The Avalon Center
for Integrative Therapies
Somatic EMDR Therapy for Women
The Avalon Center
for Integrative Therapies
Somatic EMDR Therapy for Women
Welcome to Avalon
It gets better here.
Formerly Avalon Psychotherapy Associates, we are a center for women’s holistic mental wellness.
Our services are designed to meet women+ where they are with nuanced, modern solutions to the challenges of Being in a complicated world.
Women in the mid-Atlantic are educated, accomplished, and capable.
Yet, we can struggle to find real satisfaction and joy in ourselves and the lives we craft.
You are not alone.
The Avalon Center for Integrative Therapies (ACIT) integrates Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, EMDR, Internal Family Systems, and Safe and Sound Protocol to give you the tools you need to achieve your goals and live the life you long for.
Individual Psychotherapy
Individual Psychotherapy for women+ who are ready to invest deeply in their own healing.
Psychotherapy is given in collaboration with the Client to access beliefs and ways of being held in the body and mind that once served your survival, but are no longer supporting your fullest well-being.
Women’s Wellness Community
Women’s Wellness Communityis a community of women healing and growing together.
The Women’s Wellness Community provides a safe, intimate space in which to expand into deep self-care across domains of life. With compassionate support and collaboration, members tap into inspired motivation for change.
Financial Wellness
Heal your relationship with money.
Financial Wellness services provide you with a compassionate space to repair your relationship with money and bring your financial journey into alignment and abundance.
FREE class for women
Healing is different here…
The goal of therapy is not to get rid of what we don’t want or like in ourselves, but to become so deeply embodied in our present being that we no longer need the strategies that once ensured our survival. All of who we are can safely come home, belong, and rest knowing “we’ve got this.”
The Avalon Center for Integrative Therapies Blog
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What to Expect
Here at Avalon, we know that the origins of our suffering come from our strategies for survival, connection, and safety.
The way we experience ourselves and the ways in which we move through the world are not “problems.”
They are the strategies we created when our resources were limited and the help we needed scarce.
Whether in one terrible moment or many imperceptible moments over and over again in time, we survived.
At Avalon, we honor our survival. We are grateful for the parts of us that did what they had to do to get us through.
We also know that now is not then. We know that these parts of us are longing for rest and relief.
Healing is approached from a compassion-first, non-pathologizing lens. We do not ask the question, “what is wrong with me?” We ask, “what do these feelings, behaviors, experiences tell us about what happened?”
Healing is facilitated through experiential explorations using mindfulness, parts-work, sound, and nervous system calming practices.
In these ways, we can return to embodiment by healing what was “too much,” and repairing what was “not enough” in our past.
What can “embodiment” do for me?
Imagine, for a moment, the growing and dividing cells of an embryo. As these cells divide and differentiate, they become The Body.
The being within The Body expands and explores and becomes. Suspended in warm fluid, one day, a part of us moves, expands, stretches and, whoa! Contact! There is something there, so I must be something here!
Bit by bit, our earliest experience of self begins to form as we discover the body and the edges of our body. As we start to find The Body, we start to find Me.
Our raw, primitive nervous system takes in information, even before birth, about what “being” is. In our rawest form, our nervous system begins to note and record experiences. “This, I like.” “This, I do not like.” “This feels good.” “This does not feel good.” We begin the process of weaving these experiences into our Body’s primitive sense of being.
From the beginning, we are wiring for survival. We are also wiring for connection. “Me only exists in relation to “We.” With safe connection, “Me” feels relaxed, comfortable, whole, and completely in The Body in this wonderful present moment.
One day we emerge into the world with its people, sights, sounds, smells, and happenings. We have even more experiences that give us information about who we are and what the world is, and all of this is recorded at the deepest levels of our being.
When survival and connection are threatened, we have pre-recorded responses (primitive defenses) to help us cope. Yet these responses take us out of The Body in this terrible moment. These responses, Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Submit/Collapse are meant to be temporary states, but…
If connection and survival (in one way or another) are chronically unmet, our defensive responses become chronic. What is chronic becomes habitual. What is habitual becomes seemingly, “me.”
When we make our way through a healing journey that takes us safely back to The Body, we find again rest and joy in this wonderful present moment. We discover that wholeness, well-being, and clarity were within us all along…