LAST UPDATED: JULY 2026
If you have a complex trauma history and your EMDR therapist keeps doing “preparation work” before any actual trauma processing begins, you’re not being stalled. You’re being treated correctly. This article explains why EMDR for complex PTSD is fundamentally different from EMDR for single-incident trauma, what the extended preparation phase actually accomplishes, and why that preparation isn’t a detour around healing but the heart of it. This is educational content, not a substitute for individualized clinical care.
Last updated: July 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT · Editorial Policy
- The Woman Who Wanted to Skip to the Hard Part
- What Is EMDR, and What Does the Adaptive Information Processing Model Actually Explain?
- Why Isn’t the Standard EMDR Protocol Enough for Complex Trauma?
- What Actually Happens in the Extended Preparation Phase?
- What Does Complex Trauma EMDR Look Like Once Processing Begins?
- Both/And: EMDR Can Be Gentle and Still Do Powerful Work
- The Systemic Lens: Why Is Complex Trauma Still Under-Recognized in Clinical Practice?
- Who I Am and Why I Know This
- How Do You Find the Right EMDR Therapist for Complex Trauma?
- Frequently Asked Questions
EMDR for complex PTSD is fundamentally different from EMDR for single-incident trauma. It requires an extended preparation and stabilization phase before any direct trauma processing begins. In standard PTSD treatment, EMDR can move fairly quickly to the target memory. In complex trauma, the nervous system typically needs extensive resourcing and window-of-tolerance expansion before it’s safe to approach traumatic material. This isn’t stalling. It’s clinically accurate sequencing that protects against retraumatization and makes lasting healing more possible. In my work with driven women, the hardest part is often trusting that slow preparation is itself the treatment.
In short: EMDR for complex PTSD requires a substantially longer preparation phase than EMDR for single-incident trauma, because the nervous system has to be stabilized before trauma processing can begin safely.
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The Woman Who Wanted to Skip to the Hard Part
Tammy is forty-eight, an internal medicine physician, and she’s been in EMDR therapy for four months. It’s a Tuesday, 6:40 in the morning, and she’s sitting in the parking garage outside her office in her scrubs, engine off, coffee going cold in the console. She came to therapy with a clear goal: process the memories. She’d done her research, knew EMDR was evidence-based, and knew it involved bilateral stimulation to help the brain reprocess traumatic material. She’d printed out her memories, ranked in order of disturbance, in a document she titled “Session Prep” and never once showed her therapist.
But four months in, her therapist hasn’t yet targeted a single memory.
Every session, they do what her therapist calls “resourcing.” They build what she calls a “safe place.” They work on what she calls “parts.” Tammy is a physician. She respects evidence. But she’s also, quietly, furious. She came here to process her trauma, and instead she’s doing what feels like relaxation exercises. “I have literally ordered controlled substances with less paperwork than this,” she said in session three, not really joking. She’s started to wonder if her therapist doesn’t know what she’s doing. She’s started to wonder if she’s somehow too complex, too damaged, too far gone for EMDR to work on her the way it worked on the patients in the case studies she read at 11 p.m. after a twelve-hour shift.
She’s wrong on both counts.
Her therapist knows exactly what she’s doing. And Tammy isn’t too far gone for EMDR. She’s, in fact, a strong candidate for it. But the EMDR that’ll help her isn’t the EMDR she read about. It’s a more sophisticated, more careful, more clinically demanding version, one that only a specialist in complex PTSD is equipped to deliver. And the preparation work that’s frustrating her? That preparation isn’t a detour around the treatment. It’s the treatment. I’ve come to think of this as the paperwork problem: driven women who’ve spent decades solving problems through documentation and sequencing arrive expecting healing to work the same way, and the first thing complex trauma EMDR asks of them is to tolerate not knowing exactly when the “real part” starts.
What Is EMDR, and What Does the Adaptive Information Processing Model Actually Explain?
Francine Shapiro, PhD, psychologist and originator of EMDR therapy, developed the Adaptive Information Processing model as the theoretical foundation for EMDR. The AIP model holds that the brain has an inherent information processing system that naturally moves toward mental health and resolution. When trauma occurs, this system gets overwhelmed and the memory becomes stored in a dysfunctional, state-dependent form, frozen in the emotional, sensory, and cognitive state of the original experience. EMDR facilitates the processing of these frozen memories by activating the brain’s natural information processing system through bilateral stimulation (typically eye movements, taps, or tones), allowing the memory to be integrated into adaptive memory networks.
