What we talked about
Dr. Sophora Acheson joins to explain her mission as a therapist and nonprofit executive leading Restorative Pathways / Ruby’s Place. She describes her work as “the business of connection,” running a continuum of care across multiple facilities:supporting people in crisis from domestic violence, trafficking, homelessness, and long-term trauma recovery.
Show notes
Dr. Sophora Acheson noticed something that shelter workers are told not to expect: she kept seeing different women coming in with the same abuser. The protocols prepared staff for the same victim returning seven times before leaving for good, but nobody talked about the pattern of one person doing harm to many different people in sequence. That observation sent her on a search that ended in New Zealand, where she found the only working model she could identify for treating those who cause harm, not just those who receive it.
What we covered
- Sophora is a survivor herself, of childhood family violence and an abusive relationship in early adulthood. She describes how growing up with violence as the normal backdrop meant she had no other model for conflict resolution. At 25, her now-husband told her that her way of arguing was not how other families operated, and she had to make a choice: get help, or continue the cycle.
- Working in a domestic violence shelter early in her career, she began noticing that different women were coming in because of the same abuser. She started thinking about her own father and her ex-partner and asking how many people they had each affected over time, a question that led her to realize there was no intervention program in the United States focused on those who do harm.
- She traveled to New Zealand, where a program treating people who use violence in relationships had been running for ten years. She spent significant time there studying their models and philosophy before bringing them back to Restorative Pathways, where her department is now called Whole Family Services, because the approach works with both parties, not just the person in crisis.
- Restorative Pathways operates nine facilities in California and one in Colorado, offering everything from emergency safe houses and transitional housing to a Trauma Recovery Center. When someone enters after an arrest or restraining order, the program reaches out to the partner separately and offers wraparound services to both, not in the same space, but in parallel.
- On somatic therapy, Sophora explained that trauma lives in the body biologically, not just cognitively. She described not realizing until her 30s that her nervous system needed to be actively retrained to regulate, and that what she had assumed was just the baseline human experience (feeling constantly on edge) was actually a trauma response. Breath work, she says, is one of the most effective tools for nervous system regulation.
- Her most practical advice for couples who feel escalation beginning: don’t wait, and don’t rush through repair. She referenced therapist Esther Perel’s framework that intimacy is actually built through rupture and repair, that the cycle of conflict followed by genuine reconnection is how trust forms, not how it breaks.
About Dr. Sophora
Dr. Sophora Acheson is a therapist and nonprofit executive who leads Restorative Pathways / Ruby’s Place, an organization supporting survivors of domestic violence, human trafficking, and trauma across multiple California counties. Her clinical work and organizational mission focus on breaking generational cycles of violence by treating the whole family system, including those who perpetrate harm.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophora-acheson-ma-lmft-14087b63
- Website:
Episode 105 of the PreVetted Podcast.