EMDR Therapy

Treatment Approach

Explore an approach

EMDR Therapy Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) Positive Psychology Internal Family Systems Jungian Psychology Energy Psychology

✨ EMDR Therapy at Mended Heart

At Mended Heart Family Counseling & Trauma Recovery Center, we provide online EMDR therapy to clients throughout California & Oregon.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is an evidence-based trauma-focused therapy recommended for PTSD. Jennifer may also use EMDR for trauma-related distress when clinically appropriate, based on your history, goals, and readiness.

EMDR combines attention to distressing memories with therapist-guided bilateral stimulation, such as eye movements, tapping, or auditory tones. Treatment includes assessment and preparation before memory processing. Jennifer monitors your response and adjusts the pacing to your needs.

💻 Online EMDR With Careful Preparation
Online EMDR can be an option for trauma treatment. Some clients value receiving care from home, while others may need a different setting or level of support. Jennifer considers your needs, privacy, technology, available support, and readiness before trauma processing begins. You must be physically located in California or Oregon for telehealth sessions.

📚 Evidence-Based PTSD Treatment
EMDR is among the trauma-focused treatments recommended for PTSD by the VA/DoD guideline. Research and guidance should be read in context. No approach guarantees a particular outcome. Organizations and research resources for learning about trauma treatment include:
✦ American Psychiatric Association
✦ American Psychological Association
✦ World Health Organization (WHO)
✦ SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration)
✦ U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs & Department of Defense
✦ National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI)
✦ International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies
✦ Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews
✦ U.K. National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE)

🌿 Focused Care: Three-Hour EMDR Intensives

Three-hour EMDR intensive appointments provide extended time for assessment, preparation, and trauma work when clinically appropriate. Jennifer helps you explore whether this format fits your goals, needs, and readiness.

An intensive offers more time within one appointment while keeping attention on your readiness and pacing. Treatment length and outcomes vary. A longer session does not guarantee faster recovery or a particular result. Your assessment and ongoing response guide whether and when memory processing is appropriate.

EMDR Intensive Program:

3-Hour EMDR Intensive: $750. Telehealth only in California and Oregon.

For complex trauma or dissociative symptoms, careful assessment, preparation, and stabilization are especially important. Jennifer evaluates whether an intensive or another session format fits your needs. Diagnosis or feeling stuck does not by itself establish readiness for intensive memory processing.

🤍 Why Work With Me

As an EMDR-certified therapist, I specialize in complex trauma and dissociative disorders (DID). I combine clinical training with careful assessment, preparation, and attention to your response. My work brings together clinical expertise, creativity, and respect for your individual needs.

I don’t follow EMDR as a rigid script. Instead, I adapt pacing to meet your nervous system, read subtle cues to keep you safe, and use creativity to help you move forward when you feel stuck. My goal is not only to help you process the past but to empower you to step into a future of resilience, confidence, and freedom.

🌱 What to Expect:
🌿 Day One:
We begin with a comprehensive history, a trauma timeline, and development of personalized coping tools and emotional resources.

🌿 Following Sessions:
Sessions include preparation and, when clinically appropriate, trauma processing through EMDR, cognitive restructuring, and somatic practices tailored to your needs. Each 3-hour session includes two 10-minute breaks.

🌿 Between Sessions:
You’ll be given supportive “homework” like journaling, meditation, and mindful tracking of triggers, behaviors, and thoughts related to the trauma we’re working through.

If trauma symptoms affect work, school, relationships, or daily life, a consultation can help you explore fit and next steps. Jennifer will discuss your goals, available support, and treatment options with you.

Schedule a Free 15-Minute Consultation

CBT Cognitive Behavioral Therapy & Trauma-Informed CBT

🧠 Cognitive Behavioral Therapy & Trauma-Informed CBT

🌿 Helping You Unravel the Thoughts That Keep You Stuck

At Mended Heart Family Counseling & Trauma Recovery Center, I use Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Trauma-Informed CBT as part of a holistic, heart-centered approach to healing. These powerful tools help you untangle the limiting beliefs, thought loops, and behavioral patterns that keep you feeling overwhelmed, anxious, or emotionally blocked.

💡 What is CBT?

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is one of the most researched and widely used forms of psychotherapy. It works by helping you identify and shift the thoughts and beliefs that influence your emotions and actions. In short:

✦ Change your thoughts, change your experience.

