Somatically-Centered EMDR©: A Different Approach to Healing Trauma

10 minutes ago

4 min read

By Adrienne Loker, LCSW, SEP, EMDRIA Certified Therapist and Approved Consultant

When trauma doesn’t fit neatly into a memory

Some traumatic experiences have a clear beginning and end. A car accident, an assault, or another frightening event may leave a distinct memory that can be targeted in EMDR.

Complex trauma can be harder to pinpoint. It may develop through years of emotional neglect, unpredictable caregiving, or relationships in which you learned to put other people’s needs ahead of your own. There may be no single memory that explains why you feel unsafe, invisible, unlovable, or on edge. Instead, those experiences accumulate, shaping how you see yourself, respond to others, and move through the world.

When trauma is woven into your development and relationships, healing often requires more than revisiting individual memories. It requires understanding what happens in your body and relationships right now.

A different way of working with EMDR

Adrienne Loker, LCSW, SEP, EMDRIA Certified Therapist and Approved Consultant, has practiced EMDR since 2017. Through her work with complex, attachment-related, and preverbal trauma, she began exploring how to make EMDR more responsive to the ways these experiences live on in the nervous system.

Through more than 70 hours of her own consultation, Adrienne developed an approach that integrates EMDR with principles from Somatic Experiencing™. She calls it Somatically-Centered EMDR© (SC-EMDR).

The approach recognizes that trauma recovery doesn't follow a straight line. Stabilization, reprocessing, and integration often overlap. Rather than moving through a fixed sequence and assuming each stage is complete, we continually respond to what is happening for you.

Your history shows up in the present

You don't have to remember everything that happened to you or tell your story in perfect detail to begin making sense of your experiences.

In SC-EMDR©, we pay attention to what is happening in the present: shifts in mood, physical sensations, patterns in relationships, and the ways you respond to connection, uncertainty, or stress. These moments can offer clues about your history, even when you don't have a clear narrative for where a pattern began.

The relationship we build in therapy is part of this process, too. How you experience closeness, boundaries, trust, and feeling understood can help us recognize patterns that may have developed long before you had words for them.

Building a capacity for safety that lasts

In SC-EMDR©, building resources isn't something we do briefly before getting to the “real” work. We return to it throughout treatment.

Together, we develop your capacity to stay connected to yourself as difficult feelings and sensations arise. We gradually explore activation and settling, paying attention to what you can tolerate and when you need more support. This helps us build a more sustainable window of tolerance—the range of emotional and physical activation you can experience while remaining present and connected to yourself.

We also look for resources that are already part of your life. Instead of only imagining a protective figure, for example, we might explore a time you protected yourself, set a boundary, or got through something difficult. Even a small moment can become a way to recognize and access your own capacity.

The goal isn't to avoid difficult experiences. It's to develop a stronger sense of connection to yourself while moving through them.

Letting the body guide the work

In a typical EMDR session, the therapist helps identify a target memory and assess the thoughts, emotions, and distress associated with it. In SC-EMDR©, we may begin somewhere much closer to the present.

You might be telling us about a difficult interaction with your sister. Rather than immediately asking you to select a memory and rate your distress, we might pause and ask, “As you say that, what's happening inside your body?”

We start with physical sensation because your body may register an experience before you can fully explain what you're feeling or why. We follow what's happening, bringing in memories, beliefs, or other pieces of the experience when they're helpful.

Bilateral stimulation—such as following our fingers with your eyes or using alternating taps—supports the reprocessing work. We adjust our approach to what you're experiencing rather than requiring every session to follow the same sequence.

As distress settles, new understanding can emerge. You might recognize something about what happened, what you needed then, or what you know about yourself now. We can strengthen that emerging understanding without forcing you to adopt a positive belief before it feels true.

Healing that carries into your life

Reprocessing a memory is one part of recovery. We also want to notice what changes between sessions: how you respond to conflict, whether you feel more able to set a boundary, how quickly you recover after becoming overwhelmed, or whether you can stay connected to yourself when someone else is upset.

These changes help guide our work together. Sometimes we'll continue reprocessing; sometimes we'll return to building resources or understanding a relational pattern. The process adapts as you do.

SC-EMDR© may be especially helpful if your difficulties stem from longstanding relational or developmental trauma, if you struggle to identify a single event that explains how you feel, or if you've spent years understanding your experiences intellectually without feeling that much has changed.

You don't need to have the whole story figured out before you begin. We can start with what's happening now and work from there.

You don't have to keep piecing together your story alone. If you've done therapy before and still feel stuck in familiar patterns, we'd love to help you explore what might be possible with a more embodied approach to healing. Reach out today: info@SeekingDepthToRecovery.com