Aura Morris, LCSW

We talk a lot about how effective EMDR is for trauma and PTSD symptoms, but the truth is that we use EMDR to treat a variety of presenting concerns. Anytime that you have an unrelenting symptom of distress, there is a root cause, and EMDR is almost always very helpful at treating the root cause so that the distress or unprocessed emotions can be processed and released all the way up to the present situation. I'll give a simple example that illustrates this. Let's say that you have a...

Dissociation is a natural phenomena, and many people experience mild forms of dissociation in everyday live. Dissociation can look like many different things for different people. Mild dissociation may look like feeling "checked out," numb, or tired. Moderate symptoms of dissociation might include feeling like you are "outside of your body" or like the things around you are not real. More severe symptoms can include "losing" chunks of time, where you don't remember things that you did, or...

Internal Family Systems, or IFS for short, is a type of parts work that is used in therapy. There are many different frameworks for doing parts work, but IFS is my personal favorite. In parts work, we observe that all people have different 'parts' of themselves that run certain aspects of their lives, show up in certain ways, or have a certain role they play in our inner world. Examples of common parts that people have or recognize are a 'perfectionist part' that tries to make sure we do...