🌿 CBT is especially helpful for:

Anxiety and panic
Depression
Negative self-talk
Perfectionism
Phobias or fears
Behavioral patterns you can’t seem to break

We work together to recognize distorted thinking, challenge it with truth, and replace it with more balanced, empowering perspectives. Over time, this leads to noticeable shifts in how you feel, how you respond to life, and how you see yourself.

🧠 What Makes CBT Trauma-Informed?

Trauma-informed CBT explores how past experiences can shape your thoughts and reactions. Together, we look at patterns that may be keeping you stuck and practice new ways of responding. Your history, comfort and goals remain part of the conversation.

🌿 Here’s how Trauma-Informed CBT differs:

We move at the pace of your nervous system, not just your intellect
We stay mindful of trauma responses like dissociation, emotional flooding, or inner critics
We weave in body awareness, grounding techniques, and compassionate curiosity
We treat your symptoms not as flaws, but as once-useful strategies for staying safe

You won’t just “reframe” your thoughts, you’ll begin to feel safe enough to believe new truths about yourself.

🧩 CBT + EMDR: A Powerful Combination

In most sessions, CBT is used in conjunction with EMDR therapy, and together they make a powerful pair.
While EMDR helps process the emotional and somatic residue of trauma, CBT brings clarity to the thought patterns that often accompany it. This integrative approach helps clients not only reprocess old memories but also build new mental frameworks that support long-term change, resilience, and peace.

🌱 What Does a Session Look Like?

Your session may include:

Identifying a painful thought or belief
Tracing it back to its emotional or childhood root
Exploring what that part of you needed at the time
Challenging the belief with curiosity, truth, and self-compassion
Replacing it with a more empowering, soul-aligned perspective
Practicing daily tools to interrupt old patterns and reinforce healing

This work is gentle but powerful. Even the smallest shift in thought can open the door to lasting emotional freedom.

💬 Ready to Release What’s No Longer Serving You?

CBT and Trauma-Informed CBT can help you gain insight, build emotional resilience, and rewrite the inner narrative that’s been holding you back.

Let’s explore what’s possible, together.

Positive Psychology

🌟 Positive Psychology

Shifting the Focus from "What's Wrong" to "What's Strong"

At Mended Heart Family Counseling & Trauma Recovery Center, I integrate the principles of Positive Psychology, a powerful, research-based approach pioneered by Dr. Martin Seligman to help clients reconnect with their inner strengths, core values, and sense of meaning in life.

While traditional therapy often focuses on resolving symptoms or dysfunction, Positive Psychology invites us to look at what’s already working inside of you and build from there. It doesn’t deny pain or trauma, it simply expands the lens to include hope, resilience, joy, and growth.

💡 What is Positive Psychology?

Positive Psychology is the scientific study of human flourishing. It asks:
✦ What makes life worth living?
✦ What are the keys to thriving, not just surviving?

🌿 Rather than focusing solely on what’s “wrong,” Positive Psychology emphasizes:

Personal strengths & character traits
Gratitude & appreciation
Purpose & meaning
Optimism & hope
Flow states (being fully engaged in something you love)
Emotional intelligence & relationships

Using tools grounded in research, we begin identifying what’s right with you, what lights you up, and what values guide your best self.

🌱 Positive Psychology in Trauma Work

For clients healing from trauma, Positive Psychology isn’t about bypassing or ignoring the pain. Instead, it provides a counterbalance, a way to remember your wholeness, even as you heal your wounds.

🌿 We might explore:

What gave you strength when everything felt dark?
What values helped you survive?
What do you want to grow toward now that you’re no longer in survival mode?

In this way, Positive Psychology pairs beautifully with EMDR, CBT, and other trauma-informed modalities. It restores the belief that life can be good again, that you are capable of joy, connection, and purpose even after hardship.

🧭 What Tools Might We Use?

Some tools I integrate into sessions include:

Strengths-based assessments (such as VIA Character Strengths)
Gratitude practices
Meaning and purpose journaling
Visualization and values alignment exercises
Goal-setting that reflects your heart’s calling, not just your to-do list
Identifying “flow” activities that bring fulfillment and vitality

These tools are especially helpful for clients who feel stuck, discouraged, or disconnected from their identity after trauma or major life changes.

💬 Ready to Reclaim Your Inner Light?

Positive Psychology can help you shift from a survival mindset to one of thriving, self-trust, and possibility.
Let’s remember who you are beneath the pain and build a future that reflects your highest truth.

