Trauma-informed EMDR Therapy

What exactly is trauma?

Trauma happens when an experience overwhelms your mind and body, leaving your nervous system stuck on high alert or shutting down to protect you.

Trauma can be a one-time event, like a car accident, house fire, assault, or sudden loss.

It can also build over time through experiences like racial or sexual discrimination, emotional abuse, manipulation, neglect, poverty, or growing up around violence.

Trauma can be collective too. Mass shootings, natural disasters, war, community violence, and living through a pandemic can affect our sense of safety even when the experience isn’t ours alone.

Childhood trauma can be particularly hard to recognize because the ways you learned to survive can simply feel like part of who you are. Hyper-independence, people-pleasing, perfectionism, shutting down, staying constantly alert, or struggling to trust other people may have once helped you cope. Years later, those same strategies can wreak havoc on your relationships, work, and ability to feel safe and connected.

You may think this is just the way it is…

The fear, sadness, anxiety, intrusive thoughts, nightmares, relationship struggles, perfectionism, chronic stress, or feeling constantly on edge may have become so familiar that they just feel like part of you.

You may not realize that some of what’s bringing you to therapy could be connected to trauma that never fully healed.

Or you may be all too aware of the trauma you experienced and are finally ready to face it so you can release it once and for all.

Trauma-Informed EMDR Therapy at Sentient.

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, a research-backed treatment for trauma and PTSD. We still don’t know exactly why every part of EMDR works. What we do know is that it can help painful memories lose their emotional intensity, so the past stops feeling so present.

Working with your Sentient psychotherapist, you will be emotionally held and supported through the process of resolving your trauma – at your own timing and pace.

EMDR is a bottom-up approach to treating trauma, stress and difficult feelings. Instead of relying on insight and talking alone, we work with memory, emotion, physical sensation, and bilateral stimulation to help your brain and body process what they’ve been holding onto.

This fits deeply with how we practice at Sentient. Sensing and feeling are powerful mechanisms of change. EMDR gives us a structured way to activate those systems and work with your brain and body’s natural capacity to process, adapt, and heal.

The memory stays. The charge changes. Your body learns it doesn’t have to keep sounding the alarm, giving you more freedom to live in the life that’s happening now.

The path forward starts with finding someone you trust.

Choosing to face your trauma is hard enough. Finding the right therapist, figuring out insurance, and getting on someone’s calendar shouldn’t make it harder.

Our EMDR specialists, Caroline and Kate, provide compassionate, trauma-informed care for clients ready to loosen the grip of painful experiences and finally move forward. Both integrate EMDR with a deeply relational approach, so this isn’t clinical treatment happening to you. It’s careful, human work you do together.

Our goal is to help you feel safe enough to approach what happened, understand how it continues to affect you, and gradually loosen its hold on your life so you have more freedom to feel like yourself, connect with the people you love, and live in the present instead of constantly reacting to the past.