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Online EMDR Therapy and Intensives
I provide online EMDR therapy and EMDR intensives throughout California for adults processing complex trauma, medical trauma, chronic illness, sexual trauma, and difficult life experiences.
What is EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)?
EMDR is a trauma processing modality that works with your brain's natural ability to heal itself, in part utilizing the same system that integrates your experiences during REM sleep. The connection to REM is rooted in Francine Shapiro's Adaptive Information Processing model, which observed that the bilateral eye movements used in EMDR appear to engage a similar mechanism to what the brain does to process emotion and experience during deep sleep, material we couldn’t fully process during our waking hours.
The theory we work off of in EMDR is this: when something overwhelming happens, the brain can become flooded and unable to fully process what occurred. Rather than being filed away, that memory gets lodged in the limbic system, your brain's emotional and survival center. It lives in this space in our brain that is just outside our reach, preventing us from fully contextualizing or resolving the stressor. The memory activates when triggered by an echo of the experience, pulling the body back into the original distress.
What does that mean? Think of it like a filing system. Normally, experiences (like files) get processed and stored. They’re accessible when you need them, and tucked away quietly when you don't. Post traumatic stress is what happens when an overwhelming memory never makes it into a file. It stays open in the background, running continuously, pulling your attention and resources even when you're not aware of it. EMDR helps close those open files. For people living with complex trauma or complex chronic illness, there are often many open files, some of them decades old.
EMDR helps close them. Not by erasing what happened, but by integrating it, so it's no longer living in your nervous system as if the threat is still present.
What does EMDR look like in session?
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Unlike how it's often depicted in the media, EMDR isn't something we jump straight into. There's a carefully paced (8 step) protocol. In the first few steps, we'll spend time intentionally taking history, then building a foundation of safety and resourcing that we can later lean on if we need it. This is especially important when you're carrying medical trauma, complex PTSD, or live with a nervous system that has been in a state of chronic activation. First and foremost, it’s important that you feel safe with me, in the container I’m holding for this work, after years of being unsafe in the systems that were meant to take care of you.
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​​I practice via telehealth, so we use a program with a ball that moves across the screen, creating bilateral stimulation. You're fully present throughout the process, and I’m there with you in it. You hold both the memory and the present moment simultaneously during bilateral stimulation, which is the condition the brain needs to finally process what got stuck. We pause between “sets” of bilateral stim, and you and I connect on what came up. Sometimes in this space, we use other tools like IFS parts work, imagery, and somatic awareness to support metabolizing all that is arising.
A stuck memory doesn't just carry images.
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​It carries the thoughts, body sensations, emotions and beliefs that were locked in at the moment it happened. For those navigating chronic illness, reproductive traauma, sexual trauma or relational rupture, those locked-in beliefs might sound like: my body betrays me, I’m never believed, my needs are too much, I’m unlovable, I’m damaged, or I can't trust anyone to stay. This might be associated with sensations, like a racing heart, a heaviness in your chest, or a knot in your stomach. EMDR works with all of it - the memory, the body sensation, and the story the nervous system has been telling ever since. The goal isn't to feel like what happened was okay. It's to change the relationship your nervous system has with the material, so it stops pulling the fire alarm every time it surfaces.
Therapy Intensives
EMDR intensives allow us an opportunity to prioritize re-processing a traumatic event over a shorter period of time, as we schedule 90 minute EMDR sessions just a few days apart. We can re-process a medical event, a relational rupture, a traumatic loss, a sexual trauma or an adverse experience that feels like it got “stuck” in your body or nervous system. An EMDR intensive works well for re-processing target events that feel like they frequently “haunt” your body or nervous system, or launch you into re-experiencing what your body remembers and your mind wants to forget. With the continuity of an EMDR intensive, we can utilize an expeditious protocol for re-processing and desensitizing, creating a quicker path to shifting the pattern of reactivity.
EMDR Intensives
Here at Soul Craft, I specialize in Brainspotting and EMDR intensives for:
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Preparation for, recovery from and re-processing surgeries (Endometriosis excision, hysterectomy, mastectomy, or gender affirming surgery)
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Medical event processing after adverse medical experiences, so you can feel as regulated as possible walking back into healthcare settings
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Addressing the nervous system’s relationship to pelvic pain and/or sexual pain (with a focus on nervous system regulation during pelvic floor PT, especially for survivors of medical, sexual or reproductive trauma)
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Processing fertility treatments, reproductive stress or traumatic loss (during IVF, IUI, FET or when fertility treatments have ended in TFMR)
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Processing attachment wounds, relational rupture, betrayal or abandonment, to create a path to feeling safe in the vulnerability of partnership again
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Re-processing sexual trauma to create a path for sex, intimacy and physical touch to feel safe again
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Event processing for healthcare providers and first responders, to support your nervous system in returning to work after navigating a traumatic event or loss that occurred in the workplace
