Domestic Violence Specialists, LLC

The Origins of This Work

This work emerges from a decade of direct experience in the field of domestic violence response, systems transformation, and community education. It is shaped by frontline practice, policy critique, and a refusal to accept responses to harm that perpetuate harm in new forms.

Domestic Violence Specialists, LLC was created to offer an alternative to crisis-driven, punitive, or pathologizing approaches. This is not a service that fixes people. It is a practice that witnesses, accompanies, and builds capacity. Capacity for healing, for accountability, for relational change.

What Grounds This Work

This practice is guided by a set of living commitments. These are not abstract values, they are structural orientations:

• Healing is nonlinear. Support must move at the speed of trust, nervous system regulation, and relational integration.
• Complexity is not a barrier to clarity. People can hold conflicting needs, truths, and identities. The work must make space for that.
• Care is never neutral. Trauma-informed practice must also be anti-oppressive. Responses rooted in punishment, oppression, or control replicate the dynamics they seek to interrupt.
• Systems shape survival. Harm is not only interpersonal. It is patterned through racism, ableism, classism, gendered violence, and colonization.
• Everyone is capable of change. This includes individuals, relationships, communities, and institutions.

Theoretical and Practice Foundations

This work is informed by:

• Public Health and Social Ecology: including research on the health impact of violence, chronic stress, and the intergenerational impacts of trauma
• Somatic and Attachment-Based Theories: such as applied nervous system theory and relational neuroscience
• Intersectional Feminist Praxis: rooted in community-based, non-carceral frameworks, drawing from abolitionist and transformative justice movements
• Human Rights-Based Approaches: aligned with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, particularly in response to structural violence

Practice is not just informed by theory, it is iterative. It listens, evolves, and remains accountable to the people and communities it serves.

This work is for those who:

• are navigating ongoing or historical harm in relationships
• support others in that navigation
• seek to transform how institutions and systems understand and respond to relational harm

The goal is depth, connection, and sustainable pathways toward healing and repair.

Philosophy of Care

About Leila

Leila Kelly, BAIS, LCSW, is the founder of Domestic Violence Specialists, LLC, a Santa Fe-based consulting and education practice dedicated to transforming how we understand and respond to harm in relationships. With over decade of experience in trauma-informed care and systems-level work across diverse roles, Leila established this practice to bridge the gap between individual healing and systemic transformation.

Her approach is rooted in an interdisciplinary background in psychology, criminal justice, and sociology, and shaped by clinical training in social work. Leila brings a relational lens that honors both the roots and the reach of violence. As both a strategist and therapist, she weaves together public health frameworks, trauma theory, and evidence-based practices to move beyond reactive responses and toward relational approaches that prevent and interrupt harm.

Her work collaborates with public agencies, community organizations, and businesses to create responses to harm that move beyond the traditional. Grounded in intersectional values and human rights principles, Leila’s work centers dignity, complexity, and community care as the foundation for lasting safety.