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Introducing: EMDR for Healthcare Providers, Helpers and Healers
Since the beginning of my work as a therapist, I’ve specialized in complex chronic illness. However, over the past year, I’ve come to realize that many of my clients are also helpers, healers, medical or mental healthcare providers. Being a “helper” with chronic illness, chronic pain or somatic stress is a unique experience. I’ve found that it takes an integrative toolbox to help untangle it. And, as the landscape (hellscape) that is 2026 ensues, it’s more important now than ever that the “helpers” get space to exhale, to receive care, and to be human too.
Ways I'm utilizing EMDR to support healthcare providers:
Teachers Carrying Workplace Stress
I view teachers as first responders. You are wearing multiple hats all at once, and one of those is being the first responder in stressful events with little humans. In America, we ask our teachers to put their bodies and lives on the
line to keep the children that they are educating safe. As an educator, perhaps you’re finding that this results in hypervigilance, tension in your body, or profound depletion. Of course it does. Here, we’ll pause to use EMDR to re-process what you didn’t have time and space to address in your day to day work. We'll honor the swallowed emotion, and what it cost your nervous system to do this invaluable, and all-encompassing, work. In that effort, we'll offer your nervous system the chance to come down from the adrenaline it takes to embody this role.
Healthcare Providers who have Chronic Illness
Many of my clients are therapists themselves, or they're nurses, medical providers, or bodyworkers that are quietly living their own experience of complex chronic illness or chronic pain. They're showing up every day to hold what their clients or their patients need them to hold, while their own body is silently shouting for help under the weight of what isn’t theirs. For healthcare providers with chronic illness - together, with the use of EMDR and somatic
work, we’ll lighten the weight of what you’re carrying to create more space for you to breathe. Here, you can unmask, exhale, and begin to process what others can’t see. You get to be human in all of the ways here. I can hold that with you, and for you.
Highly Sensitive, Hyper-Empathic Helpers
For those of us who are highly sensitive or highly empathic, it’s difficult on a day to day basis to figure out what’s “theirs” and what’s “ours”, and how to differentiate the two. With Highly Sensitive People (HSPs) that are helpers, I like to do that discernment work together. Together, we work to assure that you and your sense of self aren’t getting lost amidst the heavy nature of your work or what you’ve set out to professionally hold. Sometimes, while working in high stress environments, it starts to get difficult to tell the difference between anxiety, stress, and intuition. It feels like we're a sponge for it all. We can utilize a combination of EMDR and IFS parts work to connect to your discernment, to turn up the volume on your own voice, to let go of what is not "you", and to recover your relationship with your own innate sense of "knowing".
Nurses and Medical Professionals Processing Crisis, Loss and Grief
As a healthcare provider navigating your patients' health events, the truth of your own experience is often buried in the acute moment as you navigate the needs of a crisis real-time. You swallow emotion to show up and act with attententive precision, all while doing this work in a system that treats you like a machine rather than a person. Later, your own buried experience is often expressed through how you feel in your body, how you connect (or don't connect) in your relationships, or how you navigate your day to day life. Let’s use EMDR to excavate and process what you had to bury; it's your turn to heal.
If you're curious about how EMDR might help you, or if you are a helper or healthcare worker that needs an ear, please feel free to reach out. Let's chat about a space that gets to be yours.
Candice Craft, LMFT
