Eye Movement Desensitisation Reprocessing therapy

I am trained in utilising Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy as an evidence-based and highly successful psychotherapeutic treatment. It can help you to process and recover from stand alone or recurrent traumatic past experiences that are affecting your mental health and wellbeing in the present.

In my therapy practice I draw on EMDR to help you re-process the negative emotions, beliefs, images and body sensations associated with your traumatic memories that seem to be “stuck” when past sensations are re-lived in the present. With EMDR therapy, I will be able to support you with a wide range of mental health difficulties including anxiety, depression, addictions, phobias, developmental trauma, attachment issues, or stand alone events like an accident or time spent in the hospital.

Traumatic experiences can happen at any life stage leaving emotional, psychological, and physiological scars which can impact your quality of life. The trauma is not just what happened to you, but the "fallout" of how the trauma affected your nervous system, and the behaviours, thoughts and survival mechanisms you then developed to help you cope.

With EMDR, the change in perspective comes from within, and the transformative changes can be remarkable in how you will feel; perhaps from feelings of discomfort, shame, lack of motivation, excessive worry, tiredness, loss of joy, flashbacks or intrusive thoughts to calmness and empowerment. I encourage the EMDR approach where I feel it to be useful as it tackles such a wide range of presenting issues and has longevity in its positive outcomes as we also look at present and future triggers and offer therapy preventatively.

By using bi-lateral stimulation such as eye movements, tapping or alternating sounds, the traumatic memories can be focused upon and then re-processed and stored adaptively away in your memory. EMDR is a way of kickstarting your natural healing and recovery process after your trauma.

Attachment focused EMDR emphasises the importance of acknowledging early childhood developmental trauma, and the importance of the healing that happens in the therapeutic counselling relationship, also drawing on the client’s inner resources and by focusing on the client’s attachment issues.

I use EMDR in my therapy practice as it is a way of kickstarting your natural healing and recovery process after your trauma.
As your therapist I will be walking alongside you as you heal from the inside.

If you are contacting me for EMDR therapy, the first sessions will be the assessment and history taking to confirm EMDR’s suitability for yourself. We would also spend time ensuring you have appropriate containing, stabilising and grounding resources to draw upon. We also discuss your expectations for the therapy, any possible limitations and the way the therapy may impact you before we start the different EMDR stages.

I would introduce you to basic theory of EMDR and you could explore any questions or concerns you may have. The quality of our counselling relationship is essential for you to feel secure, heard, your needs met, and held in the therapy process. The early sessions are important for establishing that.

So if you feel you’d like to bring clarity to your situation, change or accept your feelings about yourself and your life, or would just like to cope and feel more content, or be free of past intrusive memories contact me for a free initial consultation.

Costs for EMDR therapy are from £85 for 50 minutes and £130 for 90 minutes at my therapy room in BS16 1JT.

Our first EMDR session

I am a member of BACP and abide by its Code of Ethics (2016). I attend regular EMDR supervision to ensure my counselling work is both effective and ethical. I also undergo training and development in the approach of EMDR in order to hone my counselling skills and I am currently working towards accreditation as practitioner. EMDR is recommended by the World Health Organisation and the National Institute for Excellence.