Single-Incident Trauma in Adults

One event, and a line down the middle of your life. Everything before it, and everything since.

You Can Name the Day

An assault in a parking lot. A fall from a ladder. A house fire. A machine that caught a coworker. A medical emergency where you watched a room fill with people and nobody told you anything. You know the date, and often the hour.

Practically, life resumed. You went back to work, you filed the paperwork, you told the story enough times that it has a shape now. What has not resumed is the two or three seconds that keep playing: the sound, the moment you understood, the split second before impact. They arrive while you are loading the dishwasher.

Many people who come for this do not think of themselves as trauma clients at all. They were fine before. They expect to be fine again, and are unsettled that time has not done the work on its own.

Why One Event Is Well Suited to ART

The material is contained. There is a beginning, a worst moment and an end, and usually a small number of images doing most of the work. That makes the targets unusually clear compared with something that accumulated over years.

ART works with those images directly while I guide the eye movements, along with the physical response that comes with them: the drop in your stomach, the tightening across your chest, the flinch. This is often where the work moves most directly, though how quickly anything shifts is genuinely individual and I will not predict it for you.

What a Session on That Day Involves

We find the strongest image first, not the beginning of the story. Frequently it is not the part you would expect: the ceiling tiles, a stranger's face, the phone on the seat beside you.

You hold that image while I guide the eye movements. We check what shifts, then take the next piece in order of charge. You do not have to narrate the incident out loud for this to work, which matters to people who have already told it to police, insurers, lawyers and family until the words feel worn out.

Sessions are 60 minutes by secure video, or up to three hours as an intensive when you would rather work through the whole event in one sitting.

What This Is Not, and When It Is Not the Fit

• Not a way to make the event un-happen, and not a claim about how fast anything changes.
• Not legal, forensic or evaluative work. I do not write reports for claims or court.
• Not appropriate while you are still in the situation that is unsafe. Safety comes first and we would talk about that first.
• Not medical care for a physical injury from the event. That stays with your physician.
• Adults only, by secure video in Kentucky and Ohio.

Bring me the day in a free fifteen-minute consultation.

Fifteen minutes by video or phone. You can say as little as one sentence about what happened. What we are deciding together is whether working on the images from that day is what you want to do next.