At Mide Integrative Therapies, we believe healing is not a single event—it is a layered, relational, and transformative journey. People come to us carrying grief, anxiety, stress, trauma, identity questions, relational patterns, and the weight of responsibility. Many arrive feeling disconnected from their bodies or unsure of where to begin. Our goal is to offer a safe space, skilled clinicians, and a variety of modalities that meet you where you are and support where you want to go.

This page explains the therapeutic approaches we use and how each modality can support your healing. Whether you’re drawn to EMDR, nervous system work, mindfulness-based therapies, relational healing, or integrative somatic practice, you’ll find information here to help you choose your path.

Our Therapeutic Modalities

  • Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)

    EMDR is one of the leading evidence-based treatments for trauma, grief, and overwhelming life experiences.
    This modality helps the brain process memories that remain “stuck” or unintegrated—those moments that resurface as anxiety, emotional overwhelm, shutdown, negative beliefs, or relational triggers.

    During EMDR, you will be guided through bilateral stimulation (usually eye movements, tapping, or sound) while holding the memory or sensation gently in awareness. This allows the brain’s natural healing systems to reprocess painful experiences and release the emotional charge that has been lingering.

    EMDR can help with:

    Complex trauma and childhood experiences

    Grief, loss, and unresolved emotions

    Anxiety and panic

    Identity wounds

    Attachment and relational patterns

    Feeling “stuck” or repeating behaviors you want to change

    Recent crises or overwhelming events

    Many clients report that EMDR helps them feel lighter, more grounded, less reactive, and more aligned with who they want to be. It is a powerful modality for healing the root causes—not just the symptoms.

  • Parts Work & Internal Family Systems-Informed Therapy

    Parts work is based on the idea that we all have many “parts” inside us—protective parts, younger parts, overwhelmed parts, critical parts, and parts longing for connection or rest. These internal roles form around your experiences and help you survive.

    In therapy, we gently explore these parts with compassion rather than judgment. This process builds internal cooperation and reduces internal conflict or self-criticism.

    Parts work can help with:

    Overthinking and inner conflict

    Shame and self-blame

    Trauma responses

    Identity work

    Decision-making

    Emotional overwhelm

    Clients often feel more clarity, internal peace, and self-trust as they begin to understand how their inner system works.

  • Attachment-Based Therapy

    Relationships create our deepest wounds—and also hold our deepest potential for healing. Attachment-based therapy helps you understand your emotional patterns, communication styles, and relational templates created early in life.

    Through consistent, attuned, supportive connection with your therapist, you can experience what healthy relationship patterns look and feel like. This work allows new relational wiring to form.

    Attachment therapy can support:

    Fear of abandonment or closeness

    Difficulty expressing needs

    Repeating relationship patterns

    Boundary challenges

    People-pleasing and overresponsibility

    Emotional overwhelm or shutdown in relationships

    This modality enhances self-understanding, strengthens emotional resilience, and supports depth and ease in your connections.

“The journey toward wholeness is not a straight road. There are many bends, many detours, and many shadows that must be faced. We must walk the path slowly, noticing the small gifts along the way, listening to the voices that guide us, and accepting both the light and the darkness within ourselves. Only by moving forward step by step do we begin to see the terrain of our own hearts, and only by staying on the road, even when it is rough, do we arrive at understanding, at depth, at life that is fully our own.”

— Robert Bly

EMDR In Depth


What Is EMDR Therapy and How Can It Help Me?

At Midé Integrative Therapies, EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is more than a technique — it’s a process of reconnecting with safety, balance, and self-trust. We honor the wisdom of the body and the resilience of the mind, helping you gently move through what has felt stuck so healing can unfold from within. 

Are You Struggling to Move Through Your Daily Life Without Painful or Traumatic Reminders of the Past?

If you have experienced trauma, you may be struggling with symptoms such as nightmares, flashbacks, anxiety, and hypervigilance. You may find yourself avoiding people or situations that trigger memories of the trauma, or you may feel detached from your emotions and relationships. You may have difficulty concentrating or find that your thoughts race and are hard to control. The impact of trauma can be profound, affecting your daily life and relationships. However, there is hope.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is a highly effective and evidence-based treatment for trauma. EMDR helps you process and heal from the traumatic experiences that are impacting your life. EMDR is a safe, non-invasive therapy modality that helps individuals recover from the effects of traumatic stress.

EMDR Activates Your Brain’s Natural Healing Capacity

EMDR therapy is based on the idea that traumatic experiences can cause disruptions in the brain’s information processing system. These disruptions can lead to negative beliefs about yourself and others, which jeopardize and severely limit your sense of safety. Being that the brain’s number one job is to keep you alive, it’s understandable that the brain develops a set response after trauma with the intent of keeping you safe from harm (however misguided those attempts). 

As a therapeutic intervention, EMDR therapy aims to reprocess traumatic memory by activating your brain’s natural healing abilities. Similar to how your body is designed to heal itself, your brain also has natural healing capacities. The pathway to healing after trauma can be demanding, but therapies like EMDR can help you in resetting your innate ability to heal. 

