Trauma Therapy & EMDR for Adults in MD, NV, SC and VT
You’re doing well. You’ve built a life with success, stability, maybe even a family of your own. You handle responsibilities. From the outside, things look good.
But deep down, something still feels…off. Whether you are navigating the high-pressure career in Bethesda or Potomac, or managing the daily grind in Ellicott City, there is a persistent dissatisfaction you can’t quite explain. It shows up most in relationships, making you feel defensive or anxious during family visits or leaving you feeling drained after a simple conversation with a parent or partner.
You’re not sure what to call it but you know you’re tired of feeling this way. And it’s starting to make you wonder:
“Why am I bothered by this? Why can’t I just be happy?”
You’re not dramatic. You’re not broken. And you’re definitely not imagining it.
I provided specialized online trauma therapy for residents across Maryland, the professional hubs of Summerlin and Henderson in Nevada and throughout South Carolina and Vermont.
Judy Wang, LCPC is a licensed trauma therapist and EMDRIA Certified Therapist with over a decade of experience helping adults heal emotional neglect and PTSD. She is licensed to provides online trauma therapy to residents of Maryland, Nevada, South Carolina and Vermont.
Could it Be Trauma…Even If It Didn’t “Look Like Trauma”?
When people think of trauma, they often imagine war, violence or life-threatening events.
But trauma can also be: Quiet. Subtle. Repetitive.
You might not have been abused. Your parents provided for you: food, clothes, a roof over your head. But something still wasn’t right.
It’s not one big event. It’s the slow buildup of small hurts that left you emotionally bruised and no one noticed. Not even you. Not until now.
Perhaps there was a lack of emotional safety. Where there were subtle, repeated moments where you felt dismissed, belittled or not good enough. And you learned to keep the peace by not saying anything.
But if you were constantly:
- Being frequently dismissed, criticized or emotionally invalidated.
- Growing up encouraged to stay quiet or “not make waves.”
- Experiencing chronic emotional neglect despite physical needs being met.
- Being gaslit, scapegoated or made to feel responsible for family conflict or dysfunction.
Then you’ve experienced trauma.
What is "Little t" Trauma?
Little “t” trauma (or microtrauma) refers to the slow buildup of emotional injuries, such as emotional neglect, chronic criticism or gaslighting, that occur in a repetitive, subtle way. Unlike “Big T” trauma, microtrauma often flies under the radar but leads to persistent feelings of anxiety and self-doubt in adulthood.
It’s the kind that doesn’t always look like trauma, but feels like something’s deeply off.
They are emotional injuries that fly under the radar but don’t go away. And it didn’t just stay in your past.
It shows up in your present. In your thoughts. In your relationships. In your body.
If you you’ve done trauma therapy in the past and felt it hasn’t worked for you or you don’t want to drag it out over weekly sessions, an EMDR intensive may be the next step to your healing.
How "Little t" Trauma and Microtrauma Show Up in Daily Life
It might not seem connected at first. But trauma lives in patterns.
You may notice:
- You go quiet when someone raises their voice even if they’re not yelling at you.
- You apologize before you’ve done anything wrong or even if you haven’t.
- You freeze in moments where you wish you could speak up.
- You keep ending up with people who don’t value you.
- You feel emotionally exhausted after visiting family.
- You feel invisible in conversations, like your voice doesn’t matter.
These aren’t personality flaws. They’re survival strategies. And they make perfect sense given what you’ve lived through.
You’ve told yourself things like:
- “It wasn’t that bad.”
- “Other people had it worse.”
- “I should be over this by now.”
That’s not healing. That’s trauma guilt. Trauma guilt is when you feel bad for having been hurt in the first place.
Let’s be clear: Your pain is real! Your story matters! And healing is possible!
Breaking the Cycle Emotional Neglect and Relational Pain
Emotional neglect is often a silent trauma. It isn’t defined by what happened to you but rather by what was missing, the emotional attunement and safety every child needs. When your emotions were treated as an inconvenience or a “bother” growing up, you learned that the safest way to exist was to stay small.
The Legacy of the Peacekeeper
In an environment where your needs were secondary, you likely became an expert at reading the room and suppressing yourself to maintain stability and safety. This wasn’t a choice, it was a way to navigate a world where your true self felt like an imposition.
Today, that survival strategy might look like:
- The Fear of Stepping Out: Living with the deep seated belief, taught through years of explicit or subtle, implicit criticism, that you are simply “not enough.” Because of this, reaching for something big feels dangerous rather than exciting. It feels like setting yourself up for a failure that will only lead to deep embarrassment and the confirmation of your worst fears.
