EMDR: A Trauma-Informed Approach

Ordinary Moments Keep Costing You the Rest of the Day

You’re somewhere ordinary when it arrives, a checkout line or a stairwell or the middle of a conversation about nothing much, and something in the air goes familiar in a way you’d rather it didn’t.

Nothing has happened.

Your breathing changes anyway, your shoulders come up before you’ve worked out what set it off, and the thread of whatever you were doing is gone.

You Spend the Rest of the Day Getting Back to Level

You get through it, because you always do, and nobody standing near you registers that anything moved.

The memory of it still lingers, and it doesn’t wait for an anniversary or a reminder or a reason to show up.

You just want relief from it, and you’ve wanted that long enough now that wanting it has stopped feeling like a plan.

You’ve Had Years of Practice at Working Around This

Trauma doesn’t always heal simply with time.

What the years hand you is practice at working around it, and practice isn’t the same as the thing being finished.

Why Nothing Has to Happen for It to Reach You

What went unprocessed then is still shaping what you feel now, which is why the reaction turns up with no event attached to it.

What EMDR Asks of You, and What I Won’t Promise

This work asks you to go toward the thing you’ve spent years going around, and it’s uncomfortable before it’s anything else.

I’m an EMDR trained therapist, and I integrate EMDR into my work with trauma related conditions.

EMDR is one method inside a wider approach to trauma, and I’ve never wanted it to stand in for the whole of what I do.

It’s a research-backed approach with a method of its own, developed by Francine Shapiro in 1987 and used in the treatment of PTSD and other trauma related conditions.

Why Your Past Keeps Setting the Terms of Your Present

The approach holds that past emotionally charged experiences are still influencing your present emotions, your sensations, and your thoughts about yourself.

The processing uses bilateral stimulation, which means eye movements, taps, or auditory tones.

EMDR processing interrupts the emotions connected to the memory of that past experience, and reduces the emotional response attached to it.

I won’t put a timeline on that, because the honest answer is that I don’t have one.

Ordinary Moments Stop Taking the Whole Day From You

Something goes familiar again, in another line, on another unremarkable afternoon.

You notice it, and you notice that you noticed, and then the hour goes on belonging to you.

It Still Comes at You, and It Takes Less From You

The memory isn’t erased, and it would be dishonest of me to tell you the past never comes at you sideways again.

What’s different is the size of what it takes out of you when it does.

Say the First Part Out Loud

Time by itself has had a long run at this.

A first talk about this work leaves the decision still open, and there’s no fee attached to it.

That talk will tell you more about whether this is the right approach for you than anything else written on this page.

It starts at (856) 395-9536, and it starts just as well at aliveandwelltherapy@gmail.com.

Two lattes side by side on a wooden tray

Bring Your House Back Together

A house divided against itself can’t stand. You’ve been living inside the proof of that for a while now, and somewhere along the way you stopped expecting the rest of the sentence to be true.

The rest of it is true. A house with two people standing on the same side of it will hold up under things that would have flattened it before. That is the whole aim of the work: get the two of you on the same team, and then let the two of you go after the actual problem.

When you and I talk, I’ll tell you plainly what I make of it. I’d rather be useful to you than agreeable.

Start With One Email

Write to me at aliveandwelltherapy@gmail.com, and we’ll set up a consultation.