My EMDR Origin Story

I Didn't Start as an EMDR Therapist. I Became One.

I want to be upfront with you: when I signed up for an EMDR basic training in 2018, I wasn't a believer. I had just started my private practice, and I knew EMDR was a modality that would attract clients. That was my reason. I was skeptical, and I didn't expect much from it. I was wrong, and I am genuinely glad I was.

The Ceiling Effect

Before EMDR, I was working primarily within CBT and traditional talk therapy frameworks. And for a lot of presentations, it worked well enough. Clients gained insight. They understood their patterns. They could identify an adaptive belief: the one they should hold onto about themselves.

But here is what I kept running into, especially with clients who struggled with depression, anxiety, and CPTSD: They knew the “correct” belief. They could say it out loud. And they would still show up the next week feeling exactly the same way about themselves. Why? Because telling themselves they were good enough didn’t change their lived experience. They continued to struggle with the cognitive dissonance between what they were thinking and what they were living.

That gap between what someone understands intellectually and what they actually feel to be true became the space I couldn’t reconcile. And here's what made it even more telling: many of these clients were doing everything right. In sessions, we would develop solid coping skills. They had tools to manage their symptoms when they were triggered. But it was like a wound that wouldn’t heal.

What Happened Next

I showed up to the EMDR basic training expecting to be underwhelmed. What I experienced instead blew my mind. I watched how quickly the root cause of a struggle came to the surface. Not after months of careful, systematic inquiry, but right then and there, in a training, no less! And more than that: what shifted was the lived experience. Not just understanding.

It was a paradigm shift about what constitutes change.

EMDR is different from traditional talk therapy in that it creates the conditions that allow our systems to heal themselves. While noticing our thoughts, feelings, and body sensations as they relate to past memories, we experience the transmutation of lived experience in real time, changing the way those experiences are stored in our nervous system. The goal isn't only insight and understanding. It's a change in our relationship to what actually happened. 

The model that underlies EMDR therapy, the Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model, helped me understand why talk therapy had its ceiling. When we go through an experience that overwhelms our ability to cope, that experience gets stuck in the memory system in a way that keeps it from connecting with what we already know that is adaptive. That's why a client can cognitively embrace an adaptive belief about the self but not feel it to be true. The memory and other memories like it are still running in the background, unprocessed, and continue to inform our experiences in the present as if the past were still happening. EMDR helps us access those stuck memories and bring them into conscious awareness where they can be reprocessed and successfully integrated with all the good stuff we know about ourselves, others, and the world. The unburdening from those old hurts and confusions of childhood frees us to live more fully in the present.  

Going Deeper: A More Relational Approach  

After the basic training, I kept going, and the path I followed through The Center for Excellence in EMDR Therapy is worth describing specifically, because each step built on the last in ways I didn't anticipate.  

I started with Healing the Wounds of Attachment and Rebuilding Self in January 2024. This training helped me better understand client defense systems: how they develop, what function they serve, and how to work with them rather than around them. For clients with complex histories, this was a meaningful shift in how I show up in the room.  

In March 2025, I completed Thinking AIP and Using EMDR, which strengthened my case conceptualization in a real and practical way. It's one thing to understand the Adaptive Information Processing model as a framework. It's another to apply it fluidly in session, in the moment, with real clients. This training helped me close that gap.  

Before The Craft of EMDR Therapy: Taking it to the Next Level, I also completed Back to the Future: An Upscaled Refresher Course in EMDR Therapy. Even after having completed basic training, there's so much information in the EMDR foundation that revisiting it deliberately was especially useful. It helped me consolidate what I already knew and go into The Craft better prepared.  

When I took The Craft of EMDR Therapy, it truly shifted how I thought about and applied EMDR therapy: not as a tool I use with certain clients, but as a psychotherapy approach in its own right. It significantly deepened my AIP case conceptualization, particularly for complex presentations, and it's the training I'd most recommend to clinicians who want to use EMDR therapy as a comprehensive psychotherapy.

Taken together, this training path, alongside ongoing consultation with Deany Laliotis at The Center for Excellence in EMDR Therapy, has shaped how I think about this work in ways I didn't expect when I signed up for that first basic training in 2018.

But I want to name something that doesn't always get enough credit in conversations about professional development: case consultation has been just as important to my growth as any training I've attended. Consultation is where the real skill-building happens. It's where I've learned to trust my instincts with clients, built genuine confidence in using EMDR consistently, and figured out how to make meaning when a session doesn't go the way I expected. Because sometimes it won't. And knowing how to sit with that, understand it, and use it clinically is something you can only develop through honest, supported reflection with someone who knows the model well.

I am currently under the mentorship of a Relational EMDR Therapy® clinician and consultant, and that mentorship has profoundly influenced how I practice.

Through Deany's trainings and ongoing consultation, I have begun to explore how a more relational lens can make EMDR more accessible, particularly for clients who might not respond as readily to a purely structured, protocol-driven approach. A relational approach considers the therapeutic relationship itself as part of the healing. It asks how we show up with our clients, not just what technique we use with them.

I am still growing in this area. But what this mentorship has opened up for me is a way of thinking about EMDR that goes beyond session structure, one where the model starts to inform every session I hold, whether or not we are doing formal reprocessing work.

EMDR stopped being something I used with certain clients. It became the lens through which I understand and work with everyone. It's no longer a tool I pick up and put down. It's how I think.

How I Work Now

Today, EMDR is central to my practice in every way. Whether someone comes to me specifically seeking EMDR or simply wanting support with anxiety, depression, or something they can't quite name, the EMDR framework shapes how I understand what's happening for them and what they need. There are three ways I work with people.   

The first is weekly EMDR therapy: ongoing individual therapy at a steady, supported pace for clients ready to do the deeper work that talk therapy alone hasn't been able to reach.

The second is EMDR intensives: half-day to full-day concentrated sessions for clients looking to process a specific experience at an expedited pace. In a standard weekly session, time is spent on check-ins at the start and closure at the end, which is necessary but does mean less of the hour goes toward active reprocessing. An intensive removes much of that, leading to more time actually in the work. That said, intensives aren't the right fit for everyone. A consultation beforehand is the best way to figure out whether it's the right approach for where you are.

The third is EMDR consultation for clinicians who are newly trained in EMDR or working to integrate it more consistently and confidently into their practice. Consultation has been one of the most important parts of my own development, and it's something I feel strongly about offering to others who are on that same path.

If you're someone who has been in therapy before, maybe for a long time, and you still feel like something isn't quite moving, I want you to know that I understand that frustration. I've sat with it from the other side of the room. There is often more available to you than talk therapy alone can offer.

And if you're a clinician who went through EMDR training and hasn't quite found your footing with it, that's exactly who I work with in consultation. You don't necessarily need more training. You often just need space to work through cases, build confidence, and let the model truly become yours.

Explore The Center for Excellence in EMDR Therapy 

The Center for Excellence in EMDR Therapy offers advanced trainings and consultation for clinicians at every stage, including the programs that shaped my own practice. If you're looking to go deeper in your EMDR work, it's worth exploring what they offer.