In plain terms: Traumatic memories get stuck in the brain in a raw, unprocessed form, as if they happened yesterday no matter how long ago they occurred. EMDR helps the brain finish processing them, so they become memories of the past rather than experiences of the present.
I read Shapiro’s original case reports years ago, in the early part of my training, and what stayed with me wasn’t the mechanism. It was how ordinary the shift sounded when it worked: a person who’d carried a memory like a live wire for a decade describing it, afterward, the way you’d describe a photograph. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, or EMDR, was developed by Francine Shapiro in the late 1980s and has since become one of the most rigorously researched and widely validated treatments for trauma. The World Health Organization, the American Psychological Association, and the Department of Veterans Affairs all recognize EMDR as an evidence-based treatment for PTSD.
The standard EMDR protocol has eight phases: History Taking, Preparation, Assessment, Desensitization, Installation, Body Scan, Closure, and Reevaluation. For single-incident trauma, a car accident, a natural disaster, an assault, the protocol moves through these phases in a fairly linear way. The preparation phase is typically brief. The client establishes a safe place, learns some grounding techniques, and then the therapist begins targeting the traumatic memory.
This is the EMDR most people have heard of. This is the EMDR the popular press describes. And for single-incident trauma in an otherwise well-resourced client, this protocol works remarkably well. But for clients with complex trauma histories, chronic childhood abuse, neglect, relational trauma, developmental trauma, this protocol isn’t just insufficient. It can be actively harmful.
Why Isn’t the Standard EMDR Protocol Enough for Complex Trauma?
Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist and author of Trauma and Recovery (Basic Books, 1992), introduced the concept of Complex PTSD to describe the constellation of symptoms that develops in response to prolonged, repeated trauma, particularly trauma that’s interpersonal, inescapable, and occurs in the context of a relationship of captivity or dependency. Unlike single-incident PTSD, C-PTSD includes not only the core PTSD symptoms (hyperarousal, avoidance, intrusion) but also profound disturbances in affect regulation, consciousness, self-perception, relationships with others, and systems of meaning (Cloitre et al. 2009).
In plain terms: C-PTSD is what happens when the trauma wasn’t a single event but an ongoing environment. A childhood, a relationship, a family system. It goes deeper than PTSD because it shapes the developing self, not just the response to a specific event.
The distinction between single-incident PTSD and complex PTSD isn’t merely academic. It has profound implications for treatment. What I keep coming back to from Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and author of The Body Keeps the Score (Viking, 2014), is his documentation that complex trauma produces fundamentally different neurobiological changes than single-incident trauma (van der Kolk et al. 2024). The brain of someone with C-PTSD isn’t simply a brain with a single stuck memory. It’s a brain whose architecture has been shaped by chronic threat, organized around the assumption that the world is dangerous, that relationships are unsafe, and that the self is fundamentally flawed.
Here’s what I’ve watched happen in my own office, roughly four times out of five, with driven women who come in for EMDR expecting a fast protocol: the nervous system isn’t just activated by specific memories. It’s activated by the entire relational field. A tone of voice, a facial expression, a particular quality of silence. Any of these can trigger a full-system threat response before the conscious mind has any awareness of what’s happened. This is what Stephen Porges, PhD, calls neuroception, the nervous system‘s below-conscious scanning for threat, which operates faster than thought and drives automatic physiological responses (Porges 2025).
Janina Fisher, PhD, psychologist and author of Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors (Routledge, 2017), adds another layer: structural dissociation. In complex trauma, the personality often divides into an Apparently Normal Part that manages daily functioning and Emotional Parts that hold the traumatic material. When a therapist attempts to target a traumatic memory in a client with structural dissociation, they’re not just activating a single memory. They’re potentially activating an entire dissociated part of the personality, one that may have no relationship to the client’s current capacity for regulation.
This is why jumping straight to trauma targeting in complex trauma clients isn’t just ineffective. It can be destabilizing. The client who hasn’t yet built sufficient nervous system capacity, sufficient internal resources, and sufficient therapeutic relationship to tolerate the activation of traumatic material may be flooded, overwhelmed, and left worse off than before. This isn’t a failure of EMDR. It’s a failure to adapt the protocol to the clinical reality of complex trauma.
What Actually Happens in the Extended Preparation Phase?
