EMDR Therapy
for Moms
Serving Mothers in California & Oregon
What is EMDR therapy?
EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. This therapy is an evidence-based approach designed to help you overcome traumatic experiences, stressful life experiences, and negative beliefs that may keep coming up in your day-to-day life.
By focusing on the connection between mind, body, and emotions, EMDR facilitates the processing and resolution of past experiences, leading to profound healing and personal transformation.
EMDR therapy is designed to help you find relief from the emotional pain associated with difficult memories and to develop new, more positive beliefs about yourself and the world.
It can be a transformative journey on your healing journey, as you finally let go of the past, feel more calm and grounded, and tune back in to your intuition to be the mother you want to be.
How does EMDR Therapy for Moms work?
EMDR therapy can be explained using Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model, which helps us understand how our brains naturally process and store experiences.
Our memories are interconnected networks of thoughts, emotions, sensations, and beliefs. Normally, when we experience a distressing event, our brain processes and integrates the memory into our broader network of memories, allowing us to learn and adapt from the experience.
Stressful experiences can overwhelm our brain's natural ability to heal and process, causing these memories to remain unprocessed and trapped in our memory networks. Unprocessed memories can continue to cause emotional and psychological distress, influencing our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in the present.
EMDR therapy utilizes bilateral stimulation, such as eye movements, tapping, or auditory cues, to activate both sides of the brain. This bilateral stimulation helps to simulate the natural processing that occurs during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, enabling the brain to access and process unprocessed memories.
What happens during an EMDR session?
Because EMDR therapy is an evidence-based intervention, it is important to stay true to the model as it was intended.
As a trained EMDR therapist, I will guide you through the process of identifying the distressing memories that continue to affect you and assist you in focusing on these memories while engaging in the bilateral stimulation.
This combination of focusing on the memory while receiving the bilateral stimulation helps your brain reprocess and integrate the memory in a way that reduces its emotional impact.
The therapy is designed to help you find relief from the emotional pain associated with these memories and to develop new, more positive beliefs about yourself and the world. It can be a transformative journey that allows you to let go of the past, regain control over your emotions, and move forward with greater resilience and well-being.
How do I know if EMDR Therapy for Moms is right for me?
Many women struggle with anxiety, depression, fear, anger, rage, and other complicated emotions during pregnancy and postpartum. These feelings can be exacerbated if you've had a traumatic birth experience. And so many of these women do not tell anyone about how they're feeling because they're afraid they'll be judged as a parent.
If you identify as a bit of a perfectionist, adjusting to motherhood can feel extra hard because you might blame yourself when things are difficult. You've likely held yourself to high (maybe unrealistic) expectations throughout your life. And now that you are a parent, instead of being able to acknowledge that this phase of your life is just that hard, you turn on yourself and are self-critical.
This makes it harder to forgive yourself when you make a mistake and ask for help because it feels like you're failing. And maybe having high expectations has served you well in the past, but in this season of your life that inner voice is not helpful. Likely you have developed some of these thinking patterns well before you became a parent.
EMDR can help you identify how some of these core beliefs developed, reprocess these difficult situations, and finally be able to let go of the negative and unhelpful beliefs you've walked around with.
This work can help you make lasting change for yourself, and for your future generations as you heal the generational trauma or cycles that have existed in your family patterns.