psychotherapy+ Ketamine STUDIO
EMDR & Trauma Intensives
EMDR is Allegra’s primary clinical tool for trauma, and she uses it with precision across a wide range of presentations. It works at the level where trauma actually lives: not in the narrative, but in the nervous system — the body’s stored response to what happened that talk therapy alone often can’t reach. Allegra also offers EMDR intensives: extended, structured blocks of clinical time for clients who want to move faster, deepen an existing process, or step down from a higher level of care and need real momentum early. Intensives are available as standalone experiences or woven into ongoing work. Length and structure are tailored to the individual
Body Image & The Work After Symptom Management
Allegra has designed and led clinical programming for eating disorder treatment — which means she understands, at a structural level, what good recovery work looks like and where it typically stops short. The clients she works with at Higher Ground are most often past the acute phase: they’ve done the stabilization, learned the skills, reduced the behaviors. What they haven’t done is the deeper work of understanding what the behaviors were actually about — the self-worth, the shame, the relational patterns underneath. That’s where Allegra works. The goal isn’t another reset. It’s a fundamentally different relationship with yourself
Life After Treatment: Rebuilding When the Structure Is Gone
One of the most disorienting moments in recovery isn’t the acute phase. It’s after. The program ends, the structure lifts, and suddenly you’re standing in the middle of your regular life — which is exactly where things fell apart before — without the scaffolding that held you. Allegra works with people navigating this transition: figuring out who you are when the treatment identity is no longer the organizing frame, what relationships look like now, what work looks like now, and how to build something sustainable when everything you relied on to cope has been taken off the table. This isn’t step-down in the administrative sense. It’s the real clinical work of learning to live differently.
New Mothers & Perinatal Mental Health
The transition into motherhood is one of the most identity-disorienting experiences a woman can go through... and one of the least clinically supported. Allegra works with women navigating postpartum depression and anxiety, birth-related trauma, the loss of a previous self, the pressure of maternal identity, and the particular overwhelm of trying to care for someone else while barely recognizing yourself. This work is warm, direct, and grounded in both attachment science and the real weight of early motherhood.
Failure to Launch & Young Adult Identity
For young adults — and the families navigating alongside them — who are stuck between where they were and where they’re supposed to be, and can’t figure out why nothing is moving. Allegra understands that what looks like avoidance is usually anxiety, what looks like resistance is usually shame, and that the families who love these clients are often the most important and most overlooked part of the clinical picture.
Family Healing & Parent Support
Allegra works with families navigating a loved one’s mental health struggle, eating disorder, young adult stagnation, or complex recovery. She provides structured family therapy, parent psychoeducation, and consultation for families managing recovery transitions, communication breakdown, and the particular grief of watching someone you love struggle without knowing how to help.
Specialties
Lead Psychotherapist & Trauma Specialist
Allegra Longo
LCSW
Trauma-informed depth work for people who’ve tried to outmanage, outperform, or outrun what they’re carrying — and are ready to stop.
There’s a particular kind of person who finds their way to Allegra. They’ve survived something — sometimes quietly, sometimes dramatically, sometimes in ways they’ve never fully named. A pregnancy that changed everything. A body that stopped feeling like theirs. A relationship that looks functional and feels completely hollow. Years of managing through food, substances, achievement, or control. A program that stabilized them and a life they’re not sure how to return to. The thread running through all of it is the same: they got through it. They just haven’t gotten over it.
Allegra specializes in the space between those two things. She works with people navigating identity loss after major life transitions, postpartum depression and anxiety, the quiet devastation of a disconnected relationship, body image and disordered eating after the acute phase is over, early recovery from substances, trauma that has never fully been processed, and the particular disorientation of becoming an adult — or a parent, or a different version of yourself — without a map. Her clients have often done work before. They understand their patterns. What they haven’t done yet is actually shift them, at the level where it counts.
What makes her work distinct is the precision she brings to that gap. Most clinical care is built around the acute phase: crisis, containment, symptom reduction. Allegra works in what comes after: the longer, less-mapped territory of figuring out who you are when the symptoms aren’t doing the organizing anymore, and what it takes to build a life that doesn’t need them to.
Her primary clinical tool is EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) which she uses to help clients process what they’ve been carrying at the level where it actually lives, not just the story they’ve learned to tell about it. She draws from attachment-based therapy, TF-CBT, DBT, and motivational interviewing, grounding everything in the relational work that makes the clinical tools actually land.
Surviving was the first work. Now comes the harder part: closing the distance between stable and actually free. I work in what comes next.
Allegra Longo, LCSW
Professional Experience
Allegra brings clinical range that is rare in this specialty. She has worked with adolescents and families across in-home, outpatient, and therapeutic day treatment settings, and spent formative clinical years inside a maximum security correctional facility — providing individual and group therapy to adults managing co-occurring disorders, PTSD, major depression, bipolar disorder, and personality disorders. She has held a senior leadership role at a nationally recognized residential program for young adult mental health and addiction.
Her clinical training draws from TF-CBT, ABFT, CBT, DBT, and motivational interviewing, with a sustained focus on trauma-informed care and the intersection of attachment, shame, and self-concept.
Education & Licensure
MSW, Fordham University Graduate School of Social Services — Trauma-Focused Concentration
BA in Psychology, Roger Williams University
Licensed Clinical Social Worker — Connecticut & Massachusetts