EMDR Psychotherapy
Free Yourself from the Past
You deserve to feel safe in your body, clear in your mind, and confident in your choices — without being held back by old pain, trauma, or patterns that no longer serve you.
It’s time to finally break out of feeling stuck and claim your whole self again. EMDR can help you move forward in your life with more peace.
You keep replaying something that happened, even if it was years ago, and it still hits like it just happened.
You feel disconnected from your body, your emotions, or your sense of self like you’re just going through the motions.
You have tried talking about it already, but it feels overwhelming, exhausting, or not enough.
You’re stuck in the same cycles with your thoughts, relationships, or emotions and don’t know how to break out of it.
You’re tired of carrying old pain and you’re ready for something that actually helps you feel different.
And living in the present while replaying the past can feel like a lot…
Especially when reactions have been creating problems in your life and you can’t control them no matter how hard you’ve tried…
Or when you 're caught in cycles of anxiety, shame, and self-doubt that you can’t seem to talk yourself out of.
You’re not broken. You’re carrying pain that your nervous system hasn’t had a chance to process.
EMDR therapy offers a way through that doesn’t rely on just talking about it. It works with your body, your brain, and your natural ability to heal.
EMDR therapy is designed to help you process what’s been stuck — the memories, emotions, and patterns that talk therapy alone hasn’t been able to shift — so you can finally feel lighter, clearer, and more in control of your life.
Okay, so what exactly is EMDR and how do I know if it’s for me?
❋ Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, known as EMDR Therapy, is an evidence-based therapeutic treatment developed in 1987 by Dr. Francine Shapiro. EMDR Therapy has increased in popularity in recent years as it brings lasting change in a relatively short amount of time to single incident traumas and can be used over longer periods to treat Complex PTSD and other challenging conditions.
❋ If you’ve tried talking about the hard stuff and still feel stuck, EMDR might be what you’re looking for.
❋ It’s a therapy that helps your brain and body actually process what happened so it doesn’t keep showing up as anxiety, shutdowns, or self-doubt.
❋ EMDR uses guided, rhythmic movements (like eye movements or tapping) to help shift how painful memories live in your system.
EMDR with me isn’t one-size-fits-all
We’ll move at your pace, and I’ll integrate other tools like mindfulness, creative expression, and Internal Family Systems (IFS) to support you holistically.
I can also provide adjunctive EMDR sessions along with another therapist if you want to still work with someone else but add EMDR to your treatment.
EMDR Therapy was initially known as a PTSD treatment for Veterans. It now has the strongest recommendation for the treatment of PTSD by the US Department of Veteran Affairs (source). Over time, the application of EMDR Therapy expanded to treat many conditions including:
❋ Anxiety
❋ Phobias
❋ OCD
❋ Disturbing or upsetting experiences
❋ Attachment wounds
❋ Depression
❋ Disaster recovery
❋ Unresolved traumas from the past (not necessarily PTSD)
❋ Grief
❋ Lack of confidence and self esteem due to past experiences
❋ Fear of future events such as a trip or major exam
What is EMDR Therapy used for?
How do I get started?
01
Free consultation:
Book a free 20-minute call so we can talk through what you’re experiencing and whether EMDR is the right fit. If it’s not, I’ll share other treatment recommendations to support you.
02
Intake session:
We’ll schedule a 60-minute intake to explore your history, symptoms, and goals. This gives us a clear picture of what’s been impacting you and how EMDR can help..
03
Begin weekly sessions:
We’ll meet regularly to start building resources, reducing distress, and working through your personalized EMDR treatment plan at a pace that feels right for you.
Hi, I’m Cristina Lugo
LCSW. I’m a licensed psychotherapist with 15 years of experience and six years of experience utilizing EMDR.
Bringing EMDR into my practice has had profound impacts on my clients and helped them break out of lifelong cycles. Once I was fully trained in EMDR and saw its powerful effects, I decided to take my education and training in EMDR a step further and become an EMDR Certified Therapist™. This credentialing process required many hours of EMDR practice, consultation, training and study to really learn EMDR inside-out. I am passionate about sharing EMDR with our community and look forward to introducing you to it.
It’s time to break out of these cycles and feel calm again.
Let’s do it together. Let’s talk to see if our group could be a good fit for you.
I found Cristina after a few unsuccessful attempts at traditional talk therapy. I was looking to try EMDR to tackle some recurring challenges in romantic relationships. From our first session, Cristina fostered a warm and nonjudgemental environment where I feel safe diving into some of the most tender parts of my past. Now, with Cristina’s help, I am able to see my past as a tool to understand how to successfully reach my goals and not something to be ashamed of. I finally feel like I am on the right path to achieving my goals and living a life where I can welcome authentic love and feel compassion for myself.
