Meaghan Tarquinio is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW-C) in Maryland and one of the trauma therapists at Kismet. She has spent over a decade doing one thing: sitting with people in the aftermath of trauma and helping them find their way through it. That singular focus is not a narrow one. Trauma is rarely simple. And the people who carry it are rarely the same from one case to the next. What Meaghan has built over more than eleven years of specialized clinical work is a deep, flexible understanding of how trauma lives in people — and what it actually takes to help them heal.

Her clinical background centers on some of the most serious forms of interpersonal harm: intimate partner violence, sexual assault and abuse, and adverse childhood experiences. These are not peripheral specialties. They are the kinds of trauma that reshape how a person understands the world, how safe they feel in their own body, and whether they believe healing is even possible for them. Meaghan works in this territory every day. She understands the complexity of trauma responses — how they can look like depression, or rage, or hopelessness, or anxiety, or PTSD — and she understands that none of those responses are wrong. They are adaptations. They are the mind and body doing what they had to do to survive.

Meaghan’s clinical approach is grounded in Brainspotting, EMDR, and Internal Family Systems therapy, alongside a broader strengths-based, person-centered framework that she adapts to each individual she works with. She does not bring a one-size-fits-all model into the room. She brings a set of powerful, evidence-informed tools and the skill to know which ones are most likely to help a particular person at a particular moment in their healing. The goal, as she describes it, is not just symptom reduction — it is a path toward wholeness and peace. That distinction matters. Symptoms are the surface. Wholeness is what lies beneath them.

What defines Meaghan’s therapeutic style is the kind of safety she creates before any of the clinical work begins. Trauma survivors — especially those who have experienced betrayal, violation, or abuse within relationships — often arrive in therapy with good reason not to trust. Meaghan builds trust slowly and deliberately, creating a space where clients can bring the full weight of what they have been carrying without judgment and without pressure. She believes deeply in the resilience of the people she works with. That belief is not a platitude. It is a clinical stance — a refusal to position clients as broken things waiting to be fixed, and an insistence on working with the strengths already present in every person who walks through the door.

Meaghan sees individuals and couples, working with adults, teens, and preteens across the lifespan. Her work extends to women’s issues, self-esteem, codependency, life transitions, and relationship recovery — areas that often intersect with trauma in complicated ways, particularly for people who have experienced domestic violence or abuse. She is affirming of LGBTQ+ clients and works with a wide range of identities and communities.

At Kismet, Meaghan’s work does not exist in isolation. She is part of a coordinated care team that includes a psychiatric nurse practitioner, a Medical Director overseeing ketamine therapy, and other trauma-focused clinicians. When clients at Kismet are receiving ketamine therapy alongside psychotherapy, Meaghan and the broader team communicate directly — with client consent — to make sure that what happens in the therapy room supports what is happening medically, and vice versa. That kind of coordination is rare in mental health care. Meaghan’s presence on the team is one of the reasons it works as well as it does.

If trauma has shaped your life in ways that feel impossible to move past — if you have tried to heal and felt like you were not getting anywhere — Meaghan’s work is built for exactly that. She has spent her career with people who thought they were beyond help. Most of them were not. They just had not yet found the right room.