EMDR Therapy in Denver, CO.
Release Old trauma, get unstuck
Somatic, Relational EMDR Therapy
EMDR therapy allows us to heal through trauma, not just understand it.
You may already know why you react the way you do. You can trace the patterns back, name the wounds, and understand how your past shaped you.
And even with all the insight, effort, and readiness for change in the world, some part of you may still feel stuck.
That gap between what you know and what you actually feel can be incredibly discouraging, especially when you’ve already done so much work.
EMDR gives us a way to lean into the parts of your experience that insight alone hasn’t been able to shift. Rather than just talking about the past, EMDR uses your brain’s natural healing capacities to reprocess and release it.
I often think of this as changing the lens through which you experience yourself, your relationships, and the world around you. Trauma can shape that lens for years. But as those experiences are reprocessed, you begin responding to the present from who you are today, rather than through the imprint of what happened to you in the past.
emdr Therapy Can Help You Heal From:
Perfectionism
Overthinking
Intrusive Thoughts
Social Anxiety
People Pleasing
Self Doubt
Relationship Anxiety
Physical Anxiety
Perfectionism Overthinking Intrusive Thoughts Social Anxiety People Pleasing Self Doubt Relationship Anxiety Physical Anxiety
EMDR Can Help You
Bridge the gap between your mind and your body, transforming intellectual self-awareness into an embodied sense of calm, safety, and self-compassion.
Shift old attachment wounds and fears of abandonment so you can stay connected to yourself while building secure, deep connections with others.
Soften deep-seated survival beliefs - like "I have to do it all alone" or "I am too much" - and integrate a sense of confidence and interdependence.
Release stored trauma from your nervous system, allowing your body to finally step out of high-alert, chronic over-functioning, or shutdown.
Feel more grounded, open, and fully yourself in the life and relationships you’ve worked so hard to cultivate.
EMDR for Childhood Trauma and Attachment Wounds
Childhood attachment trauma is layered, chronic, and can sometimes even be subtle. It develops over time, across many repeated experiences of not feeling emotionally safe, understood, or protected.
It can look like growing up with caregivers who were:
Emotionally unavailable: Your feelings were minimized, ignored, redirected, or met with discomfort rather than curiosity and care.
Unpredictable: Warm and connected one moment, critical, withdrawn, angry, or overwhelmed the next.
Highly critical or controlling: Mistakes, disagreement, independence, or emotional expression came with shame, tension, or the fear of disappointing someone.
Reliant on you emotionally: You became the listener, peacekeeper, confidant, or responsible one long before you were developmentally ready for that role.
Unable to repair: Conflict, hurt, or disconnection happened without someone coming back to acknowledge what occurred and help restore a sense of safety.
Present in practical ways but emotionally misattuned: You may have been loved, provided for, and cared about while still feeling deeply alone with your inner world.
When these are the experiences that created your earliest mold for connection with yourself and others, the impact that’s left can be vast: stay small, stay useful, don’t need too much, keep everyone okay, prepare to be hurt, people never stay.
Healing the source, not just the symptoms.
EMDR helps us trace present-day patterns back to the experiences that first gave them meaning. During EMDR, we help your mind and body gently float back to the core memories underlying the anxiety, shame, relationship struggles, or self-doubt you’re experiencing now.
Through reprocessing, those early experiences begin to lose their grip on how you relate to yourself and the people you’re connected with. Old beliefs begin to update, your body can settle into a greater sense of safety and agency, and you’re more free to trust yourself, stay rooted in your needs, love deeply, and move through life from a more embodied, authentic place.
Breaking the cycle in your family today.
Tending to your inner child not only supports your wellbeing, it also impacts what gets carried forward - and what gets left behind. It’s entirely possible to create a new legacy of love, respect, honesty, and connection in your family, which will trickle down for generations to come.
what emdr therapy looks like with us
We use EMDR as one part of a relational, body-aware process rather than a strict protocol to move through. The structure is there to support us, while your needs, readiness, and nervous system guide the work.
building our home base together
01.
our foundation for deeper work.
