Approach

The methods I use, and what each one is for.

Therapists often list acronyms without explaining them, which leaves you guessing. Here is what each approach is, what it is good at, and what it means for you in a session. I'm integrative, so the method gets matched to the person and the problem, not the other way around. And underneath every one of these methods is the question I am really working on with you. What have you decided all of this means about you?

EMDR

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing

EMDRIA-approved training · 500+ EMDR sessions
What it is, and who it's for
What it is
A structured, eight-phase therapy that helps the brain reprocess distressing memories. You hold a piece of a memory in mind while doing bilateral stimulation, following a moving dot with your eyes or gentle alternating taps, and then briefly report what came up. Repeated in short sets.
Best for
PTSD, single-incident trauma, complex trauma, distressing memories, and the anxiety and panic that grow out of them.
Why it helps
It reduces the emotional charge of a memory rather than just your reaction to it, so the past stops feeling present. It's also one of the few approaches that works without you having to narrate every detail out loud, which matters enormously if retelling the story is unbearable.

EFIT

Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy

Trained
What it is, and who it's for
What it is
An attachment-based model from the same lineage as Emotionally Focused Therapy for couples. It works with the strategies you developed early on to stay safe in close relationships, and how those strategies still run today, often long after they stopped helping.
Best for
Anxious and avoidant attachment, repeating relationship patterns, emotional distance, codependency and people-pleasing, childhood emotional neglect, and betrayal trauma.
Why it helps
It changes what you expect from people, not just how you cope with them. Where EMDR drains the charge from specific memories, EFIT reshapes the relational pattern underneath. That's why the two are often used together.

TF-CBT

Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Trained
What it is, and who it's for
What it is
A structured, well-researched trauma protocol combining coping and regulation skills, gradual processing of the trauma, and correction of the distorted beliefs trauma leaves behind, thoughts like it was my fault, or I should have stopped it.
Best for
PTSD and trauma where distorted beliefs, shame, and self-blame are doing much of the damage.
Why it helps
It gives you concrete skills early, so you have something to hold onto from the first weeks, and it directly dismantles the self-blame that keeps trauma locked in place.

CBT

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Trained
What it is, and who it's for
What it is
The most extensively studied therapy there is. It maps the loop between what you think, how you feel and what you then do, then intervenes where the loop is most changeable.
Best for
Anxiety, depression, rumination, panic, insomnia, and unhelpful thinking habits.
Why it helps
Fast and practical. You leave with tools you can use the same week, and you can usually tell whether it's working.

ACT

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

Practices with
What it is, and who it's for
What it is
Rather than fighting to eliminate difficult thoughts and feelings, ACT builds your capacity to have them without being run by them, then organizes your actions around what you value.
Best for
Chronic anxiety, avoidance, perfectionism, grief, and the exhausting effort of trying to control feelings that will not be controlled.
Why it helps
It ends the war with your own mind. Especially useful when you have already tried to think your way out and found that fighting the feeling made it louder.

Meaning and choice

Existential, meaning-centered and reality-based work

Core orientation
What it is, and who it's for
What it is
Two related orientations that sit underneath how I work. The first is pragmatic: what are you actually doing, and is it getting you what you want? The second engages the larger questions of meaning, freedom, responsibility, and who you are when an old framework stops fitting.
Best for
Feeling stuck or passive, decision paralysis, faith transitions and identity shifts, grief, midlife reassessment, and repeating behavior you already know isn't working.
Why it helps
This is the layer I care most about. A technique can take the charge off a memory; meaning changes what you believe that memory says about you, and that is the part that tends to hold. It also treats you as capable rather than damaged, and it keeps the life-transitions work substantive instead of merely supportive.
Putting it together

How they fit together

In practice these are not separate treatments you choose between. A typical course might start with CBT and ACT skills so you are steadier week to week, move into EMDR once there is enough stability to process specific memories, use EFIT to work on the relational patterns those memories created, and draw on meaning and choice work to decide what you actually want to do differently. I'll tell you which one I'm using and why. You should never have to guess what's happening in your own therapy.

