EMDR trained by the EMDR Institute.

We use EMDR with adolescents and adults as

• a primary mode of treatment
• a supplement to my clients’ ongoing work with us
• an adjunctive treatment with clients who have another therapist

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing is an approach to psychotherapy that has been practiced in the US and around the world for the past 25 years. Initially, EMDR was utilized and studied as a therapy for PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). It soon became evident that EMDR helped many other conditions such as eating disorders, panic attacks, performance anxiety, complicated grief, stress reduction, anxiety and depression, pain disorders, sexual and/or physical abuse, disturbing memories, negative beliefs about self, and addictions. Abundant research over the years has shown EMDR to be an efficient and highly effective form of psychotherapy.

EMDR therapy is a cost-effective, non-invasive, evidence-based method of psychotherapy that utilizes an eight-phase integrative therapy based on an adaptive information-processing model. In health, the body/brain/mind naturally integrates perceptions, emotions, and experience into associated memory networks. Trauma and other disturbing life experiences overwhelms adaptive processing and shatters the self. When trauma causes the disturbing memories to become “frozen in time”, the emotions and embodied self-states of traumatic experience are often relived in the present. In the desensitization and reprocessing phase of EMDR, which is the best known phase of treatment, the patient links these disturbing frozen memories with new associations that arise spontaneously while the patient holds a dual focus of attention on past memories being processed internally and on the present, external bilateral stimulation (visual, auditory and/or tactile). This reprocessing titrated in short sets, continues over one or more sessions until certain criteria are met, including a significant reduction in the subjective experience and emotional charge of these memories. The memory is not forgotten, but it is adaptively returned, so to speak, to its historical context or brought to an adaptive resolution. When it is, the client may be much less reactive to past and current triggers and less likely to be driven by fight, flight, or freeze responses. The distortions of trauma logic are exposed, negative emotions fade into the past, and a more complex, resilient sense of self emerges.