Our first step is to foster our relationship with one another. Nothing positive comes from being rushed, and in trauma therapy, it can actually create a lot of harm. It’s important for us to know each other, be able to track and name what’s happening between us, and understand what helps you feel safe enough to stay connected when the work gets hard. Together, we’ll co-create a container that feels steady, supportive, and responsive enough to hold whatever comes up. Going deep is much more possible when your body knows you don’t have to go there alone.
connecting past to present
02.
finding the root.
Sometimes the memories connected to what you’re struggling with now are obvious, and other times, they aren’t. In EMDR, we may use a “float back” to follow a present-day feeling, body sensation, belief, or reaction backward and see what earlier experiences your brain and body naturally link it to. That can bring us directly to some of your heaviest pain, or uncover a memory that once seemed insignificant or barely worth mentioning. It can be illuminating to discover how much weight those smaller moments have been carrying. This is how we identify what we “target” in the reprocessing stage of EMDR.
reprocessing what happened to you
03.
accessing your body’s innate capacity to heal.
This is the EMDR-specific part. We use bilateral stimulation (BLS), gentle buzzers in your hands and/or alternating lights you follow with your eyes, while you stay connected to the image and felt experience of a target memory. Your only role is to notice what happens inside.Big waves of grief, anger, fear, or relief may come forward and need space to move through your mind and body fully. We stay closely with you, helping you remain anchored in the present while one foot touches into the past. As the memory reprocesses, images may shift, tension may soften, or beliefs that once felt deeply resonant may begin to loosen. Our aim is to reduce the emotional charge of the memory so it no longer feels as active in the present.
integrating the change
04.
ensuring that transformation isn’t fleeting.
Processing the past is only part of the work. The other half is helping your nervous system fully take in what’s new and good now, so the shift doesn’t start and end in session together, and instead trickles down into your daily life. We’ll slow down and notice what feels different. It may look like more ease in your body, a new sense of compassion, or a stronger felt sense of your own agency. Using EMDR, we help strengthen any new beliefs, check for any places in your body that still feel activated, and begin imagining how you might move through life and relationships from this more grounded place.
EMDR Resources and Reflections
responsive, connection-centered care
Our Integrative Approach to EMDR
EMDR can be a powerful part of many trauma healing journeys, but we don’t see it as the end all, be all of trauma treatment. Our approach is flexible, relational, and responsive to what you need in each given moment - whether that be a dose of EMDR or another trauma therapy modality entirely.
emdr is just one tool in our toolbox
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We’ve found that, when applied rigidly or as the only approach, EMDR can sometimes fall flat - missing you in parts of your experience, or leaving you in the same felt sense of aloneness that often accompanies trauma in the first place. This is especially true for clients with complex trauma, where healing is rarely neat or linear. Treating EMDR as one flexible instrument inside a larger toolbox ensures your care remains dynamic and attuned to your unique needs at each stage of our work together.
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We weave EMDR into the broader foundation of our work as it’s helpful for each individual client. We also integrate other trauma approaches - like AEDP and parts work/IFS - directly into the EMDR framework itself, allowing us to tailor your EMDR experience completely to you. We may use EMDR for some parts of your experience and not others, get creative with how we mold and adapt it to your process vs following a strict formula, or stop using it entirely depending on what’s feeling right for you.
our relationship still leads
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We could talk about this endlessly. The relationship you have with your therapist is one of the most central parts of healing, especially when your trauma happened in relationships. EMDR can be powerful, but the technique itself is never more important than feeling known, supported, and emotionally accompanied through the work.