- Safety-Based Independence: Doing everything yourself, not because you want to be strong but because asking for help feels fundamentally unsafe. You’ve learned that depending on others is a risk and you’d rather carry the load than risk being a burden or being let down.
- Strategic Invisibility: Keeping your emotions tightly guarded so as to not bother the people around you. You’ve learned that staying quiet and keeping it together is the only way to stay secure and avoid conflict.
Updating Your Relational Blueprint
Relational pain often stems from stuck beliefs formed when your environment required you to disappear to stay safe. While the pain started in your early relationships, the healing happens within you. Through a combination of individual relational work and EMDR, we focus on updating your internal blueprint. This process involves:
- Validating the Quiet Scars: Acknowledging that the effort you put into not being a bother is actually a response to deep emotional neglect.
- Developing Internal Safety: Using our one-on-one sessions to practice being truly seen and heard. This allows your nervous system to learn, in a safe environment, that your voice isn’t an “imposition.”
- Rewiring through EMDR: Moving beyond just talking about the past and using EMDR to help your brain finally let go of the physiological belief that you are not enough.
Meet Your Trauma Specialist: Judy Wang, LCPC
Helping high-functioning adults untangle the pain they were never allowed to name
I specialize in working with high functioning but emotionally exhausted adults who grew up feeling unseen, unheard or emotionally dismissed even when everything looked “fine” from the outside. Often, my clients were the ones who kept the peace, stayed quiet and never asked for too much.
These are the “quiet hurts.” The ones that didn’t leave visible scars but still shape how you speak up and connect in your relationships today.
As a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor (LCPC) and EMDRIA Certified Therapist, I bring advanced training and years of experience to trauma therapy focused on relational trauma and childhood emotional neglect. My approach is steady and deeply respectful of your pace.
I’ve spent over a decade working with adults whose trauma was subtle and easy to overlook but deeply impactful.
This work is especially helpful if you:
- Appear successful but feel emotionally disconnected or depleted.
- Struggle with boundaries, people pleasing or chronic self-doubt.
- Grew up with emotionally unavailable or dismissive caregivers.
- Feel like you’re surviving rather than truly living.
A Balanced Path to Recovery
EMDR Therapy: For processing memories and negative core beliefs (such as I’m not good enough”) that still carry emotional weight.
Nervous System Regulation: To help your body move out of survival mode and into a state of internal safety and calm.
Boundary Work: Practical tools to protect your energy, strengthen your voice and shift relationships patterns.
Some clients need space to talk and feel safe. Others are ready for deeper memory work. Most find healing in a thoughtful blend of both. Together, we build a path that honors your history while supporting the future you want to live.
Finding Emotional Grounding and the Life You Actually Want
You may not have used the word “healing” yet but something in you knows:
“I don’t want to feel like this anymore.”
You’re not just here to survive. You want to live! You want to:
- Feel emotionally grounded, not triggered.
- Be in relationships that feel mutual not draining.
- Stop feeling small around your family.
- Walk calmly into a family dinner without tensing up.
- Pick healthy partners who don’t remind you of your childhood pain.
- Finally believe: “I matter. I’m enough. I’m allowed to take up space.”
You don’t want to blow up your life. You want to feel safe in it. You want to feel whole. Real. You.
And I want you to know that’s absolutely possible. That’s where therapy, specifically trauma informed therapy can help.
If traditional weekly sessions feel too slow or fragmented, an EMDR Intensive can help you move forward more efficiently.
The Transformation: Moving from Survival to Self-Respect
Healing isn’t about changing who you are; it’s about removing the layers of trauma and guilt that have kept you from being yourself. To understand what this looks like in practice, consider the shift from living in a state of constant “bracing” to living in a state of neutrality.
Before: The Weight of Chronic Stress and Guilt
The anxiety would start days before the visit even began. Just the thought of a family dinner or a phone call from a parent made her physically tense. She would walk through the door already “braced” for impact, waiting for the passive-aggressive comments she knew were coming.
When the jabs arrived, she did what she had always done: she stayed quiet to keep the peace. She would swallow her frustration until she finally snapped, leading to an argument that left her feeling like the difficult one. Afterward, the trauma guilt would crash in. She’d spend hours alone, replay every word and think “i’m a terrible daughter. Why can’t I just handle this better?” In this cycle she wasn’t living her life, she was surviving her relationships.
After: Living with Neutrality and Peace
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- There is no explosive argument.
