EMDR Therapy

EMDR consists of a number of different phases. In the beginning, we’ll get to know each other. I’ll ask you about you, your life, your significant relationships, and what matters to you most. We’ll discuss what you hope to get out of therapy, and we’ll go over what painful experience or experiences you want to focus on.

Next, we’ll spend time in preparation. We’ll go through different approaches to help you learn ways to feel calm when difficult emotion shows up. I will teach you a variety of techniques, including deep breathing, guided imagery, grounding, and more, and you’ll try them out to see which ones you like best. We’ll practice different methods of bilateral stimulation, so you can settle on what feels best for you to use. I’ll give you tools and resources that will help you process your painful memory adaptively. I’ll guide you through various activities designed to help you feel supported, protected, and assured. We may focus on a time in your life when things were going well. We may also envision a future where your life is as you want it to be. We may imagine all of your support people showing up to help you along the way. The purpose of this is to fill you with good feelings, memories, and images to access during the next phases of desensitization and reprocessing. The preparation phase is very important to the entire process. We are teaching your system what to do when we gently and carefully begin to process painful memories from the past. We do this to get you ready to go, and so the experience can be helpful and healing. In many cases, this is where significant integrative work with other modalities (particularly IFS and somatic work) get woven in, so it can be a point in treatment of profound growth and change.

Next, we’ll target the themes and painful memories we’ll be processing. I’ll guide you in identifying images, feelings, and body sensations associated with the memories. I’ll also help you notice negative beliefs about how the trauma made you feel, as well as positive beliefs that you would like to believe about yourself instead going forward.

At this point, I’ll ask you to tune your attention to the traumatic memory we’ve selected, and we’ll begin to apply bilateral stimulation. What will be asked of you here is simply to notice what comes up. You don’t have to try to make anything happen here, just stay open and present, noticing whatever surfaces in your awareness. As you engage in bilateral stimulation, various experiences may occur. You might notice shifts in emotions, thoughts, or physical sensations related to the traumatic memory. You might notice the presence of an urge. And I will be here with you to help if you start to feel stressed or uncomfortable. We can keep the process gentle, and proceed at a pace that feels right for you. This process will allow desensitization to occur, leading the memory to become less emotionally charged. Some people report feeling a sense of detachment or distance from the memory at this point. Others describe the experience becoming less vivid. At this stage, reprocessing can begin, in which the memory can start to be looked at in a new, healthy way, and assimilated into a new adaptive point of view. At this point, I will guide you as new, healing perspectives, insights, and meaning emerge for you. I’ll guide you to connect the positive belief you want to build in as we process the memory at this stage, too, and we’ll be checking in to see how you’re feeling in your body to release any residual trauma.

This is the final stage. At this point, we’ll take stock on your experience, reflect on the changes that have occurred for you, and celebrate your growth and healing. We’ll notice how things have shifted for you, and determine whether you feel our work together is complete or whether there’s more you’d like to do.