What I Treat
I work with adults, eighteen and over, in person in SeaTac and by telehealth anywhere in Washington State. EMDR is the spine of the treatment; what surrounds it depends on what you walked in with.
Harm that happened repeatedly, over years, usually inside relationships that were supposed to be safe. Complex trauma tends to show up less as a memory and more as a personality — hypervigilance, people-pleasing, a sense that you are fundamentally too much or not enough.
Assault, a car accident, a medical emergency, a sudden death. One event your nervous system has not filed as over — so it keeps rehearsing the response as though the danger were still in the room.
What was modeled about love, safety, and emotion — and what was passed down biologically through stress chemistry and gene expression shaped in the womb or in early childhood. You may be carrying something that was never yours to begin with.
Often the visible edge of something older. We treat the anxiety directly with regulation skills, and we also look underneath it, because a nervous system braced for a threat that ended decades ago will keep generating reasons to be braced.
Including the losses that do not get casseroles — estrangement, miscarriage, the death of a person you had a complicated relationship with, or the version of your life you expected to have.
Divorce, career collapse, coming out, caregiving, becoming a parent, leaving a faith community. Transitions destabilize the coping structures that were holding older material in place, which is why old wounds so often resurface during new chapters.
The arc of treatment
Not a fixed schedule — a sequence. We move to the next stage when the current one holds, and we go back a stage whenever going back is the right clinical answer.
The eight EMDR phases in detailConsult
Fifteen or twenty minutes. You describe what is going on, I describe how I work, and we both decide honestly whether it fits. If it does not, I refer.
Intake
The first sessions are thorough history-taking. We identify what to target and in what order. You are not expected to relive anything here.
Preparation
Grounding, containment, and regulation skills that work outside my office. A written crisis plan. Reprocessing does not start until this is real.
Reprocessing
Target by target, with re-evaluation along the way. Some sessions are reprocessing, some are stabilization — the mix is a clinical call we make together.
Integration
New beliefs get tested against real life. We taper as the gains prove durable rather than stopping abruptly because a number of sessions ran out.
Being straight with you
A therapist who claims to treat everything treats nothing particularly well. I focus on trauma in adults, and there are presentations that genuinely belong with someone else — active substance dependence needing a higher level of care, eating disorders requiring a medical team, children and adolescents, and anyone needing psychiatric medication management.
If that's you, tell me anyway. I would rather spend a consult call getting you to the right door than take an appointment I cannot do justice.
