If you’ve ever found yourself stuck in a painful pattern or reacting to current situations in ways that feel bigger than the moment calls for, you’re not alone. For many people, these patterns are the echoes of past trauma that never got the chance to heal properly. At Core Values Counseling, we offer something called EMDR — Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing — a powerful, evidence-based method that helps your brain reprocess trauma gently and effectively. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be taking a closer look at healing trauma gently with EMDR.
I was trained in what’s called “Safe, Somatic, and Attachment-Focused EMDR,” which means we pay special attention to how trauma lives in the body and how early attachment experiences have shaped your current responses. If you’ve read Bessel Van Der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, you know exactly what I mean: trauma isn’t just a memory, it’s a felt experience.
Many people with a wide range of experiences can benefit from EMDR. In this short video, I explain more about the origins of EMDR and who it can help.
One of the most powerful aspects of EMDR is that you don’t have to retell every painful memory. In fact, you don’t have to tell the whole story at all. We start with a current issue that’s bothering you and explore how it relates to your self-view and how it shows up in your body. Maybe you feel tension in your chest, a pit in your stomach, or a tight jaw. These body signals help guide the healing.
Using bilateral stimulation (like gentle vibrations in your hands, music that alternates between ears, or guided eye movements), we help your brain reprocess the trauma, literally. Research shows it doesn’t matter how we stimulate both sides of the brain — what matters is that we do. This bilateral process helps move the memory from the part of your brain that feels like the trauma is still happening into the part that recognizes it as something that happened in the past. That shift alone can bring immense relief.
EMDR also works beautifully in tandem with neurofeedback, another service we offer (learn more about it here and here). Both modalities help the brain recalibrate and support lasting healing. If you’re in the Portland, Oregon area and are in need of couples counseling, marriage therapy, depression therapy for yourself, neurofeedback, and more, EMDR can be a life-changing tool.
Most importantly, EMDR is gentle. It’s not about re-living pain — it’s about giving your body and mind a chance to process it differently, safely, and at your own pace. As your therapist, I’m simply here to create a safe space and walk beside you as you do this meaningful work.
I offer some more detail on what this looks like in this video:
In my next post, we’ll explore how attachment patterns influence your coping mechanisms — and how EMDR can help you build new, healthier ones.
Photo by Geon Tavares on Unsplash
