EMDR Therapy Anywhere In California
Four EMDRIA trained therapists. Weekly, couples or intensive. Wherever you are in the state.
You don’t have to live near a good trauma therapist to work with one.
You Are Good At Holding It Together
Most people who find this page are not falling apart. They are billing hours, running a team, finishing the degree, keeping the household on schedule. From the outside it looks fine.
What it looks like from the inside: you wake up at 3am with your jaw clenched. A comment from your manager lands like a threat and you replay it for two days. You took a week off and came back exactly as tired. There is a thing that happened, years ago or last spring, and you have talked yourself out of it mattering, and your body has not agreed.
That gap between how well you are performing and how bad it feels is usually where trauma lives. Not a diagnosis you would have used for yourself. Just something that got stored wrong and keeps running.
EMDR is built for exactly that. It goes after the stored version of the thing, not your thoughts about it. Which is why it tends to work for people who have already tried thinking their way out.
If you want the full explanation of how it works before you go further, that is on our EMDR and trauma therapy page. This page is about whether you can work with us, and what that looks like.
Four Therapists, One State, No Waitlist Roulette
Most practices offering EMDR in California are one therapist with one specialty and a six-month waitlist. If they are not the right fit, you are back to the search.
We are four therapists, all trained in EMDR, and California is the one state where every one of us can see you. You get matched on what you actually came in for. The lawyer with burnout, the adult who grew up in a house that was not safe, the first-generation daughter carrying everyone's expectations, the person whose relationship to sex or their own body has never felt like theirs. Those are different people and they should get different therapists.
If the fit is not right after a few sessions, you move to someone else here instead of starting over somewhere else.
Our licensed providers are EMDRIA Certified Therapists and our pre-licensed therapists are more than halfway through their certification process.
Our EMDR Therapists In California
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Alexis Harney, LMFT
California LMFT 155293. EMDRIA certified. Alexis specializes in complex trauma, childhood trauma and attachment wounds, using advanced EMDR protocols for the histories that do not fit in one memory. She sees adults, teens and couples. Sessions are $235.
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Daniella Mohazab, AMFT
California AMFT 152240, supervised by Laurel van der Toorn. Daniella works at the intersection of trauma, sex and identity, for people whose relationship to intimacy or their own body has been shaped by things that happened to them. AASECT member. Sessions are $190.
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Laurel van der Toorn, LMFT
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Tatevik Sarkisian, AMFT
California AMFT 148590, supervised by Laurel van der Toorn. Tatevik works with high achievers who cannot turn it off: anxiety, perfectionism and the particular weight of being the first in your family to do this. She brings somatic work from her background as a yoga teacher, for the clients who feel it in their chest before they can name it. Sessions are $175.
Weekly individual sessions
The standard format. Fifty minutes a week for as long as the work takes. Most people start here.
Couples work
When one partner's trauma is affecting the relationship, or when both of you are carrying something. Alexis and Daniella both work with couples and are trained in the Gottman Method. More on our couples therapy page.
Intensives
Longer sessions over a shorter stretch of time. For people who cannot hold a weekly appointment for a year, who are between jobs or on leave and want to use the window, or who have one specific thing they want to work through without spreading it out. Details on our EMDR intensives page. Most practices offer one of these. Being able to move between them without changing therapists is worth something.
All Of It Is Online
That is a deliberate choice, not a workaround.
EMDR translates to video well. The bilateral stimulation works on screen. And doing this work from your own home means you are somewhere familiar when something difficult comes up, and you do not have to drive afterward. You can close the laptop and lie down.
It also fits a life that does not have room for a commute to a therapy office. A fifty-minute session between meetings is possible. A ninety-minute round trip is not.
Being on video does not change the depth of the work. It changes where you sit while you do it.
It also means where you live in California stops mattering. Whether you are in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, the Central Valley or somewhere with no trauma specialist within an hour, the list of therapists available to you is the same.
You need to be physically located in California at the time of your session. That is a licensing rule, not a preference.
Cost and Insurance
Sessions run from $175 to $275 depending on which therapist you see.
We are out of network, which means we do not bill insurance directly. Many clients are reimbursed for part of the fee through out-of-network benefits. We provide superbills for you to submit, and it is worth calling your insurer before you book to ask what they cover for out-of-network mental health.
The consultation is free. It is fifteen minutes with an actual therapist, not an intake coordinator.
