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By Dr. Maria Niitepold, PsyD | Licensed Psychologist | EMDR, Brainspotting & CRM In my practice, I hear a particular sentence so often that I have come to think of it as a diagnostic in its own right: I have always been the problem. Not I am the problem in this marriage. Not I was the problem in my family. Always. The word is doing the real work in that sentence, because it tells me the belief predates every relationship the person can point to. It was installed before the ma

By Dr. Maria Niitepold, PsyD | Licensed Psychologist | EMDR, Brainspotting & CRM You finally lost it. After months, maybe years, of absorbing the criticism, the silent treatments, the subtle digs, the moved goalposts, and the constant low-grade contempt, something in you broke. You screamed. You said something vicious. Maybe you threw the glass, slammed the door hard enough to crack the frame, or grabbed their phone out of their hand. You behaved in a way that feels completel

By Dr. Maria Niitepold, PsyD | Licensed Psychologist | EMDR, Brainspotting & CRM In my practice, a client once described her workday to me in a sentence I have never forgotten: by the time I reach my desk, I've already decided who I'm going to be today, and it depends entirely on which version of him got out of bed. She worked for a narcissistic boss. Her mornings began in the parking lot, reading the cars, and continued through a lobby and an elevator that functioned as an..

By Dr. Maria Niitepold, PsyD | Licensed Psychologist | EMDR, Brainspotting & CRM In my practice, when I ask a new client what brings her in, the answer is often not a diagnosis or an event. It is a phrase: I feel like I'm walking on eggshells in my own house. She usually apologizes for how vague it sounds. It is not vague. It is one of the most precise clinical descriptions a person can give, and I want to start by telling you what you are actually describing when you say it.

By Dr. Maria Niitepold, PsyD | Licensed Psychologist | EMDR, Brainspotting & CRM In my practice, people confess it like a malfunction. I'm fine when things are hard, they say. I handled the diagnosis, the divorce, the deadline, the funeral. But last week a coworker noticed I looked tired and asked, gently, if I was okay, and I had to leave the room because I was about to sob. What is wrong with me? The catalog of triggers is remarkably consistent. The doctor who actually list

By Dr. Maria Niitepold, PsyD | Licensed Psychologist | EMDR, Brainspotting & CRM In my practice, there is a particular kind of person who arrives genuinely baffled by herself. Her childhood, she tells me in the first session, was fine. Genuinely fine. No abuse, no addiction, no chaos. Parents who stayed married, worked hard, came to the recitals. Food on the table, presents under the tree, photo albums full of normal. She knows what bad childhoods look like, some of her frien

By Dr. Maria Niitepold, PsyD | Licensed Psychologist | EMDR, Brainspotting & CRM In my practice, the loneliest people I work with are not the ones who live alone. They are the ones who feel alone in a room with their spouse. There is usually nothing to report. That is the first thing they tell me, almost apologetically. He doesn't yell. He doesn't cheat. He works hard, he's good with the kids, everyone thinks he's great, and they are not wrong, exactly. There is no incident.

By Dr. Maria Niitepold, PsyD | Licensed Psychologist | EMDR, Brainspotting & CRM In my practice, no one arrives more prepared than survivors of narcissistic abuse. They have done the reading. They can name every tactic: the love-bombing, the devaluation, the gaslighting, the discard. They know the cycle by heart. Some of them could teach the class. And then, a few minutes into the consultation, the real question arrives. So why do I still feel like it was my fault? Why do I s

By Dr. Maria Niitepold, PsyD | Licensed Psychologist | EMDR, Brainspotting & CRM In my experience, almost nobody arrives to their first trauma therapy session without some nervousness, anxiety, or fear. They arrive having drafted the email four times over six months. They arrive having read my entire website twice, at midnight, in a browser tab they kept closing. They arrive at the free consultation with a list of questions they are too nervous to ask, and somewhere in the fi

By Dr. Maria Niitepold, PsyD | Licensed Psychologist | EMDR, Brainspotting & CRM Let me address something important about the time investment required with trauma therapy. You want to know how long this is going to take. Maybe also how much it's going to cost in total. Maybe whether you can do it in six sessions instead of forty. Maybe whether there is some way to make it go faster, especially if money is a real and pressing variable in this decision, which it usually is, eve