Internal Family Systems

🧩 Internal Family Systems (IFS)

Healing the Inner System with Compassion and Curiosity

At Mended Heart Family Counseling & Trauma Recovery Center, I use Internal Family Systems (IFS) to help clients heal by building relationships with their inner parts: the protective, wounded, and wise aspects of themselves that often hold the key to lasting transformation.

IFS, developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz, is a deeply respectful and non-pathologizing approach to therapy. It views the mind not as broken or disordered, but as an inner ecosystem, one that is naturally designed to heal when given the right conditions.

🧩 You Are Not One Thing! You Are a System of Parts

Have you ever said something like:

“A part of me wants to move forward, but another part is terrified.”
“There’s a part of me that still believes I’m not enough.”
“I know I’m safe now, but a younger part of me doesn’t feel that way.”

IFS sees these inner voices not as flaws, but as protective parts trying to help you survive, even if their strategies are outdated or extreme.
Every part has a purpose. Every part is welcome.

🕊️ The Goal: Healing Through Self-Leadership

The heart of IFS therapy is helping you access what Schwartz calls the Self: your calm, compassionate, intuitive core. When you lead from this place, your inner parts can soften, unburden, and relax.

🌿 IFS helps you:

Develop compassion for your protective parts (like the inner critic or the avoider)
Gently connect with wounded parts carrying shame, fear, or grief
Release the burdens these parts carry from past trauma
Build a more trusting, peaceful internal system
Access clarity, creativity, and courage from your authentic Self

🤍 How IFS Supports Trauma Healing

For trauma survivors, IFS is a game-changer. Instead of pushing parts away or trying to “fix” yourself, IFS teaches you to listen, witness, and befriend the parts of you that have been screaming for attention.

IFS pairs beautifully with EMDR and other trauma modalities. Sometimes, before we can reprocess a memory, we need to meet the part of you that’s scared to go there. When your inner world feels heard and respected, healing becomes possible.

🌱 What Might an IFS Session Look Like?

A session may include:

Naming the parts that are showing up in the moment
Identifying which parts are protectors, managers, or exiles
Exploring their story and when they first came online
Offering compassion and curiosity from your Self
Witnessing and releasing emotional burdens
Creating inner harmony and trust between parts

🌿 IFS is especially powerful for:

Complex trauma
Dissociation or feeling fragmented
Inner conflict or self-sabotage
Childhood trauma and attachment wounds
Clients with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), where IFS offers language that honors and respects the reality of inner experience

💬 Ready to Meet the Inner You?

IFS shows us that true healing doesn’t come from silencing parts of ourselves, it comes from learning to lead them with love.

Let’s build that inner trust, together.

Schedule a Free 15-Minute Consultation

Jungian Psychology

🌌 Jungian Psychology

Healing the Soul by Making the Unconscious Conscious

At Mended Heart Family Counseling & Trauma Recovery Center, I often integrate the principles of Jungian Psychology, developed by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, for clients seeking deeper insight, spiritual alignment, and inner transformation.

Jung believed that lasting healing happens not just by managing symptoms, but by bringing the unconscious into conscious awareness, reconnecting with our true Self, and integrating the forgotten or hidden parts of who we are.

This is the work of soul.

🧠 What is Jungian Psychology?

Jungian therapy helps us explore the inner architecture of the psyche, which includes:

The conscious mind (your present thoughts, decisions, and identity)
The unconscious (memories, symbols, and archetypes beneath awareness)
The shadow (the parts of yourself you’ve disowned or rejected)
The persona (the mask or identity you wear for the world)
The anima/animus (inner feminine and masculine aspects of the soul)
And the Self - the center of wholeness and spiritual truth within you

Rather than labeling or diagnosing, Jungian work invites you to become a curious observer of your own story, dreams, emotions, and patterns.

🌙 Shadow Work: The Path to Wholeness

Many clients come to therapy feeling stuck, lost, or like part of themselves is missing. Often, this is the shadow calling out: the part of you that holds disowned feelings, truths, and inner power.

Shadow work doesn’t mean fighting the dark, it means turning toward it with honesty and compassion, reclaiming the gold within.

