BeyondTalk EMDR

EMDR for narcissistic and emotional abuse

Online Narcissistic Abuse Therapy Throughout California

You Know What Happened.
Why Does Your Body Still Feel Trapped in It?

EMDR and somatic narcissistic abuse therapy for adults experiencing trauma bonds, gaslighting, emotional manipulation, chronic self-doubt, and relationship trauma.

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Online throughout California • Major insurance plans accepted • Private pay available

Hira Kissana, MA, LMFT, EMDR therapist in California
Hira Kissana, MA, LMFT

Narcissistic abuse therapy in California

Therapy for the Impact of Narcissistic and Emotional Abuse

Narcissistic abuse therapy is not about diagnosing another person or proving that every painful interaction was intentional. It is about treating what the relationship left behind in you.

You may be dealing with a trauma bond, chronic self-doubt, fear of abandonment, hypervigilance, shame about staying or returning, or difficulty trusting your own perception. Hira Kissana, MA, LMFT, provides online EMDR and somatic trauma therapy to adults throughout California who are recovering from gaslighting, emotional manipulation, coercive relationship patterns, and repeated emotional harm.

If you want the clinical detail first, read how belief-focused EMDR works.

You do not need their diagnosis

You Do Not Need a Diagnosis of the Other Person to Get Help

The person who harmed you does not need to have a formal diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder for your experience to matter.

Therapy focuses on the patterns you experienced and their impact on you. These may include gaslighting, blame shifting, emotional withdrawal, intermittent affection, intimidation, chronic criticism, betrayal, coercion, or being repeatedly made responsible for another person’s behavior.

You do not have to prove what they were before you are allowed to heal from what happened.

What often remains

The relationship ended. The training it did stayed.

Gaslighting and chronic self doubt

You rehearse events to check whether you remember them correctly.

Trauma bonds

The attachment stayed strong precisely because the harm was inconsistent.

Intermittent reinforcement

Warmth arrived unpredictably, and your nervous system learned to wait for it.

Emotional manipulation

Guilt, silence, and reframing were used until your own read felt unreliable.

Fear of abandonment

Leaving and being left both feel unsurvivable, sometimes at the same time.

Shame about staying or returning

You judge yourself with a harshness you would never use on a friend.

Difficulty trusting your perception

You need outside confirmation before you believe your own experience.

Monitoring other people's moods

You still scan a room for tone shifts that no longer belong to you.

Who this is for

Narcissistic Abuse Can Happen in More Than One Kind of Relationship

  • A spouse or romantic partner
  • A former partner
  • A parent or caregiver
  • A sibling or family member
  • A high-conflict co-parenting relationship
  • Another close relationship involving manipulation, instability, or control

You are not weak for struggling to detach from someone who repeatedly hurt you.

Attachment is not a measure of judgment. When affection and harm repeatedly come from the same person, the attachment can become especially difficult to break. Your body was doing exactly what bodies do.

Relationship trauma therapy

What Narcissistic Abuse Therapy Can Help You Work Through

  • Trauma bonds and difficulty detaching
  • Gaslighting and chronic self-doubt
  • Shame about staying, returning, or still caring
  • Fear of abandonment
  • Hypervigilance and monitoring other people's moods
  • Difficulty trusting your memory or perception
  • Guilt when setting boundaries
  • Replaying conversations and searching for certainty
  • Betrayal, rejection, and sudden abandonment
  • Feeling responsible for keeping the peace
  • Believing that your needs are too much
  • Losing touch with who you were before the relationship

EMDR for narcissistic abuse

How EMDR May Help After Narcissistic Abuse

Understanding the relationship is important, but insight alone may not resolve the emotional and physiological reactions that remain.

EMDR can help address the memories, body sensations, present-day triggers, and negative beliefs that continue to carry emotional intensity. Hira may begin with a belief such as “I cannot trust myself,” “I am not enough,” or “It was my fault,” then explore the connected experiences that taught your nervous system to expect danger, guilt, rejection, or abandonment.

The goal is not to erase the past or force you to stop caring. It is to help the past feel less emotionally present, rebuild trust in your perception, and reduce the urgency that keeps pulling you toward what harmed you.

“When was the first time in your life you remember feeling this way?”

Feeling attached to someone who caused harm

The pull is a memory, not a verdict.

Intermittent warmth teaches the nervous system to hold on through the bad stretches, because relief has always arrived eventually. Months later, a text or a familiar smell can reopen the whole loop.

