EMDR Therapy
For Brown Girls Breaking the Cycle of Intergenerational Trauma
For Brown girls who want to break the cycle but feel stuck.
Maybe you logically know that cultural guilt and shame are wrong, but it doesn’t feel that way. Maybe you’ve worked with well-meaning white therapists who didn’t get it. Maybe you worked with a Brown therapist who was helpful, but you still felt guilty and ashamed about your bicultural identity, relationship anxiety, and intergenerational trauma.
If talk therapy or CBT hasn’t helped, then it’s not you. It’s the world around you—and your nervous system requires something different.
What is EMDR?
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a type of therapy that regulates the part of your brain that stores traumatic memories and emotions. It’s the recommended treatment for PTSD and complex PTSD, but can be used for navigating cultural guilt and shame, bicultural identity, relationship anxiety, and intergenerational trauma.
If you’re a Brown woman who feels scared to confront your guilt and feels triggered in your relationships with your parents, family, and cultural community, then EMDR might be a good fit for you.
Who I Am
Hey there! I’m Tracy and I call myself The Bad Indian Therapist.
I’m an EMDR Certified™ licensed therapist in New York, New Jersey, and California who helps Brown women like you who struggle with chronic guilt, shame, and self-abandonment.
Together, we can stop letting cultural guilt and shame dictate your life, embrace the nuances of your bicultural identity, and break the cycle of intergenerational trauma through with culturally responsive EMDR!
What I Offer
If confronting your guilt and shame scares you, I use EMDR to help you feel less intimidated. Here’s my general EMDR process:
Joining: I meet you where you’re at to build a safe space to name the things you’ve been taught to suppress in the name of “culture”.
Grounding: Together, we’ll develop tools to help you access a calm state, and get through life’s difficult moments and challenging triggers, even with your family’s cultural expectations.
Past, present, and future: We’ll identify the cultural guilt and shame holding you back, how they impact your life now, and how you’d like to respond to guilt and shame better in the future.
Why I’m Different
Most traditional EMDR therapists follow a strict protocol without understanding that EMDR is not one-size-fits-all, especially for Brown women. It lacks cultural nuance and can be intimidating if you’re new to it—but it really doesn’t have to be that complicated!
I’m not here to force you to do something you’re not ready to do. I take my time with you, and together, we ease into EMDR in a more natural and culturally affirming way.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions I get about how I approach EMDR therapy:
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Unlike other therapies that involve mostly talking and writing, EMDR utilizes interventions that target where your brain stores memories and emotions that trigger you. These interventions include bilateral stimulation, or eye movements.
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Bilateral stimulation is the use of rhythmic, back-and-forth eye movements to stimulate the left and right hemispheres of the brain. This helps you process painful memories and regulate difficult emotions.
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Then we can still do successful EMDR without eye movements! Bilateral stimulation can also look like shoulder-tapping, otherwise known as the butterfly hug. The butterfly hug is my favorite method of bilateral stimulation because it helps with body-mind connection and can further emotion regulation. There are also other ways to use bilateral stimulation.
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No therapy can make your trauma completely go away. You can’t forget the past. But EMDR can help you come to a place of acceptance and respond differently.
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Not initially. We can use EMDR to target current triggers or stressors in your life, but that may mean that memories from the past naturally come up. Together, we’ll work on identifying needed coping skills to help you gently approach these memories as they come up.
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You might not remember every detail, but you remember how you feel. You don’t need to remember every detail to target the feelings and sensations that come up for you. We can still work together and tailor EMDR to fit your needs.
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You don’t need to have PTSD or complex PTSD to benefit from EMDR. For many Brown women, intergenerational trauma can look like chronic guilt and shame, the stress of bicultural identity, and relationship anxiety. Together, we can tailor EMDR and pull from other therapy models, such as CBT and ACT, to find the unique approach for you.
The cycle ends with you.
Break the cycle of intergenerational trauma and start your journey today. Book your free consultation to get started!