EMDR Therapy

Your brain is built to take in an experience, make sense of it, and file it away, and those filed experiences shape how you read the world afterward. Some of them never got processed properly, usually because you didn’t have the information or the support at the time, so they stayed stuck in the form they arrived in. EMDR revisits those, which is not the same as reliving them. While you hold a piece of the memory, your therapist adds bilateral stimulation, meaning back and forth eye movement or alternating sounds or taps. That gives your brain room to scan what it knows now, make more accurate sense of what happened, and store the memory differently.

One way to picture it: your life is a river and the trauma is a boulder dropped in it. Over the years, moss and sticks and debris collect on the boulder until you can’t see what’s actually there. EMDR clears the debris so you can finally look at the thing itself and decide what to do about it.

• PTSD and single-incident trauma like accidents, assaults, or medical events
• Childhood trauma, including things you can’t fully remember
• Sexual trauma, without having to narrate it
• Complex trauma built up over years
• Anxiety and panic that talk therapy has circled without moving
• Grief and loss that stays stuck at the same intensity
• Phobias and specific fears
• Long-standing beliefs like I’m not enough or I can’t handle this
• People who’ve been in therapy a long time and want another way in

The first phase is resourcing: building tools, finding stability, getting your capacity where it needs to be before anything gets processed. For some people that’s a few sessions and for others it’s longer, and pushing past it tends to cost you time later rather than saving it. When reprocessing starts, you’ll hold a piece of a memory while your therapist runs the bilateral stimulation, and you’ll talk far less than you expect.

Your therapist is watching closely throughout, tracking your breathing, your affect, what your body does. Early sessions involve more checking in with you, and as you get used to it, they’ll step back and let you have the experience. Afterward most people go quiet. Treat it like a minor procedure: drink water, take the day gently, expect to be tired. There’s often a reflective stretch over the next day or two, and sometimes a physical release. Your body needs time to metabolize the shift, the way water takes hours to reach a plant’s roots after you’ve soaked the topsoil.

Available in person or by telehealth.

Samantha Reed is direct that EMDR is a not-right-now for some people rather than a no, and that if someone is still living inside an ongoing danger, processing would tell their brain it’s safe when it isn’t. She won’t do that.

Skye Dowell puts it as slower being faster, because a nervous system goes at the pace it goes at, and when you resource properly the material tends to surface on its own and land more gently.

Juniper Alves always starts with resourcing and never pushes anyone into the rest, and she’s found EMDR consistently effective for sexual trauma, where people can heal an experience without being re-traumatized by telling it. Her route in came through art therapy, where clients would draw something they didn’t know they were carrying.

What they all describe on the other side is a release. People are often wiped out afterward and lighter at the same time. Skye has watched clients get through family events that used to flatten them. One of Samantha’s walked out and said only that she felt aware, which was something she hadn’t had before, and Samantha had said almost nothing new.

The work was the client’s own brain doing what it needed to do now that it was in a safe space to do it.