Trauma Therapies

How do trauma-focused talk therapies and EMDR Therapy work?

EMDR Therapy

EMDR Therapy involves far less talking. In the early stages, we work together to make sure you are ready to safely talk about what you've been experiencing and manage the big emotions that come from talking about your trauma. We will form goals for the session and targets to process through. In the midst of our work, you will engage in bilateral stimulation and do the active work through these goals and targets. During this process, we will frequently reconnect past experiences with negative and visceral reactions so they can be unlearned, healed, and reprocessed without the associated stress and negative emotion.

Trauma-focused Talk Therapy

Trauma-focused talk therapy involves much more talking as the name describes. The process is more gradual but it tends to affect less of your environment outside of therapy when life inevitably gets chaotic. Through trauma-focused talk therapy, we explore how past experiences have shaped your values, thoughts, emotions, and actions. We acknowledge that the way you move through the world currently was once extremely beneficial and that's why your brain adapted that way, but it may not be serving you anymore. Through that exploration, we identify ways that you can shift perspective, gain insight, and manage life with a little more grace, self-compassion, and balance.

Further Explanation on Trauma Therapy

Let's think about a brain that has experienced trauma...

PTSD and trauma are much more than what many think of when they hear the term. It's not just veterans who go to war or wh have had horrific childhoods. If we grew up worrying about our next meal or our safety, that's trauma. If we were out with our friends one night and got into a really bad car accident, that's trauma. Our brain is wired to keep us alive and protect us. So if we get into a really bad car accident, our brain might start telling us we are scared of cars because we were in a car when we had a near death experience. Similarly, if we were abused by a stepfather growing up and our only way to keep ourselves safe was to make him happy or distract him from hurting us then we may become people-pleasers. This is when your survival instincts kick in but then subsequently fail to turn off at the appropriate time. These responses are the fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses.

People tend to favor one of these responses but depending on the situation may shift between the four. EMDR helps retrain your brain to turn off these responses when they are unnecessarily affecting your life and you are not in true danger. Your brain learns to be grateful for the survival response that it needed at one point in life to get you through while also recognizing that it is not necessary anymore and is likely impacting you negatively now.

Biology of Trauma

Trauma changes our brain in many ways. When we experience something life threatening (whether it was just once or repeatedly), our brains and bodies adapt to help us survive. Those changes can linger long after the threat has passed. The amygdala, the brain’s alarm system, becomes extra alert and sensitive, constantly scanning for danger. This can make normal, everyday stress feel overwhelming - triggering our fight, flight, fawn or freeze responses even when we're safe.

Meanwhile, the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain that helps with logic, reasoning, planning, and calming becomes less active because the pathway for communication between different parts of the brain has been cut off by our alarm system (amygdala). That makes it’s harder to think clearly, stay grounded, or tell the difference between past and present danger.

These brain changes affect the nervous system, which in turn controls how your body responds to stress. Instead of returning to a state of calm after a stressful moment, the body can stay stuck in high alert (anxiety, tension, irritability) or shut down (numbness, exhaustion, disconnection).

Therapy helps by gently retraining the brain and nervous system to recognize safety again. Through mindfulness, somatic awareness, and grounding skills, the body can begin to relax, and the brain can relearn that it’s safe to rest, connect, and heal

Because our alarm system (amygdala) takes charge of the control center in our brain these changes ripple through our nervous system (the connector between the brain and body). The sympathetic nervous system that activates our body to prepare for danger can stay switched "on," leading to anxiety, restlessness, tension, or feeling "on edge." Because our alarm system (amygdala) is telling our sympathetic nervous system to be ready for danger at any time, we might become exhausted but struggle to sleep, have difficulty concentrating, or become paranoid and frustrated. This is bad for our brain and body over long periods of time and can have serious effects. Our brain needs the alarm system (amygdala) and the logical planner (prefrontal cortex) to both have access to the control center. This way, we can turn on our parasympathetic nervous system so that our bodies can rest and recover rather than being "on" all the time.

How does trauma show up in people's lives

The effects of trauma often extend far beyond the original event. Even when life looks “fine” on the outside, trauma can quietly shape how we see ourselves, how we relate to others, and how we move through the world.

You might notice that you’re often on edge, easily startled, or constantly preparing for something to go wrong. Concentration and motivation can be hard to sustain, which can impact work or school performance. Some people find themselves withdrawing from others, struggling to trust, or feeling disconnected in relationships — while others might feel overly responsible, caretaking, or people-pleasing to keep peace and avoid conflict.

Internally, trauma can shift our beliefs about ourselves and the world. Many people carry quiet thoughts like “I’m not safe,” “I’m too much,” “It’s my fault,” or “I have to handle everything on my own.” These beliefs often developed as ways to survive, but over time, they can limit our sense of worth, confidence, and possibility.

Physically, trauma can show up as exhaustion, tension, sleep issues, stomach problems, or chronic pain — all signs that the body is still carrying stress that hasn’t yet had the chance to release.

What if I feel like what I went through "wasn't that bad?"

Feeling as though "it could have been worse" or "it wasn't that bad" is part of your trauma response. It's your brain's way of minimizing the impact of what happened so you can move through life not feeling so affected. We can appreciate that part of our brain because it is trying to help and serve a purpose while also recognizing that it might be discounting how much it actually affected us. Other people may have had "worse things happen to them" but that does not make how you feel about what happened to you any less valid.

Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing

Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR) was created by Francine Shapiro 1987 when she noticed that bilateral stimulation reduced the intensity of stressful events and began researching its efficacy from there. It has been recognized as an empirically supported treatment for trauma since the mid-to-late 1990s.

How traumatic experiences affect us

We can think of trauma experiences like getting physically hurt. We might get into an accident and some of us may come out of it with a broken bone or maybe just a sprained wrist. After that accident, depending on how our body (brain) is affected, we may be able to move on, be a little sore, and be just fine. But for those who broke a bone, a little extra help is necessary to heal from the damage done.

It was up to chance who sprained a wrist and who broke a bone, but now the person with the broken bone has to get a cast to heal. At first, they might feel fine or put it off because they think they can readjust on their own. Other times, they might go straight to the emergency room but struggle with mobility even after the chaos has died down.

EMDR or trauma-focused talk therapy is like the cast. We are meant to be the structure that helps you become healed but we do not do the healing, your body (brain) does that on its own.

How EMDR works

EMDR uses two primary mechanisms to engage patients in faster and more thorough results. They are called the adaptive information processing model and bilateral stimulation.

Bilateral stimulation works by stimulating the left and right sides of your body through visual, auditory, or tactile methods while processing your traumatic experiences. This stimulation keeps you grounded in the present moment by intentionally activating your parasympathetic nervous system while remembering traumatic experience(s).

The adaptive information processing model asserts that our brain can innately categorize thoughts, memories, and emotions appropriately but sometimes after we've experienced trauma, it becomes difficult to organize all the info that our brain has to process. By using bilateral stimulation, we allow our brain the space to adaptively process all of the information about what we went through and add all the necessary context to memories and experiences.

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