You’d have called it a temper. A bad stretch. Just how you’re built.
Something ordinary sets you off, and what comes up is three sizes bigger than what caused it. A tone in someone’s voice. A plan that changes at the last minute.
Nothing in your past seems to account for that. Other people have the kind of history that earns the word. You’ve got a Tuesday that got away from you, and a version of yourself you only meet a few times a year.
So you filed it under personality and stopped asking.
After the reaction comes the review. You go back over what went through your head in that moment, and you don’t like the person who was thinking it. That part lasts longer than the anger did.
Clients bring me this one more often than any other version: “I’m so angry that I think this way.”
Shame about your own thinking sits heavier than whatever set off the anger. It keeps you quiet, too. Said out loud, the thought sounds worse than it felt.
You’ve been reading all of that as information about your character. It’s worth finding out whether it’s information about something older.
The link between something that happened to you and something that’s hard right now rarely announces itself. Years go by in between, and the two never get introduced.
The connection doesn’t wait for you to agree that what happened qualifies.
Plenty of people start this work with no single event to point at and no diagnosis that explains the rest. I don’t need you to produce either one.
What I need is for you to want the reaction to change and to try something you haven’t tried. That’s the whole list.
We work from the present backward. You bring in the part you can actually name, and we start there.
The blowup over the dishwasher. The apology you’re still drafting three days later. The call you’ve let go to voicemail four times.
I’m trained in EMDR, and this is what I use it for. We meet in person in Lake Tahoe and online throughout California.
You won’t be asked to arrive with your history sorted out. Whatever’s underneath surfaces as we work on the piece you brought.
A diagnosis, a date, a story bad enough to justify the appointment: you don’t need any of it to book.
Tell me what set you off last week. Tell me what you thought about yourself an hour later.
That’s a starting point, and it’s more useful to me than a tidy summary would be. The tidy version is usually the one you’ve already told a few times.
Book a free consultation before you can name the thing. Unsorted is fine with me.
My favorite day in your therapy is the day you tell me you don’t need me anymore. I’m aiming at it from the first session.
You’ll get a therapist who says the hard thing instead of waiting for you to find it yourself. What I ask back is short, and none of it is easy.
Do that, and you get to find out which parts of this life you’d pick.