Getting Matched
Research consistently finds that the relationship with your therapist is the strongest predictor of whether therapy works. So there is no algorithm here.
You book a free fifteen-minute call with one of us. We talk about what brought you in. We either start, or we tell you honestly that someone else is a better fit. Sometimes that someone else is outside our practice, and we will say so.
You do not need to have the story ready. You do not need to have decided it counts as trauma. You just need to be tired of it.
Training And Credentials
All four of our therapists completed EMDRIA approved training. Our two licensed therapists, Laurel and Alexis, hold EMDRIA certification, which requires supervised clinical hours and consultation beyond basic training. Our clinical director is an EMDRIA Approved Consultant-In-Training. Daniella and Tatevik practice EMDR under her supervision, and prelicensed clinicians are not eligible for certification until licensure.
What People Come To Us For
Burnout that stopped responding to time off, and the question of whether it is time for a medical leave
Childhood trauma and attachment wounds that show up in adult relationships and at work
Anxiety with a starting point you can name, even if you have never said it out loud
Sexual assault and its aftermath, recent or decades old
A single event that changed how you move through the world
Perfectionism that has stopped being an asset
Grief that has not moved in a long time
Medical trauma, including births, diagnoses and hospital stays
Trauma that shows up in the body more than in the mind: the clenched jaw, the racing heart, the shutdown
Difficult family relationships, including in-laws
You do not need to know which of these is yours. That is part of what the first few sessions are for.
FAQs: EMDR Therapy
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You need to be physically in California during your session. Laurel is also licensed in Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Texas and Washington, and Alexis in Florida, so there is some coverage beyond the state. Daniella and Tatevik see California clients only.
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Yes. We have been doing it this way for years. The bilateral stimulation works on screen, and most clients find it easier to do difficult work from a room they already feel safe in.
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It depends on what you are working on. A single incident can sometimes resolve in a handful of sessions. Complex or childhood trauma takes longer. It is also rarer than people expect for something to be a true single incident, because one event usually connects to earlier ones. We wrote about realistic EMDR timelines here. Your therapist will give you an honest picture after the first few sessions rather than a number on day one.
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That sometimes happens and it is not a sign the work is failing. We wrote about it in detail here, and it is something your therapist will prepare you for rather than let you discover on your own.
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Most of our clients do. Sessions are online and fifty minutes, so they fit in a workday. If you are past the point where fitting therapy around work is realistic, that is worth saying in the consultation. We help people decide whether a medical leave makes sense, and we support them through it.
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We are out of network. Many clients are reimbursed for part of the fee through out-of-network benefits, and we provide superbills.
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Often, yes. We wrote about how that arrangement works here.
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Longer sessions over a compressed timeframe instead of weekly appointments. More on the intensives page.
A Message From Our Director To Anyone Looking For An EMDR Therapist In California
To my fellow Californians,
I became a therapist here. Graduate school and clinical training in Bay Area community clinics, EMDR basic training at JFK University. Something I noticed early was that EMDR therapists tend to cluster. San Francisco and Los Angeles have them, and a decent number in Sacramento and San Diego. Outside those markets, the picture thins out fast. If you live outside a city, or a county where the two EMDR-trained clinicians both have six-month waitlists, you already know this.
That was the reason we went fully telehealth. Our licenses cover the state, not a zip code. If you are physically in California, you can work with a therapist here, whether you are in Santa Cruz, the Central Valley, a coastal town, or twenty minutes from an office you would never have time to drive to anyway.
EMDR asks enough of you. It is structured, and while it is often faster than people expect, it is also an intense and vulnerable process. It works best with real preparation and careful targeting. Anyone promising you a tidy timeline is guessing. What I can tell you is that I have done this work myself, on my own history, and I have watched it give people back something they had given up hope of reclaiming.
Every therapist in this practice is trained in EMDR. That was a deliberate decision, not a credential we collected. I wanted anyone who found us to have access to it, regardless of which clinician they were matched with or which part of the state they were sitting in.
Wherever you are in California, I hope you find someone who fits.
Yours,
Laurel
Laurel Therapy Collective offers online therapy across California and Florida. Alongside EMDR, our therapists work in trauma therapy, couples therapy, LGBTQ therapy, Enneagram therapy, burnout and EMDR intensives. We are anti-racist, body positive and sex positive, and we would be glad to talk with you.