A typical session is approximately 50 - 55 minutes.

The length of time a person spends attending therapy varies by each individual's needs and preferences. While some clients like to maintain periodic “check-in” appointments for extended lengths of time to help maintain and sustain progress and stability, my goal is for you to ultimately “graduate” from therapy. If our work together is successful, you will experience healing and growth that enables you to live a fulfilling and meaningful life independent of therapy. I like to remind clients that therapy is only one hour of the week. What you do and work on between sessions has a much bigger impact on your growth than what we do in session alone. That said, consistency is a vital component of how successful one is in therapy - attending sessions regularly and avoiding gaps in treatment will help ensure you get the most out of therapy.

Appointments must be cancelled at least 24 business hours in advance. Cancellations and schedule change requests can be made by contacting me via text, voicemail, or email at least 24 business hours in advance of your session. Failure to give at least 24 business hours notice, not showing for an appointment, or arriving more than 15 minutes late will result in a Missed Appointment Fee of $75. This fee is not covered by insurance. This fee is necessary because a time commitment is made to you and is held exclusively for you. If you are late for a session, your appointment will still end at the regularly scheduled time.

A little background science: When we experience trauma and other emotionally-charged experiences, the system in our brain that takes in and stores helpful information and discards unnecessary information can get overwhelmed and derailed. So instead of information flowing through the system, the information gets dysfunctionally linked within our central nervous system. The dysfunctionally linked material drives various symptoms or adaptations, such as outsized emotional responses to specific stimuli or symptoms of anxiety and depression. 

Here’s where EMDR comes in: Rather than just focusing on the  symptoms or adaptations, EMDR provides a means of processing past memories to allow information to become “unstuck,” resulting in a natural reduction of symptoms. EMDR taxes the working memory by prompting individuals to begin by focusing both on a specific memory and bilateral stimulation, then allowing their mind to free associate along with the bilateral stimulation. The process alternates between sets of bilateral stimulation and brief reports about what you’re noticing. This alternating process forces attention across the hemispheric midline, i.e., right-brain holistic experience and left-brain logical/observing recall. Creating psychological distance from the memory and facilitating therapeutic action (asking what the participant is noticing) allows the adaptive information system to process the experience from the observing self-perspective. The adaptive system keeps what is important and discards what is no longer necessary, i.e., emotions, sensations, and beliefs tied to the experience/memory.

Research:

Christman, S.D., Garvey, K.J., Propper, R.E., and Phaneuf, K.A. (2003)

deVoogd, L.D., Phelps, E.A. A cognitively demanding working-memory intervention enhances extinction. Sci Rep 10, 7020 (2020)

Maxfield, L., Melnyk, W.W., & Hayman, C.A.G. Dual-attention taxes working memory and allows hippocampal activity to move experiences to long-term memory storage. (2008)