In adapted EMDR for complex trauma, Phase 2, the Preparation phase, isn’t a brief warm-up before the “real work” begins. It’s an extended, clinically sophisticated phase that may last months, and it’s doing something essential: building the nervous system capacity that complex trauma prevented from developing in the first place.
The primary tool of the extended preparation phase is Resource Development and Installation (RDI), a set of techniques developed specifically for complex trauma clients. Rather than immediately targeting traumatic memories, the therapist uses bilateral stimulation to install positive resources: states of calm, experiences of safety, memories of mastery, imagined or real experiences of being cared for. These resources aren’t just relaxation techniques. Think of it like reinforcing a foundation before you renovate the rooms above it. You don’t tear out the load-bearing wall on day one. You shore up what’s underneath first, so the structure can hold the work that comes later. RDI resources are being neurologically installed, strengthened, and made more accessible through the same bilateral stimulation that’ll later be used to process traumatic material. Which means in practice: a client doesn’t leave a preparation-phase session feeling like nothing happened. She leaves with a slightly wider window of tolerance than she walked in with, even if she couldn’t point to the exact moment it widened.
Pat Ogden, PhD, founder of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, emphasizes the somatic dimension of this preparation work (Ogden, Pain & Fisher 2006). Before a complex trauma client can tolerate the activation of traumatic material, she has to develop the capacity to track her own body’s sensations, to recognize the signs of dysregulation before they become overwhelming, and to use somatic resources, breath, movement, grounding, to return to the window of tolerance when she’s been pushed out of it.
Herman’s three-stage model of trauma recovery, Safety, Remembrance and Mourning, Reconnection, maps directly onto the adapted EMDR protocol. Herman is explicit that the Safety stage isn’t a preliminary to treatment. It’s the first stage of treatment. For complex trauma clients, establishing safety, in the body, in the therapeutic relationship, in the nervous system, is itself a significant therapeutic achievement. The Preparation phase of EMDR is the clinical operationalization of Herman’s Safety stage.
Tammy, six weeks in
Tammy is sitting across from her therapist with her arms crossed. She isn’t hostile. She’s too controlled for that. But there’s a tightness in her jaw her therapist has learned to read, the same tightness Tammy probably wears into the OR on a hard day. “I just want to understand,” Tammy says, carefully, in her Tuesday 4 p.m. slot, the one she books between rounds and picking up her son, “when we’re going to actually start processing.”
Her therapist, who’s been doing this work for fifteen years, doesn’t flinch. She explains, again, that they’re processing. That the resourcing work, the safe place, the container exercise, the work with the part of Tammy that learned to perform flawlessly under pressure, isn’t preparation for EMDR. It’s EMDR. It’s building the nervous system capacity that Tammy’s childhood never let her develop.
Tammy listens. She nods. And then she says, quietly, “But I feel like I’m wasting time. I bill by the fifteen-minute increment. I know what wasted time costs.” Her therapist pauses. “You spent forty years building the defenses that kept you alive,” she says. “We’re not going to dismantle them in a month. And we’re not going to dismantle them without building something to replace them first.” Tammy is quiet for a long moment, looking at her hands. Then: “Okay. I can work with that. For now.”
Sitting with a client like Tammy in this phase of the work, I feel something I’ve felt with hundreds of driven women across fifteen years of practice. Not frustration at her impatience. Recognition. The ranked list of memories, the frustration with the pace, none of it is the problem. It’s the part of her that kept her alive long enough to become a physician despite a childhood that gave her every reason not to trust the adults around her. I’ve come to think of this as the competence-as-armor pattern, and it’s rarely something I try to talk a client out of directly. It’s something we make room for, while slowly asking it to loosen its grip.
What Does Complex Trauma EMDR Look Like Once Processing Begins?
When the preparation phase has built sufficient capacity, when the client has reliable access to internal resources, when the therapeutic relationship is strong enough to serve as a co-regulatory anchor, when the window of tolerance has expanded enough to tolerate some activation without flooding, the work of trauma targeting can begin.
But even here, the adapted protocol for complex trauma differs significantly from standard EMDR. The targeting decisions are more complex. In single-incident PTSD, the therapist typically targets the most disturbing memory and works through it. In complex trauma, the sequencing of targets requires careful clinical judgment. Fisher recommends a “present-to-past” approach, beginning with current triggers and disturbances rather than diving immediately into the earliest or most disturbing memories. This approach tends to be less destabilizing and more likely to produce generalization of positive effects across a client’s life.
