Your birth experience
deserves to be processed.

My birth wasn't an emergency. Does it still count as trauma?

Yes. Trauma is not defined by what appeared on the medical chart, it's defined by how an experience was processed by your nervous system. A birth can be medically "normal" and still be deeply traumatic: if you felt unheard, if something happened without your consent, if you were alone and scared, if the experience felt out of your control. If the aftermath has affected your life, your mood, your body, your relationships, your ability to be present, then it warrants care, regardless of what anyone else thinks about whether it was "bad enough."

My baby is now two years old. Is it too late to process the birth?

Not at all. Trauma doesn't have an expiration date, and neither does healing. Many of my clients come in years after the birth, sometimes prompted by a new pregnancy, sometimes by a moment of recognition that something from that experience is still affecting them. The nervous system doesn't care how much time has passed. EMDR is effective regardless of when the trauma occurred.

I've tried talking about it and it doesn't help. Why would EMDR be different?

This is one of the most common things I hear, and it points to something real about trauma. Talk therapy works by engaging the thinking, language-based parts of the brain. But trauma is often stored in parts of the nervous system that language doesn't fully reach: the body responses, the involuntary reactions, the sensory memories. EMDR works at that level, which is why people who have talked about a trauma extensively often still find that something shifts through EMDR that didn't through conversation alone.

Will I have to relive the birth in detail?

Not in the way you might fear. EMDR doesn't require you to narrate the trauma in detail or stay inside the memory for long stretches. The protocol involves brief, titrated contact with the memory; you dip in and out rather than being immersed. Many clients find this much more tolerable than they expected. We build the capacity to do this work before we begin it, so you're not doing it alone or unprepared.

Do you only serve Northern Virginia, or anywhere in Virginia?

Anywhere in Virginia. All sessions are by secure video, so I work just as readily with clients in Fairfax, Arlington, McLean, Reston, Alexandria, Herndon, Centreville, and Woodbridge as I do with clients in Richmond, Charlottesville, Norfolk, Virginia Beach, or rural parts of the state. You only need to be a Virginia resident.