EMDR Therapy:
Attachment-Focused EMDR
When Memory Lives in the Body
Trauma doesn't always announce itself with flashbacks or nightmares. Sometimes it whispers through a racing heart when someone raises their voice. It surfaces as a knot in your stomach when you try to trust again. It shows up as that familiar feeling of bracing yourself for disappointment—even when logic tells you everything is fine.
This is what unprocessed trauma looks like. Not always dramatic. Often quiet. Always exhausting.
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) offers a way to metabolize these experiences—to help your nervous system finally digest what it couldn't process when it happened.
What Is EMDR?
EMDR is an evidence-based psychotherapy approach that helps your brain reprocess traumatic memories so they no longer hold the same emotional charge. Unlike traditional talk therapy, EMDR works with your brain's natural healing capacity through bilateral stimulation—typically guided eye movements, though we can also use tactile or auditory methods.
When something overwhelming happens, your brain's normal processing system can become disrupted. The memory gets stored in fragments—images, sensations, beliefs—without being fully integrated. This is why you might feel triggered years later, as if the event is happening now. Your brain hasn't recognized that the danger has passed.
EMDR helps your brain complete what it couldn't finish then. It allows these fragmented memories to be reprocessed and stored appropriately—as something that happened in the past, not something that defines your present or threatens your future.
Attachment-Focused EMDR: Healing Relational Wounds
Traditional EMDR was designed primarily for single-incident trauma: car accidents, natural disasters, isolated traumatic events. But what about the wounds that didn't happen in a moment—but over months, years, or a lifetime?
This is where Attachment-Focused EMDR becomes transformative.
Attachment trauma lives differently in the nervous system. It's woven into how you learned to relate to others, how you perceive safety, how you understand your own worth. These wounds weren't created by one event—they were built through patterns of abandonment, inconsistency, emotional neglect, or enmeshment.
Attachment-Focused EMDR addresses the relational scaffolding of your trauma. We don't just target specific memories; we work with the attachment system itself—the beliefs, body sensations, and survival strategies you developed to cope with unreliable or harmful caregiving.
This approach recognizes that healing relationship trauma requires more than processing individual incidents. It requires rewiring how your nervous system learned to attach, trust, and regulate in the context of connection with others.
What Attachment-Focused EMDR Addresses
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Childhood Emotional Neglect
When your feelings were dismissed, minimized, or ignored, your nervous system learned that your internal experience doesn't matter. We target these implicit memories—the ones you might not even consciously remember but that shaped how you relate to your own emotions.
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Insecure Attachment Patterns
Whether you learned to be anxiously vigilant, avoidantly self-sufficient, or disorganized in your relationships, these patterns live in your body. EMDR helps reprocess the experiences that taught you love isn't safe or reliable.
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Narcissistic Abuse and Trauma Bonds
The intermittent reinforcement of narcissistic relationships creates powerful neurological patterns. We work with both the traumatic incidents and the underlying attachment wounds that made you vulnerable to this dynamic.
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Betrayal Trauma
When someone you trusted violated that trust, it doesn't just create a memory—it fractures your ability to trust yourself and others. EMDR helps metabolize both the betrayal event and the relational template it disrupted.
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Complex PTSD
When trauma was chronic, ongoing, and relational, it impacts every layer of your system. Attachment-Focused EMDR addresses the developmental wounds underneath your symptoms.
How EMDR Works in Our Practice
When the vagus nerve relaxes, the heart opens. This isn't just poetry—it's physiology.
EMDR works directly with your nervous system's capacity to regulate, integrate, and heal.
In our sessions, we'll work together to:
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Build Resources First
Before processing trauma, we strengthen your capacity for regulation. We install positive memories, develop internal resources, and ensure you have tools for managing activation. Safety is the soil of transformation.
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Identify Target Memories
We'll map the landscape of your attachment history—not just the "big" traumas, but the moments that taught your nervous system its rules about connection, safety, and worth.
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Process With Bilateral Stimulation
As you hold the memory in awareness, bilateral stimulation (typically eye movements) helps your brain reprocess the experience. You might notice shifts in how you see the memory, changes in body sensations, or emerging insights. Your brain is doing what it was designed to do—heal.
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Install New Neural Pathways
As we reprocess old wounds, we simultaneously strengthen new patterns. Your nervous system learns that you can feel without fragmenting. That you can remember without being consumed. That safety is possible, even in the presence of difficult emotions.
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Integrate and Ground
Each session ends with grounding and stabilization. You leave feeling resourced, not raw.
The Science and Soul of EMDR
Neuroplasticity is the body's faith in second chances. Your brain's ability to rewire itself means that the patterns formed in survival aren't permanent. They're just well-practiced.
EMDR leverages your brain's natural healing mechanisms. During REM sleep, your eyes move bilaterally as your brain processes the day's experiences. EMDR mimics this natural process in a conscious, directed way—allowing you to metabolize what your system couldn't process on its own.
But EMDR is more than neuroscience. It's an invitation to witness your own resilience. To see that what you thought was brokenness was actually adaptation. To recognize that healing isn't about becoming someone new—it's remembering who you were before you learned to protect yourself from connection.
Who Benefits From Attachment-Focused EMDR
You might benefit from this approach if you:
Keep repeating the same relationship patterns despite knowing better
Feel disconnected from your body or emotions
Experience anxiety or panic in intimate relationships
Struggle to trust your own judgment about people
Have a history of childhood emotional neglect or inconsistent caregiving
Are healing from narcissistic abuse or trauma bonding
Feel like you're constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop
Know intellectually you're safe, but your body doesn't believe it
What Healing Looks Like
Healing isn't linear, and it doesn't look the same for everyone. But clients often describe:
A sense of spaciousness where there was once constriction. The ability to feel their feelings without being overwhelmed by them. A newfound capacity to recognize red flags before ignoring them. The quiet confidence that comes from trusting their own perceptions again.
They notice they can set boundaries without guilt. They realize they're no longer scanning every room for danger. They discover that peace isn't foreign—it's just been waiting for permission to return.
Beginning the Journey
If you've lived in survival mode, even peace feels foreign. Healing begins the moment you let your body know it's safe to rest.
EMDR offers a pathway back to yourself—one that honors both the pain you've carried and the resilience that brought you here. Together, we'll help your nervous system complete what it couldn't finish then, so you can finally live fully now.
Your alignment is your liberation. And it begins with a single session.