The therapist also has to be prepared to work with parts. When bilateral stimulation activates a traumatic memory in a complex trauma client, it may activate not just the memory but the dissociated part that holds it. The therapist has to be able to recognize when a part has been activated, to work with that part directly, and to make sure the client’s Apparently Normal Part stays present and engaged throughout the process. This requires training in both EMDR and parts-based approaches, a combination that isn’t yet standard in most EMDR training programs.
The pacing of sessions is also different. In standard EMDR, sessions often end with the memory significantly processed, the Subjective Units of Disturbance (SUD) score reduced, the Validity of Cognition (VOC) score increased. In complex trauma EMDR, sessions may end with the memory only partially processed, and the therapist has to be skilled at closing down incomplete processing safely, making sure the client leaves the session regulated and resourced, even if the work isn’t finished.
Not every complex trauma client follows this exact sequence, and I wouldn’t want any reader to treat this as a fixed timeline. What I’ve observed across thousands of clinical hours is a pattern, not a formula. Most complex trauma clients need something like this present-to-past, parts-aware sequencing. Some need a different order, based on their dissociative profile and what their nervous system can currently tolerate. That’s a clinical judgment made session by session, not a protocol you can look up and apply uniformly.
Both/And: EMDR Can Be Gentle and Still Do Powerful Work
Stacy is forty-one, a nonprofit executive director in Boston, and this isn’t her first attempt at EMDR. Two years before we met, she tried it with a generalist therapist. A good therapist, well-intentioned, but not specialized in complex trauma. The therapist moved quickly through the preparation phase and began targeting memories within the first month. Stacy was flooded. She left sessions more activated than when she arrived. She kept a bag of frozen peas by her bed that winter, pressed against her sternum at 3 a.m. because it was the only thing that made her chest stop feeling like it was collapsing. She stopped sleeping. After three months, she stopped going.
She told herself, and everyone who asked, that EMDR “didn’t work for her.” She’d tried it. It had made things worse. She wasn’t going to try it again.
Then, eighteen months later, she found a therapist who specialized in complex PTSD. This therapist spent the first four months doing nothing but preparation. Building resources, working with parts, establishing safety. When they finally began targeting, the experience was entirely different. “I could feel it,” Stacy told her therapist, “without drowning in it. That’s the only way I know how to describe it.” The activation was present but manageable. She could stay in the window of tolerance. She could come back to herself.
The Both/And of Stacy’s experience is this: EMDR didn’t fail her, AND the protocol wasn’t adapted for her needs. Both of these things are true at the same time. The treatment modality is sound. The implementation wasn’t matched to her clinical presentation. And the difference between those two things, between a treatment modality and its implementation, is the difference between retraumatization and healing.
This is the Both/And I want every woman with a complex trauma history to carry with her: EMDR can be gentle and still do powerful work. The gentleness isn’t a compromise. It’s the mechanism. The slower, more careful, more resource-building approach to complex trauma EMDR isn’t a lesser version of the treatment. It’s the version of the treatment that actually works for the nervous system that complex trauma created. Stacy still keeps a bag of frozen peas in her freezer, unrelated to any meal she’s planning. She hasn’t needed it at 3 a.m. in over a year. She hasn’t thrown it away either.
The Systemic Lens: Why Is Complex Trauma Still Under-Recognized in Clinical Practice?
If the adapted EMDR protocol for complex trauma is so clearly better suited to clients with C-PTSD histories, why isn’t it standard practice? This isn’t a personal failing of any individual therapist. It’s a pattern built into how the field trains people, and it’s worth naming as a structural gap rather than a character problem.
Most EMDR training programs teach the standard eight-phase protocol, which was developed and validated primarily for single-incident PTSD. The extended preparation phase, Resource Development and Installation, parts-based work, and the sequencing decisions required for complex trauma are advanced clinical skills typically covered only in specialized trainings, trainings that many generalist therapists never pursue. This creates a real gap in the field. A therapist can be fully EMDR-certified and genuinely skilled at treating single-incident trauma while being genuinely underprepared for complex trauma.
Which means in practice: a driven woman who spent her twenties and thirties building a career, and who finally has the flexibility to seek trauma treatment in her forties, may walk into the first EMDR-certified therapist she finds and get a protocol built for a different kind of wound. Not because anyone failed her on purpose. Because the training pipeline hasn’t caught up to what the research has known for decades. The consequences for clients are real: women with complex trauma histories who see generalist therapists may be moved through the protocol too quickly, inadequately resourced before targeting begins, and destabilized rather than helped.
