EMDR
Some experiences don't stay in the past. They live in the body — in a racing heart, a sudden shutdown, a reaction that feels bigger than the moment seems to warrant. You may know, logically, that you're safe. But some part of you hasn't gotten the message yet.
That's not a character flaw. That's how trauma works.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is an extensively researched, highly effective therapy originally developed by Dr. Francine Shapiro for trauma and PTSD — and now recognized as a gold-standard treatment for a wide range of struggles rooted in overwhelming experience. It works not by analyzing the past, but by helping your brain finally finish processing what it couldn't fully digest at the time.
Why some memories get "stuck"
When something overwhelming happens — whether it's a single traumatic event or years of chronic stress, neglect, or emotional injury — the brain sometimes can't process the experience the way it normally would. The memory gets stored incompletely, frozen with all the original emotion, sensation, and belief intact. Years later, something triggers it, and your nervous system responds as if it's happening all over again.
EMDR works directly with this. Using bilateral stimulation — typically guided eye movements, tapping, or sound — EMDR activates the brain's natural processing system and allows those frozen memories to finally move. The memory doesn't disappear. But it loses its charge. It becomes something that happened, rather than something that is still happening.
What to expect in session
EMDR is a structured process, and we move through it at your pace. Before any processing begins, we spend time building internal resources — a felt sense of safety, stability, and capacity — so that when we do approach difficult material, you have something solid to return to. You remain fully conscious and in control throughout. Many clients are surprised by how much shifts without having to narrate every detail of what happened.
Sessions can bring up emotion, physical sensation, unexpected memories, or moments of profound relief. All of it is part of the process. My role is to stay with you through all of it — tracking, supporting, and helping your system integrate what comes up.
Who EMDR can help
EMDR was built for trauma, but its applications are broader than many people realize. It can be effective for:
- Single-incident trauma (accidents, assaults, medical events)
- Complex or developmental trauma
- PTSD and trauma responses
- Anxiety, panic, and phobias
- Grief and loss
- Shame and deeply held negative beliefs about yourself
- Performance anxiety and self-sabotage
- Relationship wounds and attachment injuries
EMDR in combination with other approaches
In my practice, EMDR rarely works in isolation. I frequently integrate it with Internal Family Systems (IFS) to ensure your protective parts feel safe and included before we move into deeper processing — which makes the work more effective and less destabilizing. I also draw on Brainspotting when we need even greater precision in locating where trauma is held in the body and nervous system.
Together, these approaches reach the places that conversation alone cannot — the subconscious patterns, the body memories, the beliefs that formed before you had words for them.
You've already survived it. Now it's time to stop reliving it.
EMDR doesn't ask you to be brave enough to talk through everything that happened. It asks your brain and body to do what they were always designed to do — process, integrate, and move forward. Sometimes the most profound healing is less about insight and more about finally letting the nervous system catch up to what the mind already knows.
You deserve to feel like the past is actually behind you.