Trauma Therapy & EMDR

Bipolar Support

A lot of my clients come to me knowing they have trauma. Some have done years of therapy and want to try a different approach. Some are curious about EMDR after hearing about it from a friend or therapist. Some are referred to me by their current therapist for EMDR work specifically.

Wherever you’re coming from, here’s the basic premise: EMDR helps your brain finish processing experiences that got stuck. If that’s what you’re after, I’d like to hear from you.

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Call me directly. We'll start there.

What EMDR is

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. The shorter version: it’s a research-backed therapy approach for processing trauma and other distressing experiences.

Here’s the basic idea. Some experiences your brain processes in real time. You have them, you sit with them, you move on. Others, especially the ones that involve overwhelm, fear, or shame, get stored in a way that doesn’t finish processing. The memory stays charged. When something in the present touches that charge, your nervous system reacts as if the past is happening again.

EMDR uses bilateral stimulation, usually side-to-side eye movements, sometimes taps or sounds, while you bring the stuck memory to mind. The stimulation helps your brain do what it couldn’t do at the time: process the experience all the way through. The memory is still there. It just stops driving your reactions.

What it Treats

EMDR was originally developed for PTSD, and it’s still one of the most-researched approaches for treating it. But what we know now is that the same processing mechanism helps with a lot of things.

Most of my EMDR clients are working with one or more of these:

Grief or loss that hasn't fully settled

Emotional reactions that feel disproportionate to what's actually happening

Pre-verbal trauma or early attachment wounds

Negative core beliefs they intellectually know aren't true ("I'm not enough," "I don't matter") but can't seem to shake

A specific event they keep returning to in their mind

Childhood experiences that still affect how they show up in relationships

Anxiety or panic with no obvious trigger

You don't need a PTSD diagnosis to benefit from EMDR. You just need something from your past that's still affecting you now.

How We'll Work

EMDR isn’t something we jump into in session one.

The first few sessions are about getting to know each other, understanding what you want to work on, and building enough of a foundation that the deeper work has a stable base to land on. I want to know your history, your support system, your current coping strategies, and what feels safe.

When we’re ready to start the EMDR work itself, sessions look different from talk therapy. We’ll pick a specific memory or pattern to target. I’ll guide you through bilateral stimulation while you hold the memory in mind. You’ll notice what comes up: images, body sensations, emotions, sometimes other connected memories. We work through those in sequence until the original target feels different to you.

Each session ends with grounding so you’re not leaving the room still in the middle of something.

INTENSIVE EMDR

For some clients, weekly EMDR isn't the right pace. Either you've got a specific thing you want to focus on intensively, or you don't have the schedule for ongoing weekly sessions, or both. For those clients, I offer intensive EMDR. We meet for longer sessions, usually 90 minutes to two hours, one to two times a week, sometimes over a single weekend.

It's focused work on a specific memory or pattern, with the goal of getting through it more efficiently than weekly sessions can. Intensive EMDR isn't a fit for everyone. It works best when you're already pretty stable, have a clear target in mind, and have the bandwidth to do the recovery work that follows each long session. We'll talk about whether it's a good fit on the first call.

If You Already Have a Therapist

Some of my EMDR clients aren’t looking for a new primary therapist. They’ve already got someone they work with, and they want to add EMDR as a separate piece.

If that’s you, I’m happy to do that work. We’ll coordinate with your existing therapist if you’d like, and you can keep your regular sessions with them while we work on the trauma processing. When the EMDR work is complete, you go back to your therapist.

I get a lot of referrals this way, from therapists who don’t do EMDR themselves but recognize when a client could benefit from it. It’s some of my favorite work.

What Changes

What I’ve seen happen for my EMDR clients:

Relationships start to feel different because you're not reacting from old material

Triggers in the present become smaller, sometimes disappear

Some clients describe a sense of being more "here" in their daily lives

Memories that used to bring physical reactions like a tight chest, racing heart, or dissociation lose their charge

Beliefs that felt true at the body level ("It's my fault," "I don't matter") stop being on autopilot

EMDR doesn't erase what happened. It changes your relationship to it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need a specific trauma to do EMDR? 

No. A lot of my EMDR clients don’t have a single big-T trauma. They have a series of smaller experiences, or a specific pattern they want to work on, or a memory that just keeps coming up. EMDR works with all of those.

How long does EMDR take? 

Honestly, it depends on what we’re working on. A single specific event can sometimes be reprocessed in a few sessions. Longer-term patterns or complex trauma take longer. I’ll give you a more informed estimate after we’ve talked through your history.

Will I have to relive my trauma? 

You’ll bring memories to mind during the work, but you’ll do it with support and structure, not alone.