Trauma and EMDR
Specialized treatment for trauma that live below where talk therapy can reach
Trauma often doesn't look like trauma
When people think about trauma, they often picture a single dramatic event — an accident, an assault, a moment of clear danger. Those experiences are trauma. But so are many things people don't typically name as trauma: growing up in a home that wasn't emotionally safe, repeated experiences of not being seen or protected, the steady accumulation of being told who you should be rather than being met as who you are.
In adult life, trauma rarely arrives wearing its own name. It tends to show up as something else — anxiety that doesn't quite have a reason, depression that doesn't respond to medication the way it should, relationships that follow the same painful pattern, an inability to relax, a quickness to react, a sense of being not-quite-here. People often arrive in my practice thinking they have a mood disorder or a relationship problem. Sometimes that's accurate. Often what we discover is that there's older material running underneath, and that the current symptoms are how the older material has organized itself in the present.
How this looks in practice
A client came to me a few years ago for what she described as anxiety that was getting in the way of her marriage. She was successful, articulate, and had done significant therapy before. In our third session, when I asked whether anything difficult had happened in her past, her immediate answer was "not really."
A few minutes later, she described something significant that had happened to her years before — something she had never told anyone, and that she had never connected to the anxiety she was now experiencing. She had spent years treating the symptom while the source went unnamed. That conversation was the beginning of the actual work, and the anxiety she had been managing for over a decade began to shift once we addressed what was underneath it. This is more common than people realize. Trauma often hides not because we're avoiding it deliberately, but because the mind protects us from material it judged we couldn't handle at the time. The protection sometimes outlives its usefulness, and what was once survival becomes the thing blocking us from living fully.
Why understanding alone often isn't enough
Many of the people I work with have done meaningful therapy before. They can articulate their patterns clearly. They can trace them back. They understand intellectually why they react the way they do. And the patterns still run — they pull away when someone good gets close, freeze when a difficult conversation matters, choose what's familiar over what's actually healthy.
This is not a failure of insight or willpower. It's a reflection of where trauma actually lives. The reasoning, narrative part of the mind can understand what happened and why it shaped us. But trauma is stored differently than ordinary memory. It lives in the nervous system, in the body, in the patterns of arousal and shutdown that operate below conscious thought. Talking about it engages the part of the mind that already understands. To shift the pattern itself, you have to reach the part of the mind where the pattern actually lives. That's what EMDR is designed to do
How EMDR works
EMDR — Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing — is a structured therapy developed in the late 1980s specifically for trauma. It's recognized as a first-line treatment by the World Health Organization, the American Psychological Association, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Multiple studies show it can produce significant reduction in PTSD symptoms in a relatively small number of sessions, including for people who have not fully responded to other approaches.
The work itself is not what most people expect. It doesn't involve extensive re-telling of the traumatic material. It uses bilateral stimulation — typically eye movements guided by the therapist, sometimes alternating tones or tactile pulses — while the client briefly attends to specific traumatic memories or current patterns connected to them. The bilateral stimulation appears to engage the brain's natural mechanisms for processing experience, allowing material that has been stuck to begin moving through the system the way ordinary memory does. The clinical experience for most clients is that traumatic material that previously produced strong physical and emotional reactions begins to feel different. It doesn't disappear — you still remember what happened — but it stops carrying the same charge. The pattern in the present, the reactive behavior that's been running in your life, often shifts in ways that talk therapy alone hadn't been able to reach.
Who EMDR is for, and who it isn't
EMDR was developed for trauma and remains most powerful with trauma material. It is well-suited for single-incident traumas (an accident, an assault, a medical event), for complex and developmental trauma that began in childhood, for attachment wounds that show up in adult relationships, and for the kinds of anxiety, depression, and reactivity that have trauma at their root.
It is also useful — though sometimes less dramatic in its effects — for issues that are not strictly trauma but have a similar somatic, below-language quality: certain phobias, performance anxiety, grief that has gotten stuck, certain patterns of self-criticism that operate at a reflex level.
EMDR is not a fit for everyone, and not for every problem. Active substance dependency typically needs to be stabilized before EMDR can be effective. Some psychiatric conditions require additional clinical structure and may not be appropriate for the more intensive forms of the work. And some of what people come in wanting to address isn't actually trauma — it's a current circumstance that needs change, a relationship that needs different communication, a life situation that calls for decisions rather than processing. EMDR can't substitute for the work that real life is asking you to do. Part of my role in our first sessions together is figuring out whether EMDR is the right tool for what you're actually working with. If it isn't, I'll say so, and we'll talk about what would be.
How I work with EMDR
I am EMDR trained and have been integrating EMDR into my clinical work for many years. My approach is psychodynamic at the core — meaning I think of the trauma in front of us as part of a larger picture of who you are, how you developed, and what you're carrying. EMDR is a powerful tool, but it works best when it's situated inside an actual therapeutic relationship rather than delivered as a stand-alone technique.
Practically, this means our work usually begins with several sessions of preparation: getting to know you, understanding the patterns you're working with, identifying the material EMDR will be most useful for, and making sure you have the internal resources to do the processing work safely. Once we begin actual reprocessing, sessions follow the EMDR protocol but stay grounded in the broader work we're doing together. I offer EMDR in three formats: weekly psychotherapy, which is the most common and works well for ongoing trauma work; EMDR Intensives, which are accelerated packages of three or six 90-minute sessions over several weeks for clients who want a more concentrated arc; and as part of Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy, which combines EMDR with KAP for clients whose nervous systems are too defended for trauma material to surface through conventional approaches alone.
What to expect
EMDR is more direct than most talk therapy and the work can move faster than people expect. It is also serious work, and the days and weeks around reprocessing sessions can bring up material that needs time to settle. Most clients find the work demanding and meaningful in equal measure.
I'm careful not to overpromise outcomes. EMDR has a strong evidence base, but every person and every trauma is different, and the work depends on the relationship we build together as much as on the technique itself. What I can tell you is that for many of the clients I've worked with, EMDR has reached material that years of talk therapy hadn't moved. Whether that will be true for you is something we'll discover together, and we'll have honest conversations along the way about whether the work is doing what you came in for
