You addressed this in therapy before, and you addressed it honestly. The emotionally unavailable caregivers, the bullying at school, the partner who cheated on you: all of it got named out loud.
Then you went home and nothing was different. The insight was accurate, and it never reached the core of how you think and feel about yourself. The sentence that arrives with it has not changed either: you do not measure up.
What is over does not feel over. Someone uses a tone you have heard before, and something in you answers before you have decided anything.
You are mid-sentence with someone you love, and then you have gone back to an afternoon that ended years ago. Then you return and apologize for a reaction nobody can account for, including you.
The event ended. The response it taught your body did not.
Nothing about that reaction is irrational. While those events were happening, that response fit the situation exactly.
What I see is someone who understands their own history and is not helped by understanding it. Insight arrives in words, and what you live with was not built from words.
EMDR is an empirically based therapy that desensitizes a distressing event and then reprocesses it. The event still happened, and your brain and body no longer hold the emotionality of it.
Desensitizing is the part that answers the ambush. The charge that fires ahead of your thinking has been running those moments, and this work brings it down.
Reprocessing is what follows. Your brain works the memory through on its own adaptive terms, and the event takes its place in the past. That is the aim: your nervous system catching up to what you have known for years.
Both steps run on bilateral stimulation. While you bring the event to mind, your eyes follow a point crossing back and forth in front of you. Alternating taps and alternating tones do the same work, and if the eye movements do not suit you, we use those instead.
I’m certified in EMDR, and I will not pretend this is comfortable. Going back to an event on purpose asks something of you, and that hour is where the change gets made.
Nothing gets processed before you say so. You’ll hear what EMDR involves and get your questions answered first, and the talking continues throughout. If it is not right for you, the work goes another way.
A tone comes up again in a kitchen conversation that does not matter. The thing that used to answer ahead of your thinking does not answer. You stay in the sentence you were in, and hours later you notice nothing pulled you anywhere.
The worry, the anxiousness and the sadness those old events feed come down with them. What happened stays your history, and it stops being your afternoon.
The change you want shows up in a small moment you almost miss. Start your free consultation with one call or one email: (ABC) DEF-GHIJ, or greatfrontierscs@gmail.com.
We’ll talk about what keeps reaching you, and I’ll explain how EMDR would approach it.
Talking about your stress and trauma with someone new is a scary thing to do, especially the first time.
I’ve sat in the client’s chair more than once myself, so I know how much that first call asks of you.
Call me at (904) 254-8421 or email greatfrontierscs@gmail.com for a free consultation. I’ll explain how EMDR works, and we can talk about the belief you’d most like to change.