hi! i’m tera sandona
Doctor of Physical Therapy | Chronic Pain Recovery & Nervous System Regulation for Women
I help high-achieving women break out of the cycle of chronic pain, fatigue, and burnout. Not by pushing harder, but by finally addressing the full picture. Through the Regulate and Rebuild Method, I combine the clinical knowledge of a licensed physical therapist with the time and space the healthcare system never allowed me to offer. The result is a path to real, lasting recovery that fits into real life.
My Story
I became a physical therapist because I wanted to help people heal. What I didn’t expect was that my most important education would come from my own body.
In college, I woke up one day and couldn’t walk. No warning, no clear explanation. I just couldn’t. It took nine months to recover, nearly ended my Division I softball career, and required me to relearn movement from the ground up. I’ve lived with chronic low back pain ever since, for over ten years now.
I know what it feels like to have a body that doesn’t cooperate. To try to do the right things and still end up in a flare. To feel dismissed by a system that looks at your chart and tells you you’re fine, when you know in your bones that something is still not right.
Working in the clinic, I was living the same experience as many of the women I treat. The physical work matters. Movement, strength, mobility… all of it is real and necessary. But, no matter how consistent I was with that side of things, the symptoms kept coming back. The missing piece was always the nervous system, the stress load, and the patterns running underneath everything else that no exercise program alone was going to fix.
That’s when it clicked. It wasn’t that the physical work wasn’t working. It was that it was never the full picture. You can do everything right… the exercises, the stretching, the rest, and still feel good for a few weeks before life hits and the symptoms come right back.
That’s not a willpower problem or a consistency problem. That’s what happens when the nervous system is stuck in overdrive and never gets addressed directly.
A body running a constant stress response doesn’t have the capacity to heal the way it needs to.
The physical work matters, but if the nervous system piece is still driving the cycle underneath, the symptoms will keep coming back. That piece requires time and space the healthcare system simply isn’t built to provide.
So I built something that was.
PT Complete exists to bridge that gap, bringing the clinical knowledge of a licensed DPT into a coaching and wellness space where there’s finally room to get to the root. To address not just the muscles and joints, but the nervous system, the stress load, the patterns, and the habits that keep so many women stuck in a cycle they can’t seem to break no matter how hard they try.
If you’ve been told to push through, just rest, or that everything looks normal and you’re still struggling, you’re not doing it wrong. You’ve just been missing one piece of the puzzle.
That’s exactly what we work on here.
Want to learn more about how this works?
why I’m different
I’m not someone who healed completely and then built a business teaching others how to do the same. I’m someone who is still on the path, actively, every single day.
I live with chronic pain. I work on my nervous system regulation constantly, not because I have it figured out, but because it’s a practice that never really ends. Life keeps throwing stress at you. Old habits creep back in. Some weeks the consistency is there and some weeks it isn’t. I know what it feels like to understand exactly what you should be doing and still struggle to do it when things get hard.
That’s not a weakness. That’s just being human.
What I bring to this work isn’t perfection. It’s genuine understanding of what it takes to keep going when your body and your nervous system are making it difficult. I treat this every day in the clinic and I live it every day outside of it.
Outside of work you’ll find me on the golf course, out on a walk or a hike, or recharging in Palm Desert with my husband. I’m a homebody at heart who also needs movement and fresh air to feel like myself. Sound familiar?
