EMDR Therapy in Orange County, CA

Relief and renewed hope found here

Online therapy for EMDR in California and Florida

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Trauma doesn’t have to keep you stuck

Are you someone who…

  • Is jumpy, easily startled and always on-guard?

  • Has certain goals you want to achieve but you find yourself stuck and unable to achieve what you are seeking?

  • Finds yourself wanting to move past a limiting belief such as “I am worthless” but this belief keeps creeping up?

  • Has flashbacks of painful memories that come into your head when you don’t want them to?

  • Is unable to create and maintain the safe and close relationships you desire?

Then EMDR Therapy might be right for YOU!

For some, a distressing experience can happen in adulthood and rock your foundation. For example, a car accident is an experience that can cause you to feel afraid to drive again, have significant anxiety while driving, experience nightmares about the accident, or difficulty with concentrating because you cannot stop re-living it in your mind.

For others, distressing experiences could have occurred in childhood and may have been persistent such as verbally abusive statements from a parent such as “How can you be so stupid?”. This experience could result in a perpetual belief of being worthless or not good enough.

Additionally, chronic invalidation can also negatively impact us. If you are told again and again that what you feel is wrong or that you are “dramatic” this can contribute to you seeking romantic partners that are similar to your caregivers and so you might find yourself in relationships that feel unfulfilling or even painful.

Whether these experiences happened years ago or recently, EMDR can HELP!

You CAN get past your past

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What is EMDR Therapy?

EMDR Therapy stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy and is a proven and effective therapy for trauma. EMDR can help alleviate symptoms such as negative self-beliefs, sleep issues, anxiety, depression and flashbacks to name a few. EMDR first involves creating resources (coping skills) that can help you feel confident in exploring and processing those difficult memories from the past.

EMDR then helps to access your big, beautiful brain and all its healing capacities. With EMDR the idea is that past painful memories become ongoingly distressing because of how it was stored in the brain. Essentially with EMDR we are wanting to reactivate those distressing experiences and “reprocess” them. Reprocessing incorporates “Bilateral Stimulation” which is a technique that activates the left and right hemisphere of your brain, which helps your brain to understand what happened more adaptively.

According to EMDR, someone can experience persistent negative self-statements, avoid reminders of the trauma, or have intrusive memories of the event because the experience was stored in the brain before it was properly processed.

It’s not your fault that your brain ended up storing that experience in such an unhelpful way. Together, we can make sense of the past so that you can have a clear idea of how to step into your desired future.

With EMDR the goal is to no longer feel distressed when recalling those painful memories as well as to no longer have any negative beliefs about yourself, others or the world in relation to those painful memories. Another goal of EMDR is building internal resources to strengthen your own capacity to deal with life when it becomes challenging.

Essentially, the goal here is to feel that you CAN do hard things.

Types of trauma I have treated with EMDR:

  • Pervasive, childhood trauma (i.e. chronic invalidation, emotional neglect, sexual abuse, verbal abuse and physical abuse)

  • Sexual assault in adulthood and childhood

  • Military trauma

  • Car accidents

  • Trauma/Pain related to break ups

  • Cancer

The process…

When we begin EMDR, we often start with identifying what currently triggers your symptoms. For example, you may be afraid when driving and those triggers might include: getting on the freeway, someone tailgating me, and stop-and-go traffic. Then we would look at what are the previous memories that are associated with the current trigger. For example, a person might identify a car accident that occurred on the freeway, a time in which they were a kid and someone rear-ended them when they were a passenger, etc. This is essentially created a roadmap so we can know what memories are contributing to upsetting symptoms and behaviors today.

Next, we focus on strengthening your capacity to manage distressing moments by developing and enhancing resources (aka coping skills). You may already have a number of coping skills that are effectively helpful. For others, we may spend more time developing these skill sets. Sometimes the processing of the trauma can happen in-between the appointments in the form of dreams or memories re-surfacing and so it is important that we collectively feel that you have a toolbox of resources to support you in-between appointments.

Then, when we collaboratively feel you are ready and prepared to proceed with the trauma work, we start going into those old memories and reprocessing them using Bilateral Stimulation. We would work on one memory at a time until we reprocess it to completion and then move on to another past memory. Once we reprocess all the past memories to completion, we then move onto processing current triggers and then eventually future triggers so we can prepare and process for potential upcoming things that could trigger a reoccurrence of symptoms and behaviors.



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What EMDR therapy can do for you…

  • Restore restful sleep

  • Experience safety and connection to your body

  • Acknowledge that you are worthwhile, lovable person

  • Trust yourself by feeling confident in your ability to deal with stress in life

  • Reconnect to the here-and-now rather than living in memories of the past or worries about the future

Find freedom from painful memories

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