By Dr. Maria Niitepold, PsyD | Licensed Psychologist | EMDR, Brainspotting & CRM In my practice, there is a question that stops certain people cold, and it is the gentlest question in the building: what happened to you? They want to answer it. They came here to answer it. And what they find, reaching for the answer, is nothing they can hold up: no accident, no assault, no disaster, no scene. Nothing happened, they say, and then they sit with the strangeness of that sentence,

By Dr. Maria Niitepold, PsyD | Licensed Psychologist | EMDR, Brainspotting & CRM A large number of the people who eventually find their way to me have spent years being treated for the wrong thing. They were told they had generalized anxiety, or recurrent depression, or that they were simply "too sensitive," and the treatments helped around the edges without ever reaching the core. What many of them actually have is complex PTSD, and once that becomes clear, a great deal that

By Dr. Maria Niitepold, PsyD | Licensed Psychologist | EMDR, Brainspotting & CRM In my practice, this confession arrives more quietly than any other, and with more shame attached. She can tell me what her mother did. She has the evidence organized, the memories, the patterns, sometimes the diagnosis read about at two in the morning. And then her voice drops, because here comes the part that feels like a betrayal of her own case: but I still love her. I miss her. When she call

By Dr. Maria Niitepold, PsyD | Licensed Psychologist | EMDR, Brainspotting & CRM In my practice, the word arrives with the new clients now, usually somewhere in the first ten minutes. My friend said I should try somatic therapy. A podcast mentioned somatic work. I read that trauma lives in the body, so I googled it, and now I'm more confused than when I started. The confusion is fair. "Somatic" has become one of those words that is suddenly everywhere, on book covers, in Inst

By Dr. Maria Niitepold, PsyD | Licensed Psychologist | EMDR, Brainspotting & CRM In my practice, people describe it in remarkably similar words, and almost all of them apologize while they do, as if the experience itself were a confession. I feel like I'm behind glass. Like I'm watching my life instead of living it. Everyone laughed at the party and I performed laughing, and inside there was just... static. My daughter graduated and I waited for the feeling everyone else was

By Dr. Maria Niitepold, PsyD | Licensed Psychologist | EMDR, Brainspotting & CRM In my practice, there is a moment I have learned to watch for, because it reveals more than an hour of history-taking. I ask a simple preference question, what would you like to work on today, or even, would you rather meet mornings or afternoons, and instead of an answer, something else happens. A pause. A flicker of something like panic, instantly smoothed. And then: whatever works for you. I'm

By Dr. Maria Niitepold, PsyD | Licensed Psychologist | EMDR, Brainspotting & CRM In my practice, there is a particular disappointment I have watched land a hundred times. Someone finally learns about trauma responses, reads the famous four, fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and waits for the click of recognition everyone promised. And it doesn't come. She doesn't explode, doesn't sprint, doesn't exactly shut down, doesn't quite appease. She concludes, one more time, that the traum

By Dr. Maria Niitepold, PsyD | Licensed Psychologist | EMDR, Brainspotting & CRM In my practice, people arrive already knowing two of the four, because pop culture taught them: fight or flight. And almost none of them recognize themselves in either one, which is exactly why they conclude that whatever is wrong with them, it must not be a trauma response. She doesn't explode at people, and she doesn't run from danger. What she does is go strangely blank in conflict, agreeing t

By Dr. Maria Niitepold, PsyD | Licensed Psychologist | EMDR, Brainspotting & CRM In my practice, the most serious histories almost always arrive wearing the same disclaimer. It wasn't that bad. Other people had it so much worse. I don't even know why I'm bringing it up. Then she brings it up. The father whose footsteps on the stairs taught the whole house to go quiet. The mother's words at thirteen that she can still recite, verbatim, thirty years later. The thing that happen

By Dr. Maria Niitepold, PsyD | Licensed Psychologist | EMDR, Brainspotting & CRM If a therapist has talked to you about "parts" and you walked away more confused than when you started, you are not alone. It is one of the most useful ideas in trauma therapy, and one of the most easily misunderstood. The word can sound strange at first. It can sound like it implies separate people living inside you, or like something is fundamentally fragmented about who you are. Neither of tho