EMDR Therapist Bay Area
Hi, I'm Nicole and I'm an EMDR therapist in the Bay Area
You may be feeling stuck in the present, not good enough, and disconnected from those you love. I understand, and I’m here to help.
I will help you discover the roots what’s keeping you from trusting yourself so you can live in the present and look forward to the future.
If you are looking for a different approach that can help you find hope in finally being able to believe what you’ve been trying to tell yourself without the hassle of having to relive the pain, schedule a free 20 minute phone consultation today, and let's talk about whether EMDR could be right for you!
My Approach as an EMDR Therapist in the Bay Area
Life can be full of difficult experiences, moments and relationships, including trauma, grief or even chronic, long standing patterns of anxiety, perfectionism and people pleasing. You may not understand why you can’t get yourself out of these patterns when you know very well they don’t help you or serve you. These experiences may keep you feeling hopeless of ever finding relief.
As uncomfortable and difficult as it may be to look inward, acknowledging and beginning to explore the roots of these patterns is the first step towards taking action against what is holding you back from believing in yourself! With support, guidance and the right tools, you can and will break free from what is keeping you stuck.
With Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), the work in therapy doesn’t have to be as painful of a process because it doesn’t involve reliving and recounting in detail every difficult experience you’ve ever had that may be contributing to what is affecting you now. This is why I offer EMDR as a different and effective approach to healing trauma as well as healing chronic anxiety, perfectionism and people pleasing.
EMDR therapy is designed to help you reprocess difficult experiences you’ve had that went unresolved. Until resolved, these experiences will continue to hold power over you and your daily life possibly leading to relenting anxiety, depression, perfectionism and difficulty overall in relationships. The goal in EMDR therapy is to help you heal without reliving every single detail of pain in your past.
While EMDR was originally heavily researched and used for treating trauma singularly, but since it’s inception, it has since shown extreme efficacy in treating anxiety based including but not limited to perfectionism and people pleasing as well.
My approach to using EMDR it to use it when it is needed most, this may look differently for each person as every person is unique and comes to therapy for unique reasons. EMDR can be utilized whenever there are underlying issues affecting your current day happiness and sense of calm. Through this type of therapy, we can help you find ways of truly getting unstuck, once and for all, to move forward with hope about your future and believing in yourself again or perhaps for the first time ever!
Are you ready to believe in yourself and finally move on from patterns that don’t serve you anymore? EMDR therapy is your opportunity to discover the roots of what’s not working and get past what is holding you back. Contact me, your EMDR therapist in the bay area, today to schedule a free 15 minute consultation to discuss how EMDR could help you!
EMDR Therapy FAQS
-
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy is a type of psychotherapy aimed at reducing emotional distress associated with traumatic memories and difficult life experiences. EMDR therapy demonstrates how the mind is capable of healing from psychological trauma in the same way the body heals from physical trauma.
The basic theory behind EMDR is when traumatic, difficult or pervasive things have happened throughout someone’s life that have affected physical or emotional safety and wellbeing, the brain becomes “stuck” in trying to process those experiences. Someone’s brain being “stuck” leads to people responding to present triggers and future events as if still under threat because the brain was never able to come to a more helpful conclusion or adaptive way of handling the situation. This blockage can lead to less than helpful patterns of anxiety, depression, and even perfectionism and people pleasing in response to difficult life experiences.
By utilizing bilateral stimulation, such as eye movements, tapping, or sound, people will reprocess difficult life experiences and distressing memories in order to get the brain “unstuck” and move towards adaptive views of the memories or experiences and more positive beliefs about self or others in involved. Through reprocessing, the experiences will have less hold over someone’s responses in the present.
-
EMDR is a psychotherapy treatment that was designed originally to treat traumatic experiences consistent with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), however through continued research, EMDR has been found to be highly effective in also treating:
• Anxiety and anxiety related issues like perfectionism and people pleasing
• Phobias
• Depression
• OCD
• Chronic pain
• Addictions
• Other distressing life events
-
Many different life experiences can represent a trauma and many times people don’t recognize the full impact of something that has happened until some time has passed, it could even be years. Trauma does not mean the same thing to everyone, the importance of deciding what is traumatic to you is to understand how it has impacted you.
Trauma is an emotional response to a difficult and stressful situation. Often I hear my clients say, “I don’t have trauma”. In therapy we break trauma down into “big T trauma” and “little T trauma” Big T trauma is what most people think of when they think of the word trauma and typically includes major more physically threatening events such as accidents, violence, assault, war, natural disasters, etc. While little T trauma often refers to chronic emotional wounds inflicted by emotional abuse, relationships with emotionally unavailable people including parents, harassment, bullying, etc.
Often in my work I have seen that chronic patterns of anxiety, perfectionism and people pleasing can develop as a trauma response to instability of relationships, emotional unavailability in relationships, lack of validation and support from significant figures such as parents, friends, etc in early stages of life and so forth.
A therapist can help you better understand the potential consequences of past events and together in therapy, you can start to identify experiences that may be impacting you in the present in order to gain greater insight into whether or not you have experienced some version of trauma within your life, whether big T or little T.
-
EMDR can be used either as a stand-alone treatment or blended with traditional talk therapy. However, unlike traditional talk therapy, EMDR therapy does not require in depth talking about difficult experiences. EMDR is a tool to help people resolve past experiences, that have become “stuck” and taken hold of them, in order to heal from and incorporate more adaptive and positive views of the past and hope for the future as well as improving views of themselves and their capabilities.
When utilized appropriately, EMDR can help people uncover deep insights that often are not fully accessible through traditional talk therapy. EMDR has also been shown to provide faster results of relief to clients than traditional therapy methods alone.
Get Help from a EMDR Therapist in the Bay Area
EMDR Therapy is one of the most insightful ways of understanding yourself and how the problems affecting you today may be rooted in your past experiences. If you’re ready to take the leap and start finally believing in yourself, contact me, your EMDR therapist in the Bay Area today to set up a free consultation and let’s start your healing era.