Individual Therapy

Individual Therapy sessions last for 50-ish minutes and consist of one on one time between you and the therapist. With collaboration you will decide what you want to spend your time on. The therapist is there to facilitate deeper thinking and help you build awareness of how your developmental experiences interact with how you see yourself and the world around you. Then you and the therapist will transition into challenging unhealthy patterns, recovering from trauma, and creating new ways of engaging with yourself, others, and the world in the present. Generally you and the therapist will meet weekly or bi-weekly.

$150/50 minute session.

Everyone in your life has told you what you should do, who you should be, and how you should get there. You’re feeling overwhelmed with the weight of the expectations that others, and yourself, are placing on you. This makes you feel frozen, out of control, and makes it difficult for you to make decisions that are free of fear, insecurity, and uncertainty. You are tired. And you are ready to explore your own beliefs and develop a better sense of self so that you can confidently say, “This is me. This is what I want.”

You made it to college. You’re juggling classes, outside coursework, working to pay your bills, giving time to your relationships. You are overwhelmed. And while you are worried about finding the time for therapy, you know you need the extra support to cope with the stress and anxiety you are experiencing and to find that creative energy you know is within you.

Your relationships have a history of conflict and tend to be filled with tension rather than peaceful connection. Your friendships feel distant, you feel like the black sheep of the family, you aren’t sure if you are with a partner that is right for you, or you’re struggling to find a partner. Perhaps you are finding it difficult to trust others enough to share yourself with them and to make connections and this has you feeling lonely.

Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is an extensively researched effective psychotherapy method proven to help people recover from trauma and other distressing life experiences.

Our brains take in a lot of information everyday. In an ordinary circumstance, an experience like going to the park is filtered through your brain, processed and stored away. The material that is stored may drift away into inactive memory or it may be able to be recalled again in the future. If the ordinary experience becomes an exceptionally challenging experience like a tornado hitting the park while you were there it filters through your brain attached with an image, belief, emotion and body sensation. That memory becomes stuck in our brain and is incapable of adaptively processing and storing. It filters into our mood, thoughts, behaviors, etc because our brain is reacting as if it is still in danger.

Through EMDR reprocessing we access the disturbing memory by identifying the image, belief, emotion and body sensation associated with it. Then we support your brain in completing the processing of the experience until it can be stored away with a more adaptive response, taking the negative charge away from the experience and resolving the fight, flight, freeze response.

So we have one foot in the past experience and one foot in the present. We aren’t going back into it. It’s over. That’s the benefit of EMDR; you don’t have to talk in detail about what you experienced. It’s like riding a train and you are on the inside watching the image and memory go by on the outside like scenery. It is a kinder, gentler way of treating trauma instead of opening old wounds and staring at them.

The research is unclear as to why it works but it is clear that it does. It works similarly to what we experience in REM sleep cycle. If you watch someone sleep and see their eyes moving back and forth; that’s something our brain does every night to process information. Bilateral stimulation replicates the same process. The EMDRIA website has links to the research (https://www.emdria.org/).