EMDR Therapy in San Diego

What EMDR is

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It's a structured, research-supported psychotherapy developed in the late 1980s, and it appears in major clinical practice guidelines for post-traumatic stress — including those of the American Psychological Association, the World Health Organization, and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

The working idea is simple to state: when something overwhelming happens, the memory can be stored in the nervous system in an unprocessed, stuck form. Years later, that stored material keeps getting triggered — as anxiety that won't reason away, as outsized reactions in relationships, as a body that won't settle even when life is objectively fine. In EMDR, you hold a specific target memory in mind while following bilateral stimulation — usually guided eye movements, sometimes tapping or tones. That pairing appears to help the brain reprocess the memory so it can finally be stored as something that happened, rather than something that is still happening.

Two things EMDR is not: it is not hypnosis — you stay fully awake, aware, and in control the entire time — and it does not erase memories. It changes how a memory is held, so it stops running the show.

What an EMDR session actually looks like

EMDR is an eight-phase approach, and most of it is not eye movements. The early phases are history-taking, treatment planning, and — critically — preparation: building the stabilization and self-regulation skills you'll need before any memory work begins. With childhood and developmental trauma, this preparation phase is substantial, and rushing it is the most common way EMDR goes wrong.

In a reprocessing session, you bring up a specific target memory along with the negative belief attached to it — "I'm not safe," "It was my fault," "I'm too much" — while following short sets of bilateral stimulation. Between sets, you briefly notice whatever surfaced: an image, a body sensation, a thought, an emotion. We follow where your system takes it. You are never required to narrate the event in detail for the processing to work.

The pace is set by your nervous system, not a protocol. We slow down, return to resourcing, or stop entirely whenever your system says so — that isn't a failure of the method; it is the method.

What EMDR helps with

In my practice, EMDR shows up most often in four kinds of work.

For adult survivors of childhood and developmental trauma, EMDR targets the early experiences that still set the terms — in trust, in conflict, in how safe your own body feels — with a heavy emphasis on preparation and pacing.

For high-achieving professionals whose anxiety has outlasted their coping, EMDR can address the specific formative experiences the over-preparation and relentless standards have been protecting against, rather than just managing symptoms.

For couples where one partner carries unresolved trauma, individual reprocessing work can sit alongside couples work, so the trauma and the relationship around it are treated as one picture instead of two separate problems.

And for relationship and attachment injuries — betrayal, abandonment, the experiences that make closeness feel dangerous — EMDR offers a way to reprocess the injury itself while the attachment-focused work rebuilds what connection can feel like.

My training, and how I integrate EMDR

I have completed basic training in EMDR — the foundational, consultation-supported training in the full eight-phase protocol. I am EMDR-trained, not EMDRIA-certified, and I'd rather you know exactly what that distinction means before you choose a therapist; there's a plain-language breakdown in the FAQ below.

I don't practice EMDR as a standalone technique. It's integrated into a broader trauma-focused, attachment-informed approach: for some clients, reprocessing becomes a central part of our work; for others, it plays a smaller role alongside relational and somatically aware methods. The method serves the work, not the other way around.

I'm an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist (AMFT #159580), and every case I carry — including all trauma-focused work involving EMDR — is reviewed in formal clinical supervision with Dr. Jason N. Linder, PsyD. For trauma work in particular, a second, doctoral-level clinical perspective on your care is a structural safeguard, not a footnote.