You’ve done the work of understanding what happened to you.
You can lay out the timeline, the people involved, why it landed on you the way it did.
Then a voice takes a certain tone in a meeting, or a car door slams behind you, and the whole thing arrives in your body as though no time has passed.
The understanding never reached the part of you that reacts.
Ordinary memories get filed away.
Something happens. Your brain sorts it, dates it, and stores it where you can reach for it when you want it.
Traumatic memories stay out on the desk, scattered across every surface, so that touching anything at all means touching them again.
That’s why the fear, the shame, and the sudden flood of grief arrive without warning years later.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is an evidence-based trauma therapy that helps your brain file those memories where they belong.
The work happens through bilateral stimulation: side-to-side eye movements, gentle tapping, or alternating tones that occupy part of your attention while you hold the memory in mind.
The charge drains out of the memory as your brain processes it, so it stops landing in your body as though it were happening now.
And it works without you recounting every detail out loud.
I spent 14 years at the VA, where colleagues of Francine Shapiro trained me in EMDR, and where the complex trauma that came through my door was as severe as it gets.
People came to me with combat trauma, with childhood sexual abuse, with violence inside their own homes.
Whatever you’ve been protecting your family from hearing, you can say it in my office without watching my face for a reaction.
Before we open anything painful, you’ll learn ways to settle your own body: grounding, breath, and simple attention practices.
You’ll have a way back to the present before you ever need one.
The two of us work on an emotional level, at the pace your body sets.
There’s no homework here, and nothing to practice between sessions.
The memory stays.
What changes is its grip: you recall what happened, and it stays in the past tense, dated and finished.
Beliefs shift along with it, so that “I am not worthy” gradually gives way to something you feel rather than argue with: “I deserve to be loved.”
The people who live with you get more of you than the version that’s been half elsewhere for years.
I work with adults on the North Side of Chicago and by video anywhere in Illinois.
Sessions happen in English, Spanish, or Hebrew.
A free 15-minute phone consultation is enough to tell whether EMDR fits what you’re facing. Tell me what brings you, and I’ll tell you honestly how I’d work with it.
Call me today at: (773) 414-0115.