EMDR Therapy
Virtual therapy in California, New York, and Connecticut
My practice now centers on Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR), and I no longer offer EMDR. EMDR remains a valuable approach for many people, so I've kept this page to share how it works. If you're curious how the two compare, or why I made the shift, you can read DBR vs. EMDR or learn more about how I practice DBR.
Anna Huff, PhD.
HOW IT WORKS
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) works by engaging the brain’s natural processing capacity through bilateral stimulation: typically eye movements, alternating taps, or sound. This allows the individual to do what they couldn’t do at the time of a difficult experience, which is to metabolize the experience, rather than store it as unfinished business.
What makes it different from talk therapy is that it works directly with how an experience is held, not just how it’s understood. You don’t have to narrate in detail or construct insight for something to shift. The processing happens at a different level than language.
EMDR is a way of working directly with what’s stored: the charge inside old experiences, the patterns that formed and calcified, and what was inherited and never examined. The aim is not to reframe the past but to clear what it continues to do in the present.
WHO THIS IS FOR
Some people arrive knowing exactly what they’re carrying. Others know only that something persists in the way they respond, in the way they shut down, or in the way certain things never quite resolve no matter how much they understand them. Both of these are workable starting points.
People come here with childhood wounds, relational injuries, and losses that never fully processed. They also come with things that are harder to name; a weight that feels older than conscious awareness can track, inner experiences that were real but never integrated, or a sense of themselves they can touch in certain moments but cannot sustain in the ordinary movement of their day. Some are early in their inner work. Others have been at it for years and have come up against something that hasn’t yielded.
What these different presentations share is that they haven’t resolved through understanding alone. Something more direct is needed that meets them where they actually live.
WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT
The charge inside old memories and patterns begins to loosen. What the body has been holding starts to move. Patterns that have repeated across relationships and across years become traceable and then, gradually, changeable. What was inherited but never belonged to you becomes distinguishable from what is actually yours.
EMDR is individualized and attends to what is present rather than imposing a map of how healing is supposed to go. Some of what shifts will be immediate and felt. Other changes will become clear in retrospect, such as noticing that a conversation that once would have undone you is no longer an issue or that you respond to something difficult from a place of strength and integrity without having to work for it.
What tends to emerge over time is more ground, the ability to be with hard things without being taken over by them, and a relationship with yourself that feels less managed and more inhabited. Not a new self, but more of the one that was always there.