a landmark randomized clinical trial published in JAMA Network Open demonstrated that TCTSY produced faster symptom improvement, higher retention rates, and comparable long-term outcomes to Cognitive Processing Therapy — one of the most widely used evidence-based treatments for PTSD.
Our work has been validated across communities you might not expect: veterans living with treatment-resistant PTSD. Survivors of military sexual trauma. Youth in residential programs. People inside correctional facilities. Marines returning from combat. Indigenous communities. Gender non-conforming youth. Refugees.
BY THE NUMBERS
40+
Publications
Peer-reviewed studies featuring TCTSY since 2009
2023
Jama Network Open
Landmark RCT — faster results than gold-standard PTSD treatment
40K+
People Reached
Engaged with CFTE care models annually worldwide
50+
Countries
Territories and First Nations in our global community
That research matters. It matters to practitioners who need to advocate for this work within clinical systems. It matters to the survivors who deserve to know that what they're participating in has been rigorously studied. And it matters to us — because it represents thousands of hours of collaboration, honesty, and commitment to doing this right.
CFTE's body-based trauma interventions have been found to be as effective as — and in some cases more effective than — traditional talk therapy across over a dozen peer-reviewed studies published in major scientific journals.
WHAT WE'VE BUILT
Many programs. One commitment.
TCTSY
Trauma-Sensitive Yoga
The world's first yoga-based intervention for complex trauma found to be as effective as talk therapy.
TIWL
Trauma-Informed Weight Lifting
Establishing the evidence base for weight lifting as a healing modality.
TIIP
Trauma-Informed Improv & Play
Bringing embodied healing through improvisational theatre.
TIME
Trauma-Informed Mindful Eating
Exploring the intersection of trauma, nourishment, and embodiment.
Community
Massachusetts Trauma Healing Coalition
Created to build transformative experiential healing that is integrated into our public spaces for all to access
Workplace
The Embodied Workplace
Bringing trauma-informed principles into organizational culture and leadership.
podcast
On Trauma & Power
Honest, embodied conversations on trauma, healing, and power — hosted by Jenn Turner, LMHC.
THE INVITATION
We're glad you're here.
If you're a practitioner
who has always sensed that something was missing from the clinical models you were trained in — you're in the right place.
If you're a researcher
who wants to push the evidence base for embodied care further — we'd like to work with you.
If you're a survivor
who is curious about what healing outside a therapy office might look like — everything we build starts with you in mind.
If you're a leader
who wants to understand what it looks like to bring trauma-informed principles into the culture of an organization — we're developing that too.
If you simply believe
that healing shouldn't be a privilege available only to those with access to a clinical system — then you already understand why this work matters.
CFTE is not a single program, a single method, or a single answer. It is an ongoing commitment to expanding what's possible — for practitioners, for communities, and for the field of trauma care itself.
Find Your Training Program
Stay in the work with us.
Join thousands of practitioners, researchers, and community leaders around the world who receive CFTE's newsletter — including updates on new research, upcoming trainings, and conversations from our podcast, On Trauma & Power.
We respect your inbox. No spam, ever. Unsubscribe any time.
