EMDR Therapy in California
Reprogramming the past by creating a safe and embodied present
EMDR THERAPY IN CHULA VISTA, CALIFORNIA
Is past trauma disrupting your life today?
Everything from your upbringing, living with unfulfilled needs, and past relationship strains can all play a role in the way you function in your life and relationships today.
My goal is to partner with you in uncovering the roots of these challenges, empowering you to understand how to escape these patterns and create a life where you can truly thrive. From my work with countless clients, I’ve found that EMDR is the most effective tool to help you overcome these challenges and reconnect to a sense of inner calm.
EMDR THERAPY IN CHULA VISTA, CALIFORNIA
What is EMDR?
EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is a therapy that combines a cognitive process of bringing to mind specific traumas in your life and the associated beliefs with the bilateral physical stimulation of moving your eyes from side to side. These bilateral movements are known to help you access the stored memories of your trauma from a safe emotional distance. Paired with grounding coping skills, this “reprocessing” can help lessen the impact of that trauma over time.
EMDR can help with
Anxiety and Depression
Trauma & PTSD
Difficulty with parenting
Disconnection from your body
Negative view of self, low self-esteem
Feeling unworthy of success or undeserving of new opportunities
Trouble identifying or expressing your feelings
Struggling in personal and romantic relationships
What does the EMDR process look like?
The EMDR treatment is an 8 phase process, which includes an initial setup phase before proceeding to the active working phases. Although you may want to jump straight to steps three and four, the initial phases of EMDR are vital to ensure that you are safely able to contain the trauma. In session, you and I will sit across from each other—either in the same room or through teletherapy—and we’ll work through the traumas you’ve experienced and the negative beliefs they’re attached to.
Our EMDR sessions will include
-
We will talk about your personal history, what your life is like now, and what you'd like to work on.
-
I will explain how EMDR will work for us, and explain some of the terms involved. I'll help you set expectations and answer any questions you have. We will choose coping techniques to support you if you encounter difficult emotions, and when you're ready, we will start with phase 3.
-
You will select a target event to process, and I’ll ask you some questions about your sensations and feelings surrounding the memory. These may include what is hardest for you about the event, negative and positive beliefs that come up, how intense the distress is for you, where you feel your emotions show up in your body, and more. These questions will help measure the change in how you relate to the target event as you work through the EMDR process.
-
Using the bilateral stimulation of side-to-side eye movement, you will focus on the traumatic event, considering how it impacts your body, your emotions, and your mind. We will gauge your distress and work toward reducing it in this step.
-
You'll create a positive belief you want to associate with your target event, and will develop that association in this step.
-
I'll ask you to consider the target event and positive belief and scan your body to see if there are any lingering tough emotions. We will work on those as they come up.
-
We will end the session and I will guide you back to the present moment, and to complete calmness.
-
At the beginning of our next session, we will talk about how you're feeling about the last target event we worked on. If it needs more work, we will use it in another session, or we will consider future target events.
EMDR and IFS
Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a therapy modality that can combine well with EMDR. When you and I use an IFS-informed EMDR practice, you will work to connect to your protector parts before getting started, to ask them to allow you to work through tough memories without their rescue, and you’ll connect to your inner system as part of phase 4 of our EMDR sessions as well.
During desensitization, you can connect with your protective parts and blocking thoughts through the lens of exploring and reducing the impact of your trauma.
This deeper exploration of your experience and feelings helps you reconnect to yourself, tuning you into the parts that need the most love and support.
Questions about EMDR?
Connect with me for a free consultation, we can further discuss how EMDR works and what it can do to help you.
Frequently Asked Questions
EMDR can be a transformative therapy that helps you break out of cycles that hold you back from living a full, thriving life. Processing the trauma stored in your body and mind can help you break free from the sensations that keep you stuck.
-
I have found that clients have the greatest success when they are open to seeing where connections to past experiences manifest in their lives today.
EMDR allows for privacy when reprocessing past events. While you will need to call these experiences to mind, there is no need to share them aloud. Still, remaining curious and open to exploration can help you heal with EMDR.
-
When we work together, our sessions will be flexible enough to have space for talk therapy sessions as big life events come up.
We can pause EMDR as needed, reintegrating it in later sessions. EMDR will likely be useful in the processing of these big life events, alongside the support of talk therapy.
-
The time investment in EMDR therapy varies from person to person, and from target event to target event. It can take anywhere from a few sessions to a few months to process a target event.
It’s important to keep in mind that the amount of time it takes you to process an event isn’t an indication you’re doing therapy “right” or “wrong”. Being in process with EMDR is an opportunity to connect your mind to your body in powerful ways, and can happen surprisingly quickly, or take time.
-
After an EMDR session, you may feel tired, you may have dreams or nightmares, new thoughts or insights can come up about the target memory, or you may uncover other memories that might come up that were blocked. These are all normal parts of the process, but can sometimes be challenging.
As part of our work together, we will practice coping skills to manage when these things come up outside of a session. I will ask you to try to write down and keep track of your experiences, so we can process them as part of our next session.
-
EMDR is a step-by-step process, and we will begin with phase 1, where we develop a trusting working relationship and discuss your history, your current life, and your goals with treatment.
These beginning steps of planning, preparation, and assessment are just as important as the steps of EMDR which include eye movement and reprocessing.
While we will begin with EMDR immediately, the EMDR process may look a little different than what you initially expected.
-
As a proven therapeutic modality for treatment-resistant conditions, EMDR therapy offers a unique route to healing by connecting past traumatic experiences to a felt sense of calm in your present body. This safe emotional distance allows you to essentially reprogram how these traumatic experiences affect you and lessen their physical hold on you.
EMDR helps you make the connection between what your mind knows and what body sensations show up when remembering a traumatic event.. It helps you internalize what you know logically to be true, cementing understanding through connection to how you feel in your body.
EMDR’s unique structure and proven effectiveness at helping you connect the dots in your life and make change in your life means it may help more than previous therapy you’ve tried.