The part of you that stays on guard has a history.

When I say trauma, I don’t only mean one terrible event. Some of it is relational, from a relationship where you learned to want less and say less. The people-pleaser post is about that kind of relationship.

Generational trauma is the kind that was in the house before you were born. It’s more than a figure of speech. In one study, mice taught to fear a smell had children and grandchildren who were jumpier around that smell without ever meeting it. Researchers have found signs of the same thing in the children of Holocaust survivors.

Racial trauma is years of racism adding up in one body, or one event that won’t leave.

And some of it is the kind people picture first. Sexual trauma, including the kind nobody around you ever knew about. Domestic abuse, which doesn’t stop counting when it’s years behind you.

Is yours less real if it isn’t on that list? It isn’t. Those are some of the kinds I work with, not all of them.

One more thing comes up with a lot of the women I work with. Control. Needing to run the situation, the people in it, how the day goes. For many of them, what happened is part of where that need came from, and that’s hardly a mystery. Being the one who runs things is one way to never be caught off guard again.

If tonight is the bad kind, this part is for you, and the rest can wait. If tonight is bad inside your own head, call or text 988. That’s the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. It’s free, it’s open all day and all night, and a trained counselor answers. If you text, any message starts it.

If you’re in danger right now from someone else, or it’s a medical emergency, call 911 instead. Both numbers are on my contact page too, under If tonight is bad.

Because it doesn’t look like anything to anyone else. You answer the emails and laugh in the right place in the story. Underneath, something can be keeping watch the whole time. Doing well at work, with all of that underneath? I wrote a post about exactly that.

So why does it still feel like it’s happening? When something happens that the mind can’t finish with, part of it never gets filed under then. It stays filed under now. That’s how an ordinary remark can land like a threat. It’s how a door closing a little too hard can take the rest of the evening with it.

If it started when you were young, then keeping watch is something you learned early, the way you learned to read. Shame comes along with a lot of this. Shame is what says don’t tell anyone. None of that is a character problem. The mind was given more than it could finish with, and it’s still holding on to it.

Plenty of the women I see are working on anxiety and trauma at the same time, and anxiety has its own page here.

I’m trained in EMDR. The letters stand for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, which tells you almost nothing, so I’ll say what happens.

Start with what a memory does. When you bring one up, it isn’t a recording playing back. For a little while it can come apart, and the brain has to build it again before it can put it away. That’s the moment it can change. Whatever is beside it right then, a calmer body, a different ending, the fact that you’re here now, not back then, can get built back in with it.

That’s one of the main ideas about how EMDR works. The other is that keeping your eyes busy while you hold the memory takes up room in your mind, so the memory comes back less sharp.

We start with history, and with getting you steady enough for the next part. Yes, that means you do tell me some of it. You don’t have to tell me all of it, or tell it well, and we choose together what we work on. Nothing gets worked on without your yes.

Then you hold one piece of the memory in mind while your eyes follow something moving from side to side, for a short stretch at a time. That’s the eye-movement part, and it’s the usual way, though not the only one. You’re awake for the whole thing, and you can stop a set whenever you want. What we’re after is a memory that’s still there, but quieter, and stays in the past this time.

I’ll also say that a session can keep stirring things up in the days after, and you might feel tired or on edge. That’s part of why we don’t rush the start.

Does it work? For trauma that keeps going long after the event, EMDR is one of the recognized treatments, and it’s one I trained in. You don’t need a diagnosis to sit down with me. I won’t promise you results, from this or anything else, because nobody honestly can.

Who’s running it matters, too. Followed like a script, it’s just a script. Done with care, it’s a person helping you put a memory back down differently.

If yours started in childhood, you may have read that it’s harder to treat. It often is. Harder isn’t the same as stuck. What it changes in my room is how long we spend getting steady first, and I’d rather you knew that going in.

What EMDR isn’t is the whole of the work, or something I use with every woman I see. It isn’t where we start if things are still falling apart right now, either. Then the first job is getting you steady, and EMDR can wait, or never come up at all. That part is your call.

Some of the other things I use are person-centered work, CBT, DBT skills and mindfulness. Whatever we’re doing, you set the pace and you choose what gets said. Who you are, your race and your culture included, is in the room with us. The fee, and what insurance does with it, are on the fees page.