Emma Guzman

I'm Emma Guzman, a licensed mental health counselor and independent researcher based in Rhode Island. I specialize in relational and developmental trauma; the kind that doesn't always leave visible marks but shapes how people move through relationships, conflict, and connection for decades.

My clinical work sits at the intersection of neuroscience, polyvagal theory, and parts-based approaches. Over the last four years of sitting with clients who struggled to repair relationships after conflict, I started noticing a pattern that existing research wasn't quite capturing.

That pattern became the Omission of Relational Repair model, a theoretical framework proposing that childhood emotional neglect impacts adult relationships specifically through its disruption of our capacity to repair after rupture. And the absence of any tool to directly measure this led me to develop the CENOS; a standalone assessment instrument designed specifically for childhood emotional neglect.

I'm an independent practitioner-researcher, which means no university funding, no research assistant, no institutional backing. Just a clinician who saw something in the room that the field hadn't named yet and decided to build the tools to measure it.

May 2026