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More cut and dry approaches to EMDR can feel a bit clinical or distant, and in some ways that’s by design. We’ve adapted our approach. Rather than simply applying the technique and stepping back, we stay actively engaged and show up as part of the process with you. We track your body’s cues and stay close, offering gentle, consistent reminders that you’re not in it alone. Whatever emerges during processing, we help hold it with you. The relationship remains the home base we return to, even in the most structured parts of EMDR.
your nervous system sets the pace
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Trauma often teaches us to override ourselves. To push through discomfort, disconnect from what we need, and keep going no matter how many signals our body is giving us that it’s too much. Therapy should never recreate that dynamic. Your system deserves to be listened to, not pushed past. And this is part of what makes deeper trauma work possible in the first place. EMDR works best when there is enough safety and choice for your body and mind to stay engaged, not when you’re forcing yourself through the process for the sake of “doing EMDR.”
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We don’t jump into deep trauma processing right away, and when we do lean in, we pay close attention to your body as our compass. We track the parts of you that hesitate, go blank, intellectualize, pull away, or simply say “not yet.” Those responses aren’t “resistance.” They’re information, and we listen to them closely as a guide for where we go next. We’ll set intentional, flexible pacing, and we can always pause, shift gears, or step away from EMDR altogether when that’s what feels right.
Frequently Asked Questions | EMDR Therapy in Denver
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Research shows that virtual EMDR is just as clinically effective as in-person EMDR for processing trauma. Both formats follow the exact same structured protocol and bilateral stimulation techniques, and neither is inherently "better"—the right choice comes down to what feels most comfortable, accessible, and convenient for you.
Since 2020, well over half of our practice has been online, and we are deeply confident in our ability to bring the exact same presence, quality of care, and emotional attunement across a screen as we do in our office. During your consultation, we can talk through your preferences and needs and explore what feels best.
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Not at all. One of the most supportive aspects of EMDR is that you don’t have to recount your entire story out loud or relive every painful detail to heal from it.
You will never be pushed to share more than feels right, and we will work intentionally to keep you from feeling flooded or overwhelmed. Instead, we’ll focus on what feels safe enough to stay with - whether that’s a core memory, a physical sensation in your body, or an underlying belief like "I'm not safe" or "It was my fault."
We stay anchored in the safety of the room together while your brain does the reprocessing work. You control the pace, and you only share as much detail as you feel comfortable with.
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EMDR is designed to be a highly efficient, focused modality, but there is no one-size-fits-all timeline.
If we’re working through a single, isolated event, processing can sometimes happen in a handful of sessions. That being said, a majority of our clients come to us for support with deep, longstanding attachment trauma.
If we’re unpacking and disentangling years of complex attachment wounding, our processs will take more time. Your hurt didn’t happen overnight, and we can’t expect healing to happen quickly either. You deserve the spaciousness, patience, and care necessary to meet yourself - and be met - in the places that haven't had support. We’re in it with you for as long as it takes.
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It’s very real, and it’s a sign that your brain’s natural healing system is doing its job! After a session, your brain continues to reprocess and organize information in the background - much like how your muscles feel sore after a workout, especially when you’re moving them in a new way.
You might feel a bit emotionally tender, physically tired, or notice vivid dreams over the next day or two as things settle. Before we ever start processing heavy memories, we spend time grounding, helping you connect to your nervous system, and finding ways to self soothe that resonate with you. We’ll tap into these rituals together at the end of each session and they are available to you throughout the week to utilize as you need.
While it’s always nice to have the rest of the day to yourself after an EMDR session, we know that’s not always possible, and it’s usually not necessary. You shouldn’t ever feel like you’re leaving an EMDR session completely undone and dysregulated, and we will always check in intentionally around where you’re at before wrapping up our session.
Begin EMDR Therapy in Denver
We want you to find the best fit therapist for you. We’ll start with a complimentary consultation call, where you can connect directly with the therapist of your choice, share what’s bringing you here, and get a feel for whether we’re the right fit.
We offer EMDR therapy in person in Denver and online across Colorado, Washington, Rhode Island, and Indiana.