Attachment-Focused EMDR

You may even understand exactly where it came from.

And yet, there you are — doing it again.

Maybe criticism still hits much harder than you think it should. You know you don't have to be perfect, yet making a mistake sends you into a mini shame spiral. You understand that saying "no" doesn't make you selfish, but your body apparently didn't get the memo — and the restlessness dogs you.

It can feel like your hands are on the wheel, but someone else is steering.

In a way, it's true.

Attachment-Focused EMDR (AF-EMDR) gives us another way to work with what's underneath these patterns rather than simply trying to think your way out of them.

One thing I like about AF-EMDR is that we start with something happening in your life today.

Maybe your boss questioned something you did and, despite knowing it wasn't a catastrophe, you've been worrying about it for three days.

We begin there.

After a brief conversation, we identify an issue to work with and bring enough of the experience into the present so it feels alive. We identify the best — or worst — moment, notice what you're feeling and how it shows up in your body, and then I ask you to relax and allow your mind to trace back in time.

Something unexpected often arises.

Suddenly you're seven years old, remembering a second-grade teacher shaming you in front of the class.

You weren't consciously thinking about second grade. You may not have thought about that teacher in decades.

But there it is.

Then we reprocess the memory with a felt sense of dual awareness: the seven-year-old who experienced it and the adult you who knows that teacher was an SOB — and that you deserved respect and help.

After processing what happened, we can also work to provide a missing experience: perhaps protection, reassurance, understanding, or someone making it very clear that there was nothing wrong with you.

And yes, we also process and strengthen experiences you're proud of.

We're not just analyzing an old memory. We're helping your mind and body update the conclusions you formed and the strategies you developed because of it.

Before deeper processing, AF-EMDR emphasizes developing inner resources you can draw upon both in therapy and in your life.

We may begin with a real or imagined calm place and develop a Resource Team that can provide experiences of nurturance, protection, and wisdom — a team we can call on throughout our work together and beyond.

Your resources might be people you've known, imagined figures, animals, spiritual figures, or anything else that meaningfully evokes the quality you need.

A protector might offer the experience of someone keeping you safe and firmly in your corner.

A nurturer might bring warmth and unconditional acceptance.

A wise resource might offer perspective when you're too close to something to see clearly.

We strengthen these resources using gentle bilateral stimulation — alternating left-right tapping, perhaps on your legs, or alternating tones through headphones.

The resources can be calming.

But there's more to them than that.

They can bring experiences of protection, acceptance, compassion, and wisdom to places where those experiences may not have been sufficiently available before.

We're not pretending the past was different.

We're helping your mind and nervous system update old conclusions and strategies that were enormously useful once but no longer fit who you are or the life you're living today.

Even that brutal inner critic started out trying to help:

If I criticize you first, maybe you'll get it right and nobody else will hurt or humiliate you.

Useful once.

Pretty miserable company now.

As we work, we pay attention to what emerges — memories, emotions, images, physical sensations, impulses, beliefs, or something neither of us expected.

I guide the process by asking questions that encourage curiosity and bring in bits of psychoeducation to consider how these frustrating patterns were brilliant adaptations — given the circumstances.

Tapping can also help quiet some of the mental noise and make room for what I think of as your inner healing intelligence.

I use this in trauma and developmental work, and sometimes when you're simply facing an important life question and don't know what you want or what to do.

Rather than trying harder to think your way to an answer, we tap, get curious, and notice what arises.

Sometimes it's an image.

Sometimes a physical response, resource, or memory.

And usually there's simply a clarity that wasn't available while your thinking mind was working overtime trying to solve the problem.

You don't have to force an answer.

We make room for it to arise.

Developed by Laurel Parnell, PhD, Attachment-Focused EMDR builds on traditional EMDR with greater emphasis on working with the roots of daily challenges, attachment, internal resources, and the therapeutic relationship.

When useful, I also integrate Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and TIST, particularly when body-based responses, developmental adaptations, or older trauma-related patterns emerge.

The point isn't to erase your past or strip away strategies that once helped you.

It's to help what belongs in the past become more fully part of the past — so you have more freedom to respond to the life you're actually living now.

Your hands can stay on the wheel.

Reach out. Let's explore whether Attachment-Focused EMDR might be a good fit for you.