EMDR Therapy for Complex Trauma
You feel like you are "too much" — and at the same time, not enough. You crave connection and also desperately need space. You know you are safe with the people you love, but part of you doesn't quite believe it. A part of you tenses up anyway. Pulls away. Waits for something to go wrong.
You've probably spent a lot of time trying to understand these patterns. Maybe years in therapy, books read, insights gained. And yet you keep waking up with the same familiar feeling of dread. Keep having the same fight — with your partner, with yourself. Keep finding that your emotions get the best of you before you can stop them.
What if the work you've already done could actually start to land — not just in your head, but in your body and your relationships?
What if you could hold your emotions without being overtaken by them — and finally feel like yourself, without losing yourself in the process?
That's what this work is about.
This Work May Be Right for You If:
You have a complex family or relationship history — including emotional neglect, instability, or relationships where love felt conditional
You feel your emotions intensely and find them hard to trust or regulate
You crave closeness but find intimacy triggering, confusing, or exhausting
You've been in therapy before and made progress — but something still feels stuck
You wake up with a familiar sense of dread or anxiety that doesn't have a clear cause
You find yourself reacting to present situations as if an old threat is still happening
You feel like two different people — one who knows they're okay, and one who doesn't believe it for a second
If any of this resonates, you're in the right place.
What Makes Trauma "Complex"
Complex trauma — sometimes called C-PTSD or developmental trauma — develops not from a single overwhelming event, but from repeated experiences over time. Often in childhood. Often in the very relationships that were supposed to be safe.
It might look like growing up in a household where emotions weren't welcome — or were too present. A parent who was unpredictable, unavailable, or whose needs always came first. Relationships where love came with conditions, where you had to earn your place, or where you learned early that conflict meant abandonment.
Complex trauma is different from single-incident trauma in an important way: it shapes not just your responses to specific events, but your sense of who you are. How worthy you are of love. How safe the world is. How much you can trust yourself and others. These beliefs form early, get reinforced over time, and often operate below the level of conscious awareness — showing up instead as body tension, emotional reactivity, relational patterns, and the persistent feeling that something is fundamentally wrong with you.
It isn't. But those conclusions made sense in the context where they formed. And they can be updated.
Why EMDR — and Why Embodied EMDR Specifically
EMDR allows us to take all the work you've done — with past therapists, in self-help books, through insight and awareness — and apply it directly to the past memories where you didn't have access to that information. We work to show your younger parts that you have the skills and resources to navigate those past challenges differently now.
We can't change what happened. But we can shift your relationship to it — so that you only hold on to the pieces that help you move forward, and your body can finally let go of the feeling of urgency or dread that keeps showing up and taking over.
Complex trauma often requires a slower, more layered approach than single-incident trauma. The memories aren't always discrete events — they're patterns, atmospheres, absences. In Embodied EMDR, putting more emphasis on the body allows us to get a fuller picture of your experience and integrate new perspectives at a deeper level. Rather than staying in a cognitive space where it's easy to intellectualize, we check in with physical sensation too. Your body goes with you everywhere. It holds important information about your past and present — and it has to be part of this work.
Change can be scary.
Especially when you've lived your whole life feeling this way. It's familiar. It's predictable. Anything different has too many unknowns — and it is easy to avoid or put off making any kind of change.
You are not alone in that.
In this work, we work with all of those parts. The ones that want change and the ones that would rather avoid anything unfamiliar in order to keep you safe. We have to listen to all of them — because they are the ones who set the pace, not just the therapist. Sometimes we have to slow down and re-route to make sure each part of you is on board and ready to move forward.
And yes — we also make space for the parts that feel the urgent need for change. The ones who are tired of waiting and want something to be different, now. Each of those parts is welcome here.
All you have to do is open the door of possibility and take the first step.
What Changes in This Work
The emotional intensity begins to feel more manageable — not because you stop feeling, but because you're no longer at the mercy of it
Relationships start to feel safer — less like a threat to brace against, more like a place to actually land
The sense of dread that used to follow you starts to lift — or at least loosen its grip
You develop a more stable, grounded sense of who you are — one that doesn't depend on other people's reactions to stay intact
You can hold your history without being defined by it
This work is not linear, and it doesn't happen overnight. But it is possible. And you don't have to do it alone.
You deserve to feel like yourself — fully, without apology, without constantly managing or minimizing.
That's what this work is working toward.
Ready to get started? Reach out today to schedule a free consultation.
All sessions are virtual, available to adults across Massachusetts.