EMDR for Emotional and Psychological Trauma

If you’ve experienced emotional or psychological trauma, you may feel as though certain experiences from your past are still living inside you influencing how you see yourself, how you react to situations, and how safe you feel in the world. EMDR offers a compassionate, gentle path towards healing these deep wounds and helping you reclaim your sense of wholeness.

In trauma focused EMDR, we’ll work together to identify the earliest memory where emotional overwhelm first left its mark on your nervous system. These memories often involve experiences of humiliation, betrayal, neglect, or exposure to threat, we will reprocess that stored events that’s been driving chronic distress, hyperarousal, or emotional shutdown. Our aim isn’t just symptom relief instead for full integration of the experience, so it can become part of your past, an archived memory rather than something that controls your present.

We’ll often work sequentially through connected memories, tracing how one event may have reinforced another over time. By carefully activating these linked networks safely and with compassion, the trauma can be remembered without that overwhelming physiological response that once came with it, the emotional intensity subsides, and you begin to recall the event as part of your life story rather than reliving it as though it’s happening right now.

If you experience dissociation or emotional numbing, we’ll take things especially gently. Before we begin reprocessing, we’ll spend time on stabilisation and grounding techniques, only once you feel secure, we’ll carefully re-engage with trauma targets in brief, tolerable doses. This thoughtful pacing keeps your nervous system within its capacity to regulate, preventing re-traumatisation whilst allowing gradual integration of fragmented memories.

Those negative beliefs about yourself that formed during trauma, like “I’m powerless,” “I don’t matter,” or “I’m not safe”; we will treat these as part of the target network that needs healing. As the distress linked to the memory diminishes, something beautiful often happens: new beliefs emerge spontaneously, reflecting restored agency and self-compassion. Unlike simply trying to think more positively, these beliefs are genuinely felt, your body verifies the absence of danger through direct experience, making them authentically true for you.

The final stage focuses on bringing your body back into harmony. I’ll guide you to locate any residual tension, numbness, or constriction, those physical remnants of trauma, and we’ll process those as well, so your body too have access to a coherent sense of safety and emotional continuity. The trauma no longer dictates how you perceive situations, how you react, or who you are. It becomes a remembered event rather than an ongoing condition that defines your life.

Key Points:

• EMDR gently targets the original emotionally charged memories that are maintaining trauma responses
• Bilateral stimulation enables reprocessing without you having to relive the trauma or avoid it
• We work through linked trauma networks that may be stored across different times in your life
• Emotional recall becomes tolerable as your nervous system reclassifies the threat as belonging to the past
• Stabilisation and grounding techniques come first when dissociation or numbness is present
• I’ll carefully adjust our work to match your tolerance, keeping you within your capacity to regulate
• Negative beliefs about yourself are processed as integral parts of the trauma memory
• More adaptive ways of seeing yourself arise naturally from your body’s evidence of safety
• Working with body sensations releases stored physical tension and reestablishes connection with yourself
• The therapy achieves full memory integration, ending chronic reactivation and emotional fragmentation

You’ve carried this burden for long enough. This work honours what you’ve survived whilst offering a genuine path towards peace, integration, and a sense of safety in your own life and body.