Chronic anxiety usually has roots. EMDR is built to address them. Susan Quinn Therapist, LMFT EMDRIA-certified EMDR therapist in Los Angeles, treating anxiety, panic, and phobias with the eight-phase protocol.
Approach to Anxiety
Specific Anxiety Targets
Specialisation
Most people who come to me with anxiety have already tried things. Breathing exercises, meditation apps, CBT worksheets, medication sometimes for years. The relief is often partial. The anxiety keeps coming back.
Here’s why. Chronic anxiety isn’t usually random. It’s the nervous system responding to something it learned at some point sometimes recent, often older, frequently before you had language for it.
The thoughts (“what if this goes wrong,” “I can’t handle this,” “something bad is about to happen”) are downstream of the body’s alarm. Calming the thoughts without addressing the body’s alarm is like silencing the smoke detector instead of dealing with the fire.
It doesn’t mean you become a person who never feels anxious. It means the anxiety stops firing on default. The baseline shifts. Many clients describe it as “my body finally believing what my mind already knew.”
EMDR is effective for many forms of anxiety, but not all. Here’s an honest picture of fit.
Yes. EMDR works particularly well for anxiety that has roots — anxiety connected to earlier experiences, even if you can’t always trace the connection consciously. Most chronic anxiety has roots like this. EMDR addresses what your nervous system learned to fear, not just the present-day trigger.
Generalised anxiety, panic disorder, social anxiety, performance anxiety, specific phobias, health anxiety, separation anxiety, and the chronic hypervigilance that often follows trauma. EMDR is also effective for the anxiety that develops around a difficult life event — a diagnosis, a loss, a betrayal — and won’t quiet after the event has passed.
CBT helps you identify and challenge the thoughts that fuel anxiety. It’s effective for many people. EMDR works at a different level — it addresses the underlying nervous-system imprint that’s generating the anxious thoughts in the first place. For some clients, CBT is enough. For others, the anxiety responds to EMDR after CBT has only managed it.
My office sits on San Vicente Boulevard in Brentwood minutes from Santa Monica, West LA, and Beverly Hills. For clients across California, telehealth makes the same work possible from home.
Primary office · 90049
20 min · Telehealth
20 min · In-person
20 min · Telehealth
20 min · Telehealth
20 min · Telehealth
No commitment, no paperwork. A chance to talk through what you’re carrying and see whether EMDR and whether I might be the right fit.