The question everyone asks

What actually happens in an EMDR session

This is the question people ask most, and most descriptions online are uselessly vague. Here's the practical version.

01

History and targets

First you map what's going on and pick specific targets: a memory, an image, a belief like "I'm not safe." Nothing gets reprocessed on day one.

02

Building resources first

Before touching anything hard, you build tools to settle your system: grounding, a mental "safe place," and a clear signal to stop. You always have the brakes.

03

Reprocessing

You hold a piece of the memory in mind while doing bilateral stimulation, usually following a moving dot or light with your eyes, or gentle alternating taps. Then you notice whatever comes up and report it briefly. That's the loop, repeated in short sets.

04

Noticing the shift

Over sets, the memory typically gets less vivid and less charged. People often describe it as the event moving from feeling like now to feeling like then.

05

Closing down

Every session ends on purpose, with time to get back to grounded and settled before you log off. You don't get left raw.

You stay awake, aware and in control the whole time. It isn't hypnosis and you can stop any set. You don't have to narrate every detail out loud, which is a large part of why EMDR works for people who can't bear to retell their story. Processing often continues for a day or two afterward, which is why the closing step matters.

Wondering which of these applies to you? That's what the free consult is for.

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Attachment work

What attachment work means

EMDR gets most of the attention, but a good share of the work here is attachment-based, and that phrase deserves an explanation rather than an acronym.

I'm trained in Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT), which comes out of the same body of work as Emotionally Focused Therapy for couples. Its premise is simple. Humans are wired for connection, and the strategies you developed early on to stay safe in your closest relationships are still running today, usually long after they stopped being useful.

In practice that means if you learned that needing things got you dismissed, you may have become someone who needs nothing and feels quietly empty. If closeness came with unpredictability, you may reach for reassurance constantly and hate yourself for it. If nobody was curious about your inner life, you may genuinely not know what you feel, and read that as being broken rather than trained.

The work is to see the pattern clearly, understand what it was protecting you from, and then build a different experience of what closeness can be, starting inside the therapy relationship, where it's safe enough to practice. It pairs naturally with EMDR. Where EMDR takes the charge out of specific memories, attachment work changes what you expect from people now.

The evidence

Does it work?

Worth asking before you spend money on anything. EMDR has been evaluated in more than 30 randomized controlled trials. In studies of single-event trauma, several trials found that a large majority of participants no longer met the criteria for PTSD after roughly three to eight sessions. It is recommended for PTSD by the World Health Organization and in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs / Department of Defense clinical practice guidelines, and it is used routinely with veterans and first responders.

Two caveats. Those figures come from studies of single-incident trauma in adults, and complex or repeated trauma generally takes longer. That's why the work here is organized into reviewed chapters instead of promised in a fixed number of sessions. And nobody can guarantee an outcome. Any therapist who does should worry you.

Where these claims come from

What tends to change, and roughly when

In my experience, most people notice something in the first three or four weeks, usually sleep, or a short fuse getting slightly longer. Around week six, the memory we've been working on often stops arriving uninvited. By the end of a block, the more common report is that it feels like something that happened instead of something happening. Some people move faster. Some move slower, particularly with a long and layered history, and that is not a failure on anyone's part.

Safety and pacing

What happens if it gets overwhelming

That's a fair worry, and I hear it often, especially about video. You'll agree on a stop signal before any reprocessing begins, and using it is expected. If you get flooded, dissociate or go numb, the session shifts to grounding until you're settled. That's part of the method. Before starting, you'll also confirm practical details: that you're somewhere private, who to contact locally in an emergency, and where you are physically, in case help is ever needed. Pacing is set by your nervous system, not by a calendar.

Not sure which of this applies to you?

That's a good reason to book a free consult. Describe what's going on and I'll tell you what I'd suggest and why.

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