Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing was developed by psychologist Dr. Francine Shapiro in 1987 and has become one of the most well-researched trauma therapies in the world.

The premise: when a traumatic event happens, your nervous system can be so overwhelmed that your memory network fails to process and integrate it. The moment becomes "frozen in time." Later, when you're triggered by a similar image, smell, sound, or feeling, you don't only remember the original event — you relive it, often without consciously knowing why.

What sets EMDR apart from talk-based approaches is what it doesn't require: you don't have to consciously remember what happened. EMDR works directly on the emotion and sensation the body has stored — the felt residue of an experience, even when the narrative is missing or fragmented. The body can release what the conscious mind never had words for.

This matters especially for clients carrying early childhood trauma they can't recall, or somatic symptoms — insomnia, binge cycles, persistent anxiety — whose roots aren't accessible to language. EMDR meets the material where it actually lives.

It's the spine of my trauma work. Effective for PTSD, complex trauma, anxiety, panic, and the persistent patterns that have their roots in early experience.

Brainspotting was developed by Dr. David Grand in 2003, building on observations from EMDR practice: certain eye positions consistently correspond to specific points in the brain where trauma is held — what Grand called "trauma capsules." Where you look affects what you can access.

Where EMDR uses bilateral eye movement, Brainspotting uses a fixed eye position. They're complementary — some material responds to one, some to the other — and I often use both within the same client's work.

What Brainspotting reaches is the deeper, somatic layer of trauma — material that lives below cognition, sometimes below explicit memory, sometimes laid down before you had language for it. The body knows where the wound is held. In a session, we find the specific eye position where your body's signal is strongest, and process the material from there. My role isn't to direct or interpret — it's to track and hold the space while your system does the work it's been waiting to do.

This matters especially for early attachment wounds, dissociation, and the kind of trauma that EMDR can begin to surface but not fully resolve.

Brainspotting is effective for PTSD and complex trauma, attachment wounds, dissociation, emotion regulation difficulties, depression, anxiety, and addiction.

Expressive Therapy is a broader tradition in psychotherapy that uses creative media — image-making, drawing, collage, symbol work — as the entry point into unconscious material. The premise: when the analytical mind is busy choosing a colour, arranging an object, or making a mark on the page, the older, image-based part of the psyche has room to surface.

In my practice, the core of this work is symbol work. We use images, objects, and visual prompts to bypass the rationalising mind and find what's pressing to be expressed. The image often arrives before the explanation. You make something, and only later — sometimes much later — do you understand what part of you was trying to speak.

This isn't art therapy in the "let's make something pretty" sense. The work isn't about skill or craft. It's about what surfaces when the editor — the part of you that curates how you appear — finally has nothing to do.

Expressive Therapy is especially useful when language itself is the obstacle: for highly verbal clients who have over-relied on cognition, for early childhood material that was never given words, or for emotions too tangled to translate into a single sentence.

Sandplay — Scenes the unconscious builds

Sandplay is a distinct modality developed by Swiss therapist Dora Kalff in the 1950s, drawing on Margaret Lowenfeld's earlier "World Technique" and Carl Jung's depth psychology. It uses a specific format — a tray of sand and a wide collection of miniature figures — within what Kalff called the free and protected space of the therapy relationship.

In a Sandplay session, you build a scene in the tray using figures that draw you, without instruction about what they should mean. The scene is yours alone — I don't interpret it in the moment. The making is the work; meaning often unfolds across a series of trays, sometimes only becoming clear in hindsight.

What Sandplay reaches is the unconscious in its native language: image, story, archetype. For clients who have done years of verbal therapy and feel stuck above the surface, Sandplay can access depths that words alone don't quite touch. The tray often holds material that doesn't feel personal at first — until, gradually, it does.

This is slow, quiet work. Something old in you gets to be seen by something steady — and in being seen, can finally move.