The broader clinical culture has also been slow to fully integrate Herman’s original insight that complex trauma is a distinct clinical entity requiring a distinct treatment approach. The DSM-5 doesn’t include C-PTSD as a separate diagnosis, though the ICD-11 does, so many clinicians still treat complex trauma as a more severe version of PTSD. It isn’t. It’s a different clinical picture, with different neurobiological underpinnings and different timelines.
For the woman seeking EMDR for a complex trauma history, this systemic reality has a practical implication: you have to advocate for yourself. Ask your therapist about their specific training in complex trauma EMDR. Be willing to slow down, even when every part of you wants to push forward. The preparation work isn’t a sign that your therapist doesn’t know what she’s doing. Of course you’re impatient with a process that asks you to trust before you understand it fully. You’re not imagining how hard that is. It’s a sign that she does.
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“The physical incident model is harmful because it ignores the many non-physical forms of abuse inherent to coercive control, as well the on-going nature of the domestic violence.”
Emma Katz, PhD, sociologist and researcher on coercive control and children, formerly senior lecturer in childhood and youth at Liverpool Hope University, Beyond the Physical Incident Model: How Children Living with Domestic Violence are Harmed by and Resist Regimes of Coercive Control, Child Abuse Review (2016)
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Over 15,000 direct clinical hours have shown me that skipping stabilization in complex trauma EMDR work reliably leads to flooding, dissociation, and clients dropping out of treatment entirely. I’ve watched it happen more than once with a client who arrived from a well-meaning but generalist EMDR therapist, and I’ve watched the opposite happen, slowly, when the preparation phase is given the time it actually needs. Herman established the phased treatment model for complex trauma that undergirds current EMDR protocol modifications, emphasizing stabilization before processing, and it’s the framework I return to most often when a driven client wants to skip ahead.
How Do You Find the Right EMDR Therapist for Complex Trauma?
If you have a complex trauma history and you’re considering EMDR, here’s what to look for in a therapist:
Specialized training in complex trauma. Ask specifically whether your therapist has training in EMDR for complex PTSD, C-PTSD, or developmental trauma, not just general EMDR certification. Look for therapists who’ve completed advanced EMDR trainings, who have training in parts-based approaches (IFS, structural dissociation model, ego state therapy), and who have specific experience working with complex trauma populations.
A commitment to an extended preparation phase. A therapist who’s prepared to spend months in preparation before targeting traumatic memories isn’t stalling. She’s demonstrating clinical competence. If a therapist moves to trauma targeting within the first few sessions without extensive resourcing and stabilization work, that’s a red flag for someone with a complex trauma history.
Comfort with parts-based work. Ask your therapist how she works with dissociation and parts. A therapist skilled in complex trauma EMDR will have a clear framework for working with the different parts of the personality that emerge during trauma processing, and will be able to explain that framework to you in plain language.
A relational approach. The therapeutic relationship isn’t just the context for EMDR. It’s a primary mechanism of change in complex trauma treatment. A therapist who’s warm, attuned, and able to serve as a co-regulatory presence isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a clinical necessity.
Tammy is, as of this writing, seven months into the work. She still keeps her ranked list of memories in a folder on her laptop. She hasn’t opened it in weeks. “I stopped needing the list to feel like I was making progress,” she told her therapist recently, still in her scrubs, still on a Tuesday, the coffee this time actually finished before it went cold. The list hasn’t been deleted. It’s just not the thing running the session anymore.
If you’re ready to explore EMDR for complex trauma, I offer individual therapy with EMDR certification and specialization in complex PTSD. I also recommend Fixing the Foundations™, my relational trauma recovery course, as a stabilization-phase supplement that builds nervous system capacity and supports the preparation work of complex trauma EMDR.
The work isn’t fast. It isn’t linear. There will be sessions that feel like nothing is happening, and sessions that feel like everything is happening at once. But for women with complex trauma histories, this careful, adapted, deeply relational approach to EMDR isn’t just the best option available. It’s the approach that most honors the complexity of what you’ve survived, and what you’re capable of healing from. This article is psychoeducational and doesn’t replace individualized assessment; if you’re in crisis, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988 in the U.S.) is available right now.
If this resonates with where you’re in your recovery, you can reach out for a complimentary consultation to explore what EMDR-informed work might look like for your specific history.
