Find peace of mind. Feel at ease in your body.

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a natural and effective way to heal from trauma. This therapy method helps you process and reframe disturbing experiences, allowing your mind to heal—much like your body does from physical wounds. By unblocking your brain’s processing system, EMDR transforms the emotional impact of traumatic events, turning feelings of shame or fear into thoughts of empowerment and survival. If the details are too difficult to talk through, that’s okay. You don’t need to retell the entire story for EMDR to work—it’s designed to help without causing additional distress.

During EMDR, we use bilateral stimulation (BLS) to help your brain process memories. This can involve moving your eyes, listening to sounds, or feeling vibrations. BLS keeps part of your attention in the present while another part of your brain safely revisits the past. This dual awareness helps you reprocess traumatic memories without feeling retraumatized, providing a safe and effective path to healing.

We’ll spend our first session or two creating a treatment plan together. During these sessions, I’ll learn about your history. We’ll identify how past experiences are affecting your current life, and decide what issues you want to address with EMDR. We’ll pinpoint specific memories to target and look at the strengths and support systems you have within yourself and around you that can help you through this process. We’ll also define a positive state goal—how you want to handle these issues in the future and how you want to feel at the end of our work together.

Next, we’ll prepare for reprocessing. I’ll explain the process in detail, set expectations, and address any questions or concerns you might have. You’ll get a chance to practice using bilateral stimulation (BLS) before we dive into reprocessing. We’ll also work on building up your inner strengths to help you handle the emotions tied to these memories. Preparation might take one session, but some clients benefit from additional preparation time—we’re moving at your pace, so you’ll get to decide.

Then, we’ll begin reprocessing the targeted memories. We’ll start by assessing a memory, identifying the negative belief associated with it, and the positive belief you want to hold. You’ll think about the memory while engaging in sets of BLS, which last about a minute each. Between sets, I’ll ask you what you notice—thoughts, feelings, sensations, or images. You can share as much or as little as you want. We’ll know desensitization is working when the memory no longer feels disturbing. Then we’ll reinforce the positive belief with BLS until it feels completely true. I’ll ask you to scan your body for any lingering disturbances and we’ll process those too. In the following sessions, we’ll ensure the memory is no longer impacting you as it once did and move on to the next target, if needed. Once all memory targets are reprocessed, we’ll solidify your future positive state goal, making it feel true and achievable.