AF-EMDR therapist in Los Angeles. Susan Quinn Therapist, LMFT — bringing an attachment-focused approach to clients whose deeper work is relational, developmental, or about who they’ve become.
Typical for single-incident PTSD
Evidence-Based PTSD Treatment
Specialisation
Trauma doesn’t store like other memories. When something overwhelming happens, the brain’s normal filing system fails — the experience ends up in a kind of cold storage, with image, sensation, emotion, and belief all locked together. Years later, a smell or sound or feeling can fire all of it off at once, as if it’s happening now.
Talk therapy can describe and contextualise this. It can help you understand what happened and why you respond the way you do. What it often can’t do is dissolve the stored material itself. EMDR addresses that directly.
Using bilateral stimulation while you hold the memory in mind, EMDR helps the brain finish the processing that got stuck. The memory remains — but the charge it carried drops away. You can think about it without it overwhelming you. The body stops bracing for it.
For single-incident trauma — an accident, an assault, a medical emergency, a loss — EMDR is often remarkably efficient. For complex PTSD, where the trauma was chronic and relational, the same protocol applies but the arc is longer and more carefully paced.
EMDR is powerful for trauma and PTSD, but it’s not the only path. Here’s where it tends to be the right starting point — and where it isn’t.
Standard EMDR is built to reprocess specific traumatic events. Attachment-Focused EMDR adds a layer: it targets the relational wounds that shaped how you feel about yourself and how you connect with others. The therapist is more actively present and attuned during AF-EMDR, and resource installation is more extensive. The result is that AF-EMDR reaches developmental and relational material that standard EMDR alone often doesn’t.
AF-EMDR builds on standard EMDR with additional training that integrates attachment theory and interpersonal neurobiology into the core EMDR protocol. Clinicians who practice AF-EMDR have completed advanced training beyond basic EMDR certification, with an emphasis on resource installation, relational attunement, and the application of EMDR to developmental and relational wounds.
No. AF-EMDR is particularly powerful for developmental and relational trauma, but it’s also effective for any client whose work involves patterns in connection, self-worth, or felt safety. Many clients come to AF-EMDR after standard EMDR or talk therapy has helped with discrete events but hasn’t shifted the underlying relational template.
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.