I found Cristina after a few unsuccessful attempts at traditional talk therapy. I was looking to try EMDR to tackle some recurring challenges in romantic relationships. From our first session, Cristina fostered a warm and nonjudgemental environment where I feel safe diving into some of the most tender parts of my past. Now, with Cristina’s help, I am able to see my past as a tool to understand how to successfully reach my goals and not something to be ashamed of. I finally feel like I am on the right path to achieving my goals and living a life where I can welcome authentic love and feel compassion for myself.
I found Cristina after a few unsuccessful attempts at traditional talk therapy. I was looking to try EMDR to tackle some recurring challenges in romantic relationships. From our first session, Cristina fostered a warm and nonjudgemental environment where I feel safe diving into some of the most tender parts of my past. Now, with Cristina’s help, I am able to see my past as a tool to understand how to successfully reach my goals and not something to be ashamed of. I finally feel like I am on the right path to achieving my goals and living a life where I can welcome authentic love and feel compassion for myself.
Testimonials
Payment details
Rates:
- $215 per 50 minute in person or virtual session
- $250 per 60 minute intake session
Superbills available for PPO reimbursement
Frequently asked questions
How does EMDR Therapy work?
EMDR Therapy is a natural, eight phase process based on the theory of Adaptive Information Processing (AIP). Eye movement is the most famous phase, but all phases are valuable and help integrate change into your life. According to the AIP model, we each have a healing function in our brain that allows us to process experiences and memories to an adaptive resolution. Some experiences are so difficult that they get stuck and don’t move toward an adaptive resolution on their own.
In EMDR Therapy, we map out “targets”- traumatic or upsetting incidents in your life and the resulting beliefs you have formed about yourself. We then encourage Adaptive Information Processing through bilateral stimulation- where the right and left hemispheres of our brains are stimulated in a quick, rhythmic way through moving our eyes back and forth or feeling a physical pulse on alternating hands.
Okay, so I get that you use bilateral stimulation to make it work but what does that actually do?!
Applying bilateral stimulation while recalling a stuck memory or experience helps desensitize the disturbing and distressing “charge” of the experience. Nothing about the facts of the event change in your mind. It’s your perspective of the event that changes along with thoughts, feelings, and body sensations relating to the event. When these shift, you can move forward in a more integrated, empowered, and healed way. Rapid Eye Movement (REM sleep) dream states may be an example of how we naturally use bilateral stimulation to process our feelings and experiences while we sleep.
What is actually happening in my brain when we do EMDR?
EMDR Therapy creates or strengthens new neural pathways in addition to desensitizing old ones. For example, if every time you recall an event, you have a negative thought about yourself, you build a strong neural network between that event and the negative perspective about yourself. In EMDR Therapy, we identify positive thoughts and connect these to events instead, so that you have a more adaptive response to past and future experiences.
By repeatedly holding positive thoughts with situations, you strengthen the thoughts, like brain exercise! These changes in your self-perspective can be felt in your body and have a powerful impact on how you navigate your world.
So if I start therapy with you, will we just be doing eye movements the whole time and not talk at all?
It really depends on what works for you and your therapeutic goals. In EMDR we still need to talk so I can understand what we are working on. In EMDR Psychotherapy with me, I provide comprehensive, holistic treatment that is tailored to your needs. In addition to EMDR I also include coping tools and resources to help provide strength during difficult moments. I also weave in important lessons and realizations using mindfulness-informed talk therapy, IFS (internal family systems) and art therapy to help you apply this growth to the way you want to live your life and move forward.
Good faith
You have the right to receive a “Good Faith Estimate” explaining how much your medical and mental health care will cost.
Under the law, health care providers need to give patients who don’t have insurance or who are not using insurance an estimate of the expected charges for medical services, including psychotherapy services.
You have the right to receive a Good Faith Estimate for the total expected cost of any non-emergency healthcare services, including psychotherapy services.
You can ask your health care provider, and any other provider you choose, for a Good Faith Estimate before you schedule a service.
If you receive a bill that is at least $400 more than your Good Faith Estimate, you can dispute the bill. Make sure to save a copy or picture of your Good Faith Estimate.
For questions or more information about your right to a Good Faith Estimate,
visit www.cms.gov/nosurprises or call (800) 985-3059.
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Ready to free yourself from the past? Let’s talk
Let’s explore how EMDR can help you process what’s been holding you back—so you can move forward with more clarity, calm, and confidence.