Trauma, PTSD & EMDR

For those of us who have suffered ongoing abuse from young childhood onwards… We don’t have a pre-trauma us……We don’t know what is is like to not be someone suffering and surviving abuse.
All we know is being someone trying to survive abuse and all the severe lifelong affects of prolonged child abuse.  ~Lily Hope

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What Is Trauma

As we travel through our lives, we often times can be affected by large and small life traumas. We may recognize the painful incident or not. Often times, we feel that time will just heal the wound, but many times it does not. Examples or large life traumas could be physical and sexual abuse, military events, car accidents, and so on. Smaller life traumas may be experienced by people who were bullied, deceived by a loved one, put down by a family, etc. You may be thinking that your smaller life trauma is actually a large trauma and it may be for you. You do not have to live with your trauma any longer as Sarah James is an expert in the treatment of trauma. Sarah has helped hundreds of individuals heal and transcend the pain and constriction of trauma. She is passionate about removing the life trauma in order for her clients to align themselves with their authentic selves, rather than their traumatized self.

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Trauma Symptoms Include

  • Hopelessness about the future and feeling like life patterns will never go away.
  • Difficulty concentrating and/or memory issues.
  • Avoiding activities you once enjoyed.
  • Avoidance of discussion or thinking about the traumatic event.
  • Increased anger, emotional instability, guilt, shame, self-destructive behavior, trouble sleeping, nightmares.
  • Hearing or seeing things that are not there and/or startling easily.
  • Feeling emotionally numb, anxiety, and/or depression
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Trauma & PTSD Treatment with EMDR Therapy

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is at the forefront in treating large and small life traumas. “When a traumatic or very negative event occurs, information processing may be incomplete, perhaps because strong negative feelings or dissociation interfere with information processing. This prevents the forging of connections with more adaptive information that is held in other memory networks. For example, a rape survivor may ‘know’ that rapists are responsible for their crimes, but this information does not connect with her feeling that she is to blame for the attack. The memory is then dysfunctionally stored without appropriate associative connections and with many elements still unprocessed. When the individual thinks about the trauma, or when the memory is triggered by similar situations, the person may feel like she is reliving it, or may experience strong emotions and physical sensations. A prime example is the intrusive thoughts, emotional disturbance, and negative self-referencing beliefs of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).” – www.EMDR.com

EMDR works to lower the disturbance level of difficult and triggering events. Sarah James integrates EMDR into her practice with individuals struggling with PTSD, chemical dependency, anxiety, chronic pain, negative self-talk/image, phobia and panic disorders, and sexual abuse.

Get In Touch With Us
Sarah James

Sarah James

LCSW, CAS, EMDR, CBC, and CEC

Jayne Statler

Jayne Statler

LPC, LAC, EMDR.