Perinatal trauma is any traumatic event that happens (to birthing people and/or to babies) around conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum. This could include a traumatic birth experience, infertility, pregnancy loss or termination, pregnancy or postpartum complications, emergency or unwanted medical interventions, a NICU stay, stillbirth grief and loss, postpartum depression or anxiety, and medical trauma.

These experiences can lead to acute stress disorder or posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and impact mental health and well-being, keeping you from being present and fully enjoying being a parent. These are really hard and heavy life experiences that bring up hard and heavy feelings - and psychological trauma like this literally changes your brain. If you find yourself having a hard time moving forward and thinking negatively about yourself, EMDR could be supportive for you in your mental health and healing process.

EMDR, Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing helps to decrease the effects and give you relief from trauma symptoms that can get in the way of caring for yourself and your family - leaving you with low self esteem, difficulty bonding with your baby, or overwhelmed by your feelings or so many other conditions and other symptoms, related to past events.

Feelings like failure, fear, anger, guilt or shame and distressing memories around perinatal trauma experiences might make you feel stuck and alone. You are not alone and there is help.

Our brains heal themselves all the time. You've resolved and worked through many difficult life experiences without any help in the past. But sometimes, trauma can interfere with your brain's ability to process and naturally recover from stress. The memory gets kind of stuck, all tied up with negative beliefs, past experiences, and big feelings, making it hard to digest. These memories are unprocessed and can impact our beliefs about ourselves and the world and create a negative lens through which we experience everything in life. If a scary, intense, or stressful event sticks around and keeps you feeling overwhelmed with that "flight, fight, or freeze" response, if you feel like every time you're reminded of it you're living it all over again, then EMDR can be supportive in to processing the disturbing event and decreasing the amount of distress associated with those memories. A trained therapist can use EMDR therapy to help you reprocess the traumatic events in your brain, so that normal healing can resume. You'll be able to understand the experiences from a different perspective, one grounded in safety - alleviating symptoms and allowing you to heal and move forward.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing doesn't erase the memories, after reprocessing an experience in session, the information about the experience is the same, but the way that you understand the experience, the feelings around it, the meaning you make from it, and how it impacts your daily life is what changes. This difference in understanding and meaning is what leads to healing from this treatment.

EMDR therapists have specialized training in supporting and nurturing you during EMDR therapy reprocessing so you are able to notice, create positive belief, and heal through the process.

I provide therapy that not only addresses the distressing experience, but also helps you move forward.

EMDR can reduce symptoms and distress following birth related trauma and so much more, like:

• Alleviate fears of pregnancy and childbirth

• Prepare yourself emotionally and psychologically for fertility treatments, labor and delivery

• Preparing to return to work

• Process and heal pregnancy losses (miscarriage, termination, TFMR)

• To process and heal the trauma and grief of baby loss

• To treat postpartum depression and anxiety

• To treat PTSD and past traumas that resurface during pregnancy and postpartum

If you are ready to move forward, schedule a consultation with me today.

EMDR therapy is provided either in-person or virtually and can happen during a regular 50-53 minute long session.

The Process

EMDR treatment starts with preparation and history taking, identifying the emotional wounds that need healing. We'll prepare for treatment, make a plan together that will serve as a roadmap we'll follow. When you are ready, we move forward to the reprocessing phases of EMDR therapy.

Eight Phases of EMDR Therapy

1. Client history and treatment plan

2. Preparation

3. Assessment

4. Desensitization (this is when we do the bilateral stimulation)

5. Installation of positive beliefs

6. Body scan

7. Closure

8. Re-evaluation

MDR therapy is not talk therapy, we won't spend a lot of time talking in detail about what's bothering you or what has brought you in to therapy. EMDR therapy is all about processing your thoughts, emotions, and body sensations without having to talk about the details of an event. Talk therapy is helpful for many people, but some people prefer not to have to talk about their experience and some painful experiences are too painful to put into words. EMDR can be supportive in these cases.

I also won't ask you to do homework outside of session like in other therapies - with EMDR treatment, the work is done in session. We will focus on addressing unresolved trauma and negative beliefs connected to the reproductive trauma you experienced. We do this through using bi-lateral eye movements or other bilateral stimulation to facilitate your brain's ability to process the event and the related emotional distress, negative feelings, and body sensations. In EMDR, it's important to remember that it is your own brain that will be doing the healing and that you are the one in control. As your therapist, I will facilitate the process and help guide you.