Efficient, structured, measurable healing

Do you want more from therapy than just talk?

You try to get through your day but struggle with distressing emotions and memories.

You feel like everything’s a trigger.

You don’t like discussing in detail distressing issues in your life.

You’ve heard that there are therapy approaches that focus more on the body and your emotions than on the brain and your thoughts.

EMDR therapy can help make painful thoughts, feelings, & memories less distressing & more bearable.

EMDR is a structured approach that uses established protocols.

EMDR is a structured approach asking you to briefly focus on a memory or body sensation while paying attention to eye movements, light, or sound as guided by the therapist. EMDR is typically used to help people who’ve experienced disturbing events make sense of their experience in a different way. Similarly to REM (the cycle in which you dream), the brain takes this memory and creates new, internal associations, transforming it on an emotional level. In successful EMDR, the memory still exists, but doesn’t hold the same emotional charge.

What to expect:

History taking and treatment collaboration.
Learning skills to manage emotions and any types of disturbance.
Bilateral stimulation (eye movements, tapping, or audio) that can help your body relax and any disturbance to soften when reprocessing uncomfortable feelings and memories.
Installing positive beliefs to replace negative beliefs associated with the traumatic memory or feelings.
Consistent measuring to determine progress toward treatment goals.

How can EMDR help me?

Accidents

After successful EMDR, you will remember a car accident, but won’t feel agitated when you think about the accident or about driving again.

Bullying, Emotional Abuse, Gaslighting

EMDR can calm distress in your body that comes up when thinking about people in the past who hurt your soul.

Anxiety

After successful EMDR, you might feel stressed at times - after all, life gives us stressors – but you won’t feel like you might have a panic attack at any moment.

Medical Trauma

EMDR can help eliminate anxious thoughts, slow accelerated or shallow breathing, and reduce queasiness associated with upcoming medical appointments.

Sexual Trauma

Successful EMDR can reduce intense feelings of fear or shame related to sexual assaults. It’s possible that sexual enjoyment can increase.

EMDR Therapy will give you key takeaways:

Reduce feelings of discomfort and disturbance.
Increase calm and peace.
Lessen feeling triggered.

EMDR helps you gently & efficiently heal distressing feelings & memories.

FAQS

What others have wondered about EMDR therapy.

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. This therapy traditionally utilizes eye movements, desensitizes how disturbed you feel, and helps you reprocess uncomfortable memories.
Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is a method which was initially used for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. It is now being used to treat anxiety, acute stress, panic, various phobias, depression, eating disorders, gender dysmorphia, OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder), and more.

In EMDR therapy, you’ll focus on a distressing feeling or memory while the therapist uses eye movements, sounds, or rhythms to help access your body’s natural mechanisms and adapt the memory to reduce the disturbance level related to that distressing target. Ultimately, successful EMDR therapy leads to being able to adapt related negative beliefs about yourself into positive beliefs.
The most widespread use of EMDR is to treat trauma and PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). However, EMDR is also used to treat anxiety, acute stress, panic, various phobias, depression, eating disorders, gender dysmorphia, OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder), and more.
This evidence-based therapy is one of the most researched therapies and is grounded in neuroscience. EMDR uses the body’s natural mechanisms (similar to REM sleep) to create new and positive neuropathways in the brain. EMDR therapy typically results in lower levels of disturbance and distress in the body and mind. Ultimately, successful EMDR therapy leads to being able to adapt related negative beliefs about yourself into positive beliefs.
Toward the beginning of therapy, we’ll go over your history, work together to prioritize uncomfortable memories or disturbances, and collaborate on a treatment plan. I’ll help you rate your disturbance level before therapy to create a baseline. One of the wonderful parts of EMDR therapy is that we can consistently measure how you feel to assess change and progress toward your treatment goals. We’ll then team up to prepare you for working with distressing issues by teaching you coping strategies and helping you develop resources.

During the majority of therapy, we’ll work with the negative feelings or memories themselves. These specific disturbances are often called targets. Here you’ll focus on the memory while I guide you using eye movements or have you hold sensors that make soft vibrations in your hands.

Here your body’s natural mechanisms — similar to what happens during REM sleep, when you dream — will adapt the memory such that when we next assess the level of distress you should see a reduction in disturbance level related to that distressing target. With successful EMDR, this bilateral stimulation will help your body relax as the disturbance will soften, blur, or seem more distant. As one of the final steps, I will help you focus on strengthening a positive belief in relation to your tagets.

Successful EMDR allows for thoughts and situations that used to be highly uncomfortable to not feel triggering, creating increased feelings of calm, peace, and stability. Your beliefs about yourself in relation to these situations have the power to move from being negative and judgemental to positive and more compassionate.

More questions? Check out my FAQs page.