EMDR Therapy in Wisconsin
EMDR therapy with Dr. Alicia Meyer, PsyD, LPC
Sometimes an experience is over without entirely feeling over.
You may understand perfectly well that you are safe now and still find yourself reacting as though danger is close. You may know intellectually that something that happened was not your fault while continuing to carry shame about it. An experience from years ago may still shape what you expect from relationships, how you respond to conflict, or what you believe about yourself.
This gap between what we know and what we continue to experience is one of the reasons EMDR can be so helpful.
Alicia is a certified EMDR therapist and uses EMDR extensively in her work with adults who want the past to have less power over the present.
When Understanding Is Not Enough
Insight can be enormously valuable in therapy.
Understanding our histories can help us recognize patterns, make sense of emotional reactions, and become more compassionate toward ourselves.
But sometimes we understand something very well and still feel it.
A person may know why criticism affects them so strongly and still experience criticism as deeply threatening. Someone may understand that a current partner is trustworthy while remaining vigilant for betrayal. A painful or frightening experience may have been discussed many times without losing its emotional intensity.
EMDR offers another way of working with experiences that seem to remain psychologically active despite everything we already understand about them.
The goal is not to forget what happened or convince yourself that it did not matter.
It is to help the experience become more fully part of the past.
What Is EMDR?
EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It is an evidence-based form of psychotherapy originally developed for trauma and PTSD and now used with a broader range of distressing experiences and the emotional patterns that can develop around them.
EMDR uses a structured process that includes bilateral stimulation, often through guided eye movements, while working with aspects of an experience that remain emotionally significant.
You do not need to understand the mechanics of EMDR in order for it to be useful.
What matters more is what happens through the work. Memories may become less emotionally charged. Beliefs that once felt deeply true may begin to loosen. Situations in the present may stop producing reactions that seem disproportionate until we understand what they have been connected to.
The memory remains.
Your relationship to it can change.
Trauma Does Not Always Look Like Trauma
Some experiences are immediately recognizable as traumatic. Abuse, assault, accidents, violence, sudden loss, frightening medical experiences, and other situations involving danger or powerlessness can leave lasting psychological effects.
Other experiences accumulate more gradually.
Growing up around criticism or unpredictability, repeatedly feeling responsible for other people's emotions, experiencing rejection during an important developmental period, or learning that approval depended upon becoming what someone else expected may leave no single dramatic event to point toward.
What matters clinically is not whether an experience qualifies for a particular cultural definition of trauma.
The more useful question is whether something from the past continues limiting freedom in the present.
What EMDR Can Help With
Alicia uses EMDR particularly when earlier experiences remain connected to present difficulties involving trauma, anxiety, shame, relationships, boundaries, self-worth, grief, or religious trauma.
The connection is not always obvious at first.
A current relationship problem may be activating something much older. A fear that appears irrational may make considerable sense in light of an earlier experience. A belief such as “I am not safe,” “My needs do not matter,” or “I have to stay in control” may have originated in circumstances where it once felt necessary.
EMDR can help loosen the connection between what happened then and what automatically happens now.
You Do Not Have to Relive Everything
People sometimes avoid trauma therapy because they imagine it will require recounting painful experiences in exhaustive detail.
EMDR does not require that.
You and Alicia will need enough shared understanding to know what you are working with, but you do not need to provide a complete verbal reconstruction of everything that happened.
The work is also paced.
Good trauma therapy is not about forcing your way through defenses or seeing how much distress you can tolerate. Preparation and stability matter, and Alicia approaches EMDR within an ongoing therapeutic relationship rather than treating it as a procedure to be completed as quickly as possible.
Sometimes EMDR work can begin relatively soon.
Sometimes something else needs attention first.
The pace should serve the person rather than the protocol.
EMDR Within a Relational Approach
Alicia does not treat painful memories as isolated technical problems.
Her broader approach is relational, psychodynamic, and informed by family systems. She is interested not only in what happened but in how what happened became woven into the way you understand yourself and other people.
An experience may shape expectations about whether people can be trusted, whether needs are acceptable, whether conflict is dangerous, or whether closeness is safe. Experiences within families, relationships, religious communities, and other important environments can become particularly powerful because they influence not only what we remember but what we come to expect.
EMDR provides a way of working directly with experiences that continue carrying emotional force.
The larger therapeutic relationship provides a place to understand what those experiences have meant.
EMDR Therapy with Dr. Alicia Meyer
Alicia is a certified EMDR therapist who works with adults experiencing trauma, anxiety, depression, OCD, codependency, relationship difficulties, religious trauma, and longstanding patterns shaped by earlier experiences and relationships.
EMDR may become a central part of therapy or one part of a broader therapeutic process.
Alicia does not assume that every difficult experience needs to be processed through EMDR simply because EMDR is available. The question is what kind of work is most useful for the person sitting in front of her.
That may involve understanding something.
It may involve experiencing something differently.
Often it involves both.
[ MEET ALICIA ]
In-Person & Online EMDR Therapy in Wisconsin
Alicia provides in-person EMDR therapy from our office in Glendale, Wisconsin, serving Milwaukee and surrounding communities including the North Shore, Mequon and Thiensville, Wauwatosa, Brookfield and Elm Grove, and the greater Milwaukee area.
Online EMDR therapy is also available throughout Wisconsin when virtual treatment is clinically appropriate.
Looking for an EMDR Therapist?
You may already know that EMDR is the kind of therapy you want, or someone may simply have suggested that it could be helpful.
Either is enough.
Tell us a little about what continues to feel unresolved and what you hope might be different.
Alicia can help determine whether EMDR is a good fit and how it might fit within the larger work of therapy.