Rebecca Rose Bonneville, NP, is the founder of Emuná Institute for Resiliency and the developer of the Emuná Method™. She is a psychiatric nurse practitioner, psychoanalytic and somatic psychotherapist, and multidisciplinary artist. Her art and her clinical practice are concerned with the body as an expressive field.

 

Her conviction: a person is whole and cannot be treated in fragments. Pain needs expression, and expression needs a container — a form to hold it, a presence to receive it. Otherwise, we fall ill.

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For over a decade she practiced in high-acuity community mental health and hospital consult psychiatry, called to the ER, the ICU, oncology. Everywhere, the same thing: medical charts on the door, psychic pain in the room. Every patient carries a story that asks to be told. She trained in Chinese medicine, naturopathy, and traditional Jewish medicine in the lineage of the Rambam, and learned to track the story in the body. Particular emotions live in particular organs. Patterns of emotion appear alongside patterns of illness. Relational psychoanalytic formation turned the instrument inward. Her own body registers what moves between two people in a room.

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Across leadership roles, including as Associate Clinical Director of Psychiatry, she supervised five clinics and trained hundreds of clinicians and therapists. During the pandemic she founded Resilient Minds, her psychiatric practice in Ojai, California, and began pairing patients with artist collaborators trained in deep presence. It was the seed of Emuná's therapeutic mentoring program.

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The work began earlier. Born in San Francisco, she was drawn, always, to the people others walked past: the homeless, the ones talking to other worlds. A beloved family member lived with mental illness, and Rebecca adored her. As a young woman she worked as the Spanish translator at a family planning clinic, translating stories of rape, assault, and mental illness, holding hands through abortions. Her work, before she had a name for it, was presence. At UC Berkeley she stood between two callings: she ached to dance, and she was driven, just as truly, toward medicine.

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The artist and the clinician were never rivals. Years of held encounter refined the listening into a discipline; the discipline became a method; the method became an institute.