Trauma & EMDR Therapy
Somatic and attachment-based EMDR for adults in Nashville, TN
Therapy for Trauma
When people come to therapy with me, they might be in a season where they are noticing a lot of fear, anxiety, grief, or overwhelm for what can feel like no reason. Maybe they have done talk therapy before and had some good insights, but are still feeling stuck and like they are a problem.
Wired for survival.
We’ve evolved with all kinds of incredible survival mechanisms to keep us alive. It's just that unless we’re actively in danger many of these strategies can keep us stuck in survival mode (despite our best efforts to move towards happier, more fulfilled ways of living).
Connect the Dots.
Trauma gets stuck in our nervous systems and frozen in time until we've been able to safely reprocess the events, and access the felt sense of safety and connection in the body again. This is a brilliant and difficult response from our bodies, asking that we remember the feeling to keep ourselves safe, and never let anything bad or scary happen to us again.
Healing is possible.
The good news is that there is a large body of research that proves that it’s not only possible for our brains to heal, they want to. Our bodies want us to be okay, and it’s possible all throughout the span of our life to heal and do things differently. I see this every day with my clients in EMDR therapy.
About EMDR
Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR) is a therapy that helps people heal from the symptoms and emotional distress that result from disturbing life experiences. Repeated studies show that EMDR can accelerate the therapeutic process, completing only a handful of sessions that once took years in traditional talk therapy.
It is widely assumed that severe emotional pain requires a long time to heal. EMDR therapy shows that the human nervous system can, in fact, heal from psychological trauma much as the body recovers from physical trauma. When you cut your hand, your body works to repair the wound. If a foreign object or repeated injury irritates the wound, it festers and causes pain. Once the block is removed, healing resumes. EMDR therapy demonstrates that a similar sequence of events occurs with mental and emotional processes.
The brain’s information processing system naturally moves toward mental health. If the system is blocked or imbalanced by the impact of a disturbing event, the emotional wound festers and can cause intense symptoms like panic attacks, obsessive thinking, and chronic pain. Once the block is removed, healing resumes, and the symptoms can stop.