EMDR for First Responders & Veterans

If you’re thinking about EMDR, you probably have two questions. Does it work? And does this person actually get what my job is like?

A lot of trauma therapy assumes one bad thing happened once. Work like yours doesn’t usually look like that. If you’re a paramedic, a dispatcher, a police officer, a firefighter, on search and rescue, or you served in the military, it’s calls that stack up. It’s the one that got in, the one you can still see clearly years later, sitting under a hundred others that blurred together. And it’s going back to work the next shift because that’s the job.

I volunteered with Squamish Search and Rescue for ten years, including providing critical incident stress support and debriefs. I’m a contracted CISM counsellor with BC Emergency Health Services, and I’m registered with Veterans Affairs Canada to see military veterans and retired RCMP members. I’ve sat with these stories many times. You don’t need to protect me from what you’ve seen.

What EMDR does with this kind of material

EMDR isn’t about telling the whole story. You don’t have to narrate the call from start to finish for the processing to work. We work with how the memory is held, not with producing a full account of what happened.

For a single, contained incident, the call that still feels present, the one your body reacts to before your mind catches up, this is often where EMDR does its clearest work. Contained doesn’t mean small. It means there’s a specific moment we can work with directly, rather than years of accumulated stress with no particular target.

Where EMDR has limits

I’ve completed EMDR Basic Training through an EMDRIA-approved program. I’m not going to tell you EMDR fixes the whole picture.

Cumulative stress, the slow fill of the bucket rather than one incident tipping it, usually needs more than reprocessing. Moral injury, when a call exceeds what your role could hold, has its own shape too. EMDR is one tool in that work, not all of it.

For the specific incident that keeps coming back, EMDR is often a good fit.

If this sounds like you

You don’t need the whole story ready. You don’t need to perform being fine, and you don’t need to prove you’re struggling enough to deserve help. If there’s a call that still sits differently than the others, that’s enough to start.

I offer online EMDR across BC, so you can do this work without driving anywhere or explaining your schedule to anyone. Not sure how it works over video? I wrote about what I’ve found with online EMDR.

Veterans and retired RCMP members: I bill VAC directly through Medavie. See the VAC counselling page.

BCEHS paramedics and dispatchers: you can go through CISM or your Pacific Blue Cross benefit. See the BCEHS page.

I already know how both work, so you won’t have to walk me through it. Book a session or a free 15-minute video consult.