EMDR works. It’s well-known that it works for those who want to heal trauma, but you don’t have to be a trauma survivor to benefit from EMDR. In fact, I believe that it works for nearly every human on the planet.

This week, I’m starting a new series that I think will...

Have you struggled with finding the right therapy for your needs? Maybe you’ve had a few appointments with several different therapists but never found someone you felt was on the same page as you for your treatment.

The client-therapist relationship is so important and it’s...

EMDR is a fantastic brain-based modality for trauma therapy, but there are so many other uses that we don’t talk about enough because of the focus on trauma. What gets lost the most is that EMDR supports anyone who wants to rewrite the curriculum they learned as a result of...

Identifying and pulling on positive resources is essential to processing trauma, but it’s also something you can do when you want to change your mindset around specific feelings and events. Even better, it’s something you can do on your own with a little bit of work and reflection.

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Doing mindset work isn’t always the answer. We’re inundated with messages from coaches and therapists on Instagram telling us that if we just worked on our mindset, we could get past so many of our limiting beliefs and roadblocks.

And while maybe mindset works for some, for...

Most of us know how to behave appropriately in society, which is helpful in navigating the world. We follow the laws of our community, pay our bills, wait in the grocery lines, treat animals with kindness, etc. But sometimes, society (or our culture) teaches us a set of rules that...

Too often I hear therapists share that a client “isn’t doing the work.” They’re not progressing or working through their trauma because in session they talk about what’s going on in their life today, rather than talking about what happened in the past.

I...

The way we’ve been talking about triggers is an incomplete conversation and it’s time to change that. The more information you have about what triggers you will help inside trauma therapy and help create adaptive material to help with trauma.

Here’s where we need to...

Curiosity should always be the default for therapists working with clients, and clients should know this and look for it in session. This is especially true when we’re talking about phobias.

There’s often a lot of shame around phobias because they’re characterized by a...

Adaptations are all things we created in response to something we learned in life, often during a traumatic experience. Whether that experience happened in childhood or as adults, we learned how to cope and feel safe. And those adaptations perform a positive function, whether...

While every therapist has their own methods and systems for working with clients, one of the most harmful things they can say to a client is, “You’re not ready for trauma therapy.” Especially when there’s no explanation or plan for getting the client...

Talking about details of trauma doesn’t feel good for the therapy client, which is why it’s so important that we create a reframe not only around therapy in general, but especially in brain-based modalities like Brainspotting and EMDR in particular.

Not convinced that we...