Warmly,
Annie.
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Q: How many EMDR sessions do I need for complex trauma?
A: There’s no universal answer, and any therapist who gives you a specific number without a thorough assessment should be approached with caution. For single-incident PTSD, research suggests that 6 to 12 sessions of EMDR can produce significant symptom reduction. For complex PTSD, the treatment timeline is substantially longer, often 1 to 3 years of weekly therapy, with the preparation phase alone potentially lasting 3 to 6 months or more. The timeline depends on the severity and duration of the original trauma, the degree of dissociation present, your current life stability, and the strength of the therapeutic relationship.
Q: Why does my EMDR therapist spend so much time on preparation?
A: Because the preparation phase isn’t a warm-up. It’s a treatment phase in its own right. For clients with complex trauma histories, the nervous system hasn’t developed the capacity to tolerate traumatic material without becoming overwhelmed. Preparation builds that capacity through resource development, stabilization work, and the gradual expansion of the window of tolerance. Skipping or rushing this phase leads to destabilization and the false conclusion that EMDR “doesn’t work.” Your therapist’s insistence on thorough preparation is a sign of clinical competence, not hesitation.
Q: Can EMDR make complex trauma worse?
A: Standard EMDR, applied without adaptation to a complex trauma client, can be destabilizing. This isn’t a failure of the modality. It’s a failure of protocol adaptation. When a therapist moves too quickly to trauma targeting without adequate preparation, the client may be flooded with traumatic material she doesn’t have the nervous system capacity to process. This can increase symptoms, disrupt daily functioning, and damage the therapeutic relationship. This is why choosing a therapist with specific training in complex trauma EMDR matters so much. In the hands of a skilled specialist, EMDR for complex trauma isn’t destabilizing. It’s one of the most effective healing modalities available.
Q: What’s the difference between EMDR for PTSD and EMDR for C-PTSD?
A: The core mechanism, bilateral stimulation to process frozen traumatic memories, is the same. But the protocol adaptation for C-PTSD is substantial. The preparation phase is significantly extended, often lasting months rather than sessions. Resource Development and Installation (RDI) builds nervous system capacity before targeting begins. The targeting sequence follows a present-to-past approach rather than starting with the most disturbing memory. Parts-based work is integrated throughout. These aren’t minor variations. They represent a fundamentally different clinical approach.
Q: How do I know if my therapist is trained in complex trauma EMDR?
A: Ask directly. A therapist with genuine complex trauma EMDR training will be able to speak clearly about the extended preparation phase, Resource Development and Installation, parts-based work, and the sequencing decisions involved in complex trauma targeting. She’ll have specific training beyond basic EMDR certification, advanced trainings in complex trauma, C-PTSD, or developmental trauma. She’ll also be able to explain her approach to dissociation and how she works with clients who have structural dissociation. If a therapist is vague about these specifics, or if she suggests moving to trauma targeting within the first few sessions without extensive preparation, seek a second opinion.
Related Reading
- Shapiro, Francine. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy: Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures. 3rd ed. Guilford Press, 2018.
- Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence. From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books, 1992.
- Fisher, Janina. Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors: Overcoming Internal Self-Alienation. Routledge, 2017.
- van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, 2014.
- Ogden, Pat, Kekuni Minton, and Clare Pain. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Interventions for Trauma and Attachment. W.W. Norton & Company, 2015.
References
Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)
- van der Kolk BA, Wang JB, Yehuda R, Bedrosian L, Coker AR, Harrison C, et al. Effects of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD on self-experience. PLoS One. 2024;19(1):e0295926. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0295926. PMID: 38198456.
- Cloitre M, Stolbach BC, Herman JL, van der Kolk B, Pynoos R, Wang J, et al. A developmental approach to complex PTSD: childhood and adult cumulative trauma as predictors of symptom complexity. J Trauma Stress. 2009;22(5):399-408. doi:10.1002/jts.20444. PMID: 19795402.
- Porges SW. Polyvagal Theory: Current Status, Clinical Applications, and Future Directions. PMID: 40735382.
- Ogden P, Pain C, Fisher J. A sensorimotor approach to the treatment of trauma and dissociation. Psychiatr Clin North Am. 2006;29(1):263-79, xi-xii. PMID: 16530597.
Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)
- Fisher, Janina. Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors. Taylor & Francis Group, 2017.
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Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 direct clinical hours. She works with driven women, including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs, in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information. She’s currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
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