- Most importantly, there is no guilt. She drives home in peace, knowing she treated herself with the same respect she gives to others. She no longer spends her night spiraling in “what-if” thoughts. She has moved from a place of automatic reaction to a place of intentional self-respect.
Trauma Healing is About Freedom, Not Perfection
This shift is possible because trauma therapy, specifically when incorporating nervous system regulation and EMDR, help you process the memories that keep you stuck in that bracing mode. You are allowed to:
- Not pick up the phone when you don’t have the emotional capacity.
- Stop being the peacekeeper at the expense of your own mental health.
- Want joy instead of just “getting through the day.”
- Choose yourself without feeling like you’ve done something wrong.
You don’t need to be fixed. You need to be heard. you need to be safe and your need a roadmap to get there.
Is This Trauma Therapy Right for You
Trauma therapy is a collaborative process. This work is specifically designed for those navigating the long-term impact of complex and relational trauma. You may find this approach especially helpful if:
- You experienced emotional neglect or narcissistic parenting: You grew up feeling like your needs were secondary to the adults around you.
- You were the “Scapegoat” or the “Peacekeeper”: You carried the emotional weight of the family and were never the “Golden Child” who could do no wrong.
- You minimize your own pain: You find yourself saying “others had it worse” to justify why you shouldn’t feel the way you do.
- You struggle with chronic guilt: You feel responsible for other people’s emotions and find it nearly impossible to set a boundary without an emotional spiral.
- Talk therapy hasn’t been enough: You understand your past intellectually but you still feel stuck in the same psychological patterns and triggers.
- You are tired of reliving the same cycles: You are ready to stop surviving and start living your life with intentionality and peace.
Start Your Healing Journey: Online Therapy in MD, NV, SC and VT
If you’re noticing difficult patterns in your relationships, especially with parents, partners or people in power and you’re tired of the emotional weight. Let’s talk.
- Schedule a trauma therapy consultation.
- Online in Maryland, Nevada, South Carolina and Vermont.
You don’t have to figure this out alone. You don’t have to carry it forever. Healing is possible and it starts with one brave step.
Click here if you’re interested in learning more about EMDR Intensives.
Frequently Asked Questions About Trauma & EMDR
Trauma isn’t always about one major event. It can be a buildup of small, repeated experiences like being dismissed, criticized, gaslit or emotionally neglected. If you feel anxious, shut down or triggered in relationships without fully understanding why, you may be experiencing the impact of trauma.
This is often a symptom of trauma guilt. When you’ve achieved success and stability in places like Bethesda or Summerlin, you may feel you “don’t have a right” to struggle because your childhood wasn’t overtly abusive. However, trauma isn’t just about what happened; it’s about the emotional safety tha was missing. Feeling “off” despite your success is a valid signal that your internal blueprint is still operating in survival mode.
As a high achiever, your logical brain is highly developed but trauma is stored in the limbic system and the body, not the rational mind. You can’t logic your way out of a triggered nervous system. This is why many professionals feel stuck despite years of talk therapy. In my practice serving MD, NV, SC and VT, we use EMDR to bridge this gap, helping your brain and body finally come into alignment so you can feel the peace you already understand.
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is an evidence-based trauma treatment that helps the brain reprocess painful memories so they lose their intensity. Instead of feeling stuck in the past, EMDR allows you to move forward without the emotional baggage that comes with trauma.
Yes. We call this Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN). While “Big T” trauma involves specific events, being ignored or emotionally dismissed is a slow buildup of small hurts. When a child’s emotional needs are consistently secondary to the adults around them, the brain develops a freeze (shut down) or fawn (people pleasing) response to stay safe. These quiet hurts are real emotional injuries that impact how you show up in your adult relationships today.
Numbness is often a sophisticated survival strategy called dissociation. If your childhood environment was one where expressing sadness or anger felt unsafe or like an imposition, your nervous system learned to shut down to protect you. This state of Strategic Invisibility prevents you from feeling the pain but it also prevents you from feeling joy and connection. Therapy helps you safely move out of this numbness and back into a state of grounded presence.
Yes. I am licensed to provide specialized teletherapy to residents across Maryland (including Bethesda, Ellicott City and Potomac), Nevada (serving Summerlin and Henderson), South Carolina and Vermont. Because I’m 100% virtual, you can access high-level trauma care and EMDR from the privacy of your home, regardless of where you are located in these states.
Start by scheduling a free consultation. We’ll talk about your concerns, how trauma shows up in your life and whether a trauma-informed approach, including EMDR intensives, is the right fit for your healing journey.