EMDR Doesn’t Require You to Retell Your Trauma

Many clients report that they feel apprehensive about retelling painful and upsetting parts of their story to a therapist, as this can sometimes make them feel worse. When you experience trauma, your brain has trouble making sense of something that was not supposed to happen. It can be difficult to recount details of the event(s) and retelling your story can even be retraumatizing. 

However, EMDR therapy allows you to nonverbally process your traumatic memory. Throughout reprocessing, traumatic memories and maladaptive beliefs are neutralized so that it no longer causes you distress.

Researchers believe EMDR produces a change in neural circuitry that is similar to what happens in REM sleep. This helps you reintegrate traumatic memories back into the larger context, helping you make better sense of yourself and life.

Who Can Benefit From EMDR Therapy? 

EMDR therapy is most commonly used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, yet it has been shown to be effective in treating a range of mental health conditions such as phobias, anxiety, and even depression. It can be used with clients of any age, depending on the therapist’s level of training and specialty focus. 

EMDR will allow your brain to change its perception of what is threatening and dangerous in the world around you. It will allow you to know yourself more deeply, to appreciate your brain’s evolutionary wisdom, and to create more adaptive responses that will serve you and not keep you stuck. 

If you have experienced trauma and are struggling with difficult emotions, EMDR can be particularly helpful for you. Our EMDR trained clinicians at Midé can provide a pathway to heal from the effects of trauma.

Trauma Is Big Enough for EMDR?

Many clients wonder if what they’ve experienced counts as trauma and whether it warrants talking to a therapist. The truth is that most of us who have lived through adolescence and into adulthood have experienced some kind of trauma in their lives.

Trauma can come in all forms. Some are acute, specific in time, and visible, such as a car accident or rape. Some are more invisible, multidimensional, and chronic, such as experiences of racism or emotional neglect in a romantic relationship. Your pain is valid simply because it happened to you. 

Researchers often explain that what constitutes trauma is more about your response to the event than the event itself. If something happened to you that was significant to you, then it is important. Most likely, your most stressful life experiences have changed your perception about how life works, and have become obstacles for you when you are in similar situations.

The Process of EMDR

Preparation & Building Safety

Before any reprocessing begins, we focus on creating stability and trust.
You’ll learn grounding techniques, resourcing, and ways to connect with calm within your body Our goal is to ensure you feel safe, supported, and in control throughout the process. Healing happens best in the presence of safety and connection.

Assessment & Identifying the Target

In this phase, we identify the specific memory or experience that still carries emotional charge. We explore how it shows up — through images, sensations, thoughts, or beliefs like “I’m not safe” or “I’m not enough.”
From there, we begin to anchor toward a new belief that reflects your truth — “I am safe now.” “I am whole.”

Desensitization & Reprocessing

This is where the processing begins.
Through bilateral stimulation (such as eye movements, taps, or tones), your brain naturally begins to reprocess distressing memories. You may notice new thoughts, emotions, or sensations arise and shift. The nervous system starts to release old patterns that once felt “stuck.” You don’t have to force anything — your mind and body know how to heal when given the right space.

Installation of Positive Beliefs

Once the distress connected to a memory lessens, we help strengthen the positive belief you’ve chosen.This phase helps you truly feel that new belief in your body — not just think it.
It’s about embodying the truth of who you are now, rather than the pain of what happened.

Body Scan

Trauma often lives in the body long after the mind has made sense of it. In the body scan phase, we gently notice any remaining sensations or tension.If anything feels unsettled, we bring in compassion and tools to help the body integrate the healing fully.

Closure

Every EMDR session ends with grounding and reconnection. We make sure you feel stable, calm, and present before leaving the session. This phase reinforces safety and reminds your system that it’s okay to rest after doing meaningful inner work.

Reevaluation

At the start of the next session, we revisit what was processed — not to re-open it, but to notice what has shifted and what still needs care. Healing is a process, and EMDR honors that rhythm. Each round of reprocessing builds integration and resilience.

Ego State  In Depth

How Does Ego State Therapy Work?

Ego State Therapy helps you understand and heal the different “parts” of yourself — the inner voices, roles, and emotional states that have developed through life’s experiences. These parts often form as a way to help you survive and adapt, but over time they can become conflicted, disconnected, or stuck in pain.

Ego State Therapy helps bring those inner parts into harmony so you can feel more whole, calm, and in control.

Parts 

Your personality is made up of distinct neural pathways that interact within yourself in ways that parallel how people interact. These pathways in your brain communicate with you through thoughts, sensations, memories, and emotions. Some parts are carrying burdens—extreme beliefs, emotions, or fantasies. When your system is overwhelmed, some pathways use different strategies to try and gain influence over your system. But every part—no matter how disruptive—is trying to help.

Placing Parts Into Groups

Protectors - These are the tender, younger parts that have experienced trauma, shame, fear, or neglect. Exiles can become extreme and desperate because they want to be cared for, and they want their story to be heard. These can be child parts who never got the chance to relax and rest.

Managers - These parts run your day-to-day life. They plan, perform, achieve, self-monitor, and try to prevent pain at all costs. Their main goal is to keep you in control of situations and relationships and protect you from hurt or rejection. They operate out of the most rational and logical spaces in your brain.