🌱 Through this work, you’ll begin to:

Understand the root of recurring emotional triggers
Heal shame and self-rejection
Reclaim suppressed gifts and wisdom
Stop projecting pain onto others
Move toward true integration and self-acceptance

🌙 Dreams, Symbols & Synchronicity

Jung believed the psyche speaks in symbols, especially through dreams and synchronicities (those meaningful “coincidences” that feel divinely timed).

🌿 In therapy, we may explore:

Your recent dreams and what they reveal about your inner world
Archetypes and myths that resonate with your life journey
Symbols, animals, or recurring images that arise in meditation or intuition
Synchronicities guiding your healing path

This is especially powerful for clients who feel spiritually open or drawn to meaning beyond the material world.

🧭 Jungian Tools I May Integrate

Depending on your needs and interests, our work may include:

Shadow work and parts dialogue
Active imagination and visualization
Dream analysis and symbolic interpretation
Archetypal exploration (e.g., inner child, healer, warrior, victim, lover)
Values-based guidance for soulful living
Guided journaling and rituals for integration

Jungian psychology pairs beautifully with EMDR, Internal Family Systems, and Positive Psychology for clients ready to go beyond symptom relief and into soul-level healing.

💬 Ready to Begin the Journey Within?

Jung wrote, “Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.”
If you feel a stirring inside you… an invitation to meet yourself more fully… this path may be calling.

Let’s explore your inner world together.

Energy Psychology

⚡ Energy Psychology

Optional Mind-Body and Spiritual Practices

At Mended Heart Family Counseling & Trauma Recovery Center, I integrate Energy Psychology as a complementary approach for clients who feel drawn to holistic, body-based, and spiritually aligned healing.

Energy Psychology is a term used for practices that combine attention to thoughts, feelings, and body awareness with traditional or spiritual energy concepts. Different practices have different levels of research support. References to energy systems reflect these frameworks. They should be distinguished from established explanations and treatments for trauma.

🌿 What is Energy Psychology?

These practices may draw on:

Traditional Chinese Medicine (like acupuncture meridians)
Personal reflection
Somatic awareness
Spiritual beliefs and imagery
Modern psychology

Some approaches use the language of meridians, chakras, or biofields. These are traditional or spiritual frameworks that some clients find personally meaningful, rather than verified physical explanations for trauma or illness. Jennifer discusses the proposed approach, its limits, and how it relates to your goals before you choose to participate.

🌿 Techniques I May Integrate

In sessions, I may incorporate energy-based techniques that are gentle, intuitive, and trauma-sensitive, such as:

Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) or “Tapping”
Touch-and-Breathe or acupoint holding methods
Energy clearing visualizations and light-based healing
Guided somatic scanning and intuitive awareness
Chakra balancing or meridian tracing (when appropriate)

These tools are always offered with consent and tailored to your unique needs and beliefs. Some are subtle enough to be done silently in session or practiced at home for empowerment between visits.

🌱 How Optional Practices May Fit Your Care

Trauma-related distress can affect your emotional wellbeing and sense of safety. Jennifer works with you to understand your needs and plan care. Optional complementary practices are considered alongside clinical assessment and evidence-based trauma therapy, with attention to your response and preferences.

When appropriate, we may explore:

Your own beliefs and understanding of balance
What emotions and sensations you notice
Grounding and comfort at a pace that fits your needs
How optional practices fit alongside your trauma treatment
What feels personally meaningful or supportive to you

Clients may describe feeling “lighter,” “more clear,” or “reconnected to their body.” Experiences are individual and responses vary. Jennifer welcomes your feedback about what feels helpful and whether the approach continues to fit your goals.

🤍 A Spiritual Yet Grounded Path

If spiritual or energy-based ideas resonate with you, they can be discussed in a way that respects your beliefs and goals. Participation is optional, and you can choose to focus entirely on conventional trauma therapy.

As a certified energy healer, I’ve studied several energy healing systems. This training is part of my interest in optional spiritual and complementary practices. Energy-based language is part of the practice’s philosophy. In psychotherapy, assessment, preparation, and evidence-based care continue to guide treatment.

All energy-based interventions are offered gently, with permission, and are seamlessly blended with traditional psychotherapy tools. Healing doesn’t need to be forced. It simply needs space to unfold.

💬 Curious About Energy Psychology?

If you’d like to explore spiritual or complementary practices alongside trauma therapy, a consultation can help you ask questions and discuss fit.
Together, we can consider your goals, preferences, and the care that feels appropriate for you.

Schedule a Free 15-Minute Consultation