EMDR is Transformational
Ever catch yourself saying, “I know it, I just don’t feel it”? That’s exactly where EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) comes in.
Backed by the World Health Organization and the American Psychological Association, EMDR helps your brain process distressing memories so they stop triggering those overwhelming emotional reactions.
Using guided eye movements (think of it as your brain’s personal cleanup crew), we help rewire the way your mind holds onto pain—so you can finally feel the freedom your logical brain already knows is possible.
Common EMDR Targets
three common pain points
Anxiety
EMDR therapy for anxiety can help you learn the root cause of dysfunction (over-function, really) in your nervous system. The result is a sense of relief and belief in your ability to cope.
Self-Worth
Negative beliefs about yourself, poor self-image and low self-esteem impact your self-worth. EMDR therapy helps identify core memories and process distress. This makes room to create a new, positive image.
Stressful Events
EMDR therapy can be used to process recent and past stressful events. Special protocol can help you process a recent stressor faster than talk therapy, such as life transitions or accidents.
eye movement desensitization and reprocessing
EMDR Therapy
About EMDR
EMDR is a specially trained technique to help the brain process emotional memories to a healthy state. EMDR therapy helps to process painful events and transform negative beliefs. Processing painful events and creating positive beliefs can help improve your mood and increase your quality of life.
EMDR mimics the same process that your brain automatically uses. In REM sleep, your brain digests events and turns them into factual memories. In EMDR, eye movements help to jump-starting the self-healing process in your brain. This process naturally happens for most of our memories, but traumatic and emotional memories can often need assistance. When your working memory is occupied with the EMDR process, this bypasses your biases and allows your memories to become factual rather than emotional.
EMDR Therapy isn’t like exposure therapy. You don’t talk about all the details you can remember and all your thoughts about it. We want to stick to the feelings. So unlike talk therapy, there’s no vivid storytelling, and yet, emotional processing happens, and rapidly.
Learn how EMDR Therapy can help you.
EMDR therapy can:
- Make disturbing memories become factual memories
- Result in strong emotions and emotion processing between sessions
- Reduce the clarity of an emotional memory (like any regular memory!)
- Process negative thoughts (for example, "I am worthless," "I am unlovable," "I am powerless," "I am in danger," etc.)
EMDR therapy cannot:
- Create unrealistic positive thoughts
- Create untrue, unrealistic or inappropriate thoughts or responses
- Eliminate healthy responses (like your survival instinct)
- Change accurate descriptions of events
- Recover “repressed memories” or initiate a PTSD response or post-traumatic symptoms
emdr therapy
EMDR Treatment
Stress less, live more—it’s time to rewrite the rules.
What to Expect
In an EMDR session, you’ll be coached on strategies to manage your mood. This will help you safely process experiences and any reactions that might arise.
We’ll target key experiences for processing, which you can think of as accessing information files stored in your brain. Before EMDR, these memories still have your original thoughts, feelings and sensations connected, and they feel active. After EMDR therapy, it will feel like any other memory you can recall. One client said, “it just feels like it was an event that happened.”
During EMDR therapy, you might also remember other related memories. Maybe you felt the same emotion or had similar thoughts in both memories. This is how our brain stores memories naturally. In EMDR, your brain scans this information at a fast pace (4-5x faster than hypnosis), so you are able to resolve the trauma quickly.
The re-experiencing of images, sensations, thoughts, and emotions as you remember them is not expected with every set of eye movements, but it can occur. This is not like a PTSD flashback. It feels more like your mind moving from one moment to the next , as if you were channel surfing your memories.
After an EMDR session, it’s helpful to have time set aside before your next activity. Emotional processing can continue after we’re done, and you might feel tired or even energized! I’ve heard both of these reactions from clients. Having a special object like a therapy notebook, or creating a self-care ritual around therapy can help you feel calm and present during and after EMDR sessions.
let’s work together
Reclaim your life. Recover from past experiences.
When you’re ready, head over to my booking calendar and schedule your first EMDR therapy session.