Reactive Ego - These reactive parts jump in to “extinguish” emotional pain that threatens to break through. They may use distraction or numbing tactics like emotional outbursts, disordered eating, substance use, or self-harm. They’re often misunderstood, but their goal is to put out emotional “fires” quickly. These are the most cherished parts of self because they have worked so hard and for so long.


Do You Feel Like You’re Fighting Yourself?

Maybe part of you wants to take risks and grow—but another part keeps you stuck in fear, shame, or self-doubt. Perhaps when it comes time to care for yourself, you feel overwhelmed or disconnected. You may even wonder: Why do I keep repeating the same patterns, even when I know better?

Instead of trying to “fix” you, Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy offers a compassionate, non-judgmental way to understand the different parts of yourself.

Ego State Therapy can support you in healing from:

  • Childhood trauma or neglect

  • Anxiety and emotional overwhelm

  • People-pleasing and burnout

  • Inner criticism and shame

  • Feeling “stuck” or disconnected from yourself

  • Relationship struggles and trust issues

Clients often describe this work as coming home to themselves — feeling grounded, confident, and at peace with all parts of who they are.

At Midé we understand how hard it can be to live with that internal push-pull. You’re not alone - and you’re not broken.  Schedule a free 15-minute phone consultation to learn more about our in-office (Spokane, WA) and online therapy options and see if Ego State therapy can be a good fit for you.

What Is Ego State Therapy?

Ego State Therapy is a compassionate and non-pathologizing therapy model that views every person as made up of a system of “parts.” These parts can carry memories, emotions, beliefs, and even protective behaviors to help us survive. 

All of these parts are led by a core Self—a core state of presence and compassion that Ego State believes everyone possesses. When we operate from Self, we are better able to lead our lives with confidence, resilience, and emotional intelligence.

Ego State is used across a wide range of settings, including individual, couples, and family therapy, as well as in education, coaching, and trauma recovery. It is especially effective in helping people navigate trauma, depression, anxiety, interpersonal conflict, and identity-related struggles.

The goal of Ego State treatment is to heal the parts of ourselves that have become burdened by life’s hardships, so that the parts can work more harmoniously and allow us to interact with life in ways that align with our values and goals.

What Is The Goal of Ego State Therapy?

Rather than eliminating parts, the goal of Ego State is to create balance and harmony within your internal system, so all parts can exist and contribute their talents. This happens when:

  • All parts are allowed to contribute their wisdom without taking over

  • Your Self leads with calm, clarity, and connection

  • Wounded parts are witnessed, heard, and healed, not silenced or exiled

This work often leads to profound shifts—not just in how you feel emotionally, but in how you make decisions, relate to others, and trust yourself in new ways. Supporting the Self allows you to become an effective leader of your system and be the ultimate decision maker, even when different parts are given input.

Relationships Between the Internal and External Systems

The External Experience

Your external experience is the part of you the world sees — the professional who shows up for work, the caregiver who keeps things running, the friend who seems fine.
It’s the version of you that strives to hold everything together, often at the expense of rest, emotion, or authenticity.

When life feels heavy, that outer self can begin to feel distant from what’s really happening inside.

The Internal Experience

Beneath the surface lives your internal experience — the younger parts, the protectors, the ones who carry old pain, fear, or unmet needs.
These inner voices or sensations may not always match the calm image you project. One part of you might want to move forward, while another part quietly resists, afraid of being hurt again.

Ego State Therapy helps make sense of these internal experiences — not to get rid of them, but to understand and integrate them with compassion.

Whole Self

At Midé Integrative Therapies, we believe that true healing happens when the inner experience and outer expressionof the self come into alignment.
Using Ego State Therapy, EMDR, and mind-body awareness, we help you reconnect with all parts of who you are — mind, body, and spirit — so that you can live from a place of integration, not fragmentation.

FAQ’s

  • Your first session is a gentle, collaborative conversation. We’ll explore what brings you in, your history, your goals, and what feels most supportive right now. You do not need to have everything figured out—your therapist will help guide the process and create a plan with you.

  • You don’t need to choose on your own. We tailor your care to your needs, goals, and nervous system. Most clients benefit from a blend of approaches, and your therapist will walk you through what may be most helpful.

  • Yes—EMDR can be done safely and effectively through telehealth. We use bilateral tools designed for online therapy and ensure the process feels supportive and contained.

  • It’s completely normal. Many people arrive unsure, cautious, or overwhelmed. We move at your pace and create a comfortable, validating environment where you are always in control of your process.

  • Our team supports clients navigating trauma, anxiety, depression, complex grief, identity development, relational patterns, life transitions, burnout, and mind–body disconnection. We match you with a clinician who fits your needs and preferences.

  • Somatic therapy works with the body, not just the mind. It helps you notice physical sensations, patterns, and nervous system responses. This is especially helpful for trauma, anxiety, and chronic stress that talk therapy alone may not fully address.

  • The timeline varies for every person. Some clients feel relief within a few sessions, while others engage in longer-term care for deeper healing and trauma resolution. We honor both short-term and long-term goals.