EMDR Therapy
Virtual therapy in California and New York
“Most of what people are working with isn’t really theirs. It’s inherited, protective, or formed long before they had any say. EMDR allows those layers to move. What’s underneath was never the problem.”
– Anna Huff, PhD.
EMDR Therapy: Clearing What the Mind Alone Can’t Touch
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 nervous system to do what it couldn’t do at the time of a difficult experience, which is to metabolize it, 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 in the body and nervous system, 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.
Some things don’t respond to insight not because the insight isn’t good, but because what’s stored in the body and nervous system operates by different laws than insight does. EMDR allows for insight, and yet, it also allows a releasing of what was left behind.
EMDR is a way of working directly with what’s stored: the charge inside old experiences, the patterns that formed early and calcified, 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 type of therapy 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 works at the level where the material actually lives.
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 was no longer an issue or that you responded 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.
I work within an understanding that a person is not reducible to their psychology. Developmental history, the body, what was transmitted across generations, and the subtler dimensions of who someone is all matter. These are not separate domains. They inform each other continuously, and the work I do reflects that.
EMDR is held within that broader frame and from an understanding that trauma lives in the body, in relational patterns, and sometimes in layers that predate conscious memory. Working with all of it, rather than one dimension at a time, is what makes the difference.
If something remains unresolved at the center of your life despite genuine prior effort that is worth taking seriously. Not because what came before was insufficient, but because some things require a different kind of contact to shift. This is a space for that kind of contact.
Why Awaken Psyche?
EMDR’s Eight Stages:
History and orientation: Understanding your history and what you’re working toward.
Preparation: Building internal resources and stability to support deeper processing.
Assessment: Identifying a specific memory or pattern.
Desensitization: Processing using bilateral stimulation until the emotional and physical charge settles.
Installation: Strengthening what’s actually true about you in place of what the wound taught you to believe.
Body scan: Checking whether anything remains held in the body after processing.
Closure: Returning you to equilibrium before the session ends, whether processing is complete or not.
Reevaluation: At the start of the next session, we assess what shifted, what held, and where to go from there.