In EMDR we treat those moments as targets. Not the story of the relationship, but the specific images, sensations, and beliefs that still carry a charge.

The beliefs the relationship installed

“I am too much.” “It was my fault.” “I cannot trust myself.”

These sentences were repeated to you until they sounded like your own. Arguing with them has not worked, because they are not held as arguments. They may be linked to emotionally charged memory networks that logic alone has not resolved.

So we find the belief first, then the earliest moment you can remember feeling it, and we work from there forward.

How treatment is structured

Stability first, then the material underneath.

Phase one

Preparation

History, safety, and resourcing. Grounding and containment skills before anything is opened.

Phase two

Reprocessing

Memories, beliefs, sensations, and present day triggers, worked through with bilateral stimulation and somatic tracking.

Phase three

Rebuilding

Trusting your own perception again, and noticing what you now want rather than what you can tolerate.

Sessions are weekly, with extended sessions available when clinically appropriate, as part of online EMDR therapy throughout California. When you are ready, book a free consultation.

Insurance and fees

Major Insurance Plans Accepted

Beyond Talk EMDR provides online therapy throughout California through Sahih Therapy. Coverage, copays, deductibles, and eligibility vary by individual plan and will be verified before treatment begins.

  • Aetna accepted for online narcissistic abuse therapy and EMDR in California
  • Anthem Blue Cross of California accepted for online narcissistic abuse therapy and EMDR in California
  • Blue Shield of California accepted for online narcissistic abuse therapy and EMDR in California
  • Carelon Behavioral Health accepted for online narcissistic abuse therapy and EMDR in California
  • Cigna accepted for online narcissistic abuse therapy and EMDR in California
  • Health Net accepted for online narcissistic abuse therapy and EMDR in California
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Private-pay sessions and extended EMDR options are also available. Contact Sahih Therapy for the current cash rate.

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FAQ

Questions people ask about narcissistic abuse therapy.

Narcissistic abuse therapy treats the impact of repeated emotional harm inside a close relationship. It is not about labeling the other person or building a case against them. The work focuses on what the patterns did to you: the self-doubt, the vigilance, the guilt, the sense that your own read of reality needs outside confirmation. In practice that means understanding what happened, stabilizing your nervous system with grounding and containment skills, and then using EMDR and somatic work to reduce the emotional charge on the memories, beliefs, and present-day triggers that keep the relationship feeling current. Pace is set with you, not imposed on you.

No. A formal diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder is not required, and it is not something a therapist can responsibly assign to someone who is not their client. What matters clinically is the pattern you lived through and the effect it had on you: gaslighting, blame shifting, emotional withdrawal, intermittent affection, intimidation, chronic criticism, betrayal, coercion, or being made responsible for another person's behavior. Those experiences are treatable regardless of what anyone else is or is not called. You do not have to prove what they were before you are allowed to heal from what happened.

It often can. A trauma bond is not a character flaw or a failure of judgment. It forms when closeness and harm come from the same person, so relief becomes tied to the source of the distress. EMDR treats the specific moments that hold that charge: the reconciliation you still replay, the look, the message, the fear that arrived when you tried to leave. As the charge on those moments comes down, the pull tends to lose its urgency, and the choices you make about contact begin to feel like choices rather than compulsions. Individual responses vary.

Because attachment is built by repetition, not by accounting. When affection arrived unpredictably, your nervous system learned to hold on through the hard stretches, because warmth had always eventually returned. Missing them is that learning still running, not evidence that you were wrong about the harm or that you want to go back. Many people hold both at once: clear memory of what happened, and real grief for what it felt like when it was good. In therapy we treat the longing as information about a memory network rather than as a verdict on your judgment.

That is extremely common, and it is not something you will be judged for here. Leaving a relationship marked by intermittent warmth and fear is rarely a single clean exit. People often go back several times, sometimes for practical reasons, sometimes because the fear of the aftermath was louder than the fear of staying. What matters is what you want now. Therapy can hold contact, ambivalence, and reconsideration without shame, and can help you notice what happens in your body around those decisions so that the next one is made with more information and less panic.

No. Decisions about contact belong to you, and there are situations where cutting off contact is not safe, practical, or wanted, including co-parenting and family relationships. Hira's role is to help you regulate, process what happened, and reconnect with your own perception so that any decision you make is yours rather than one made under pressure or fear. If safety concerns are present, they will be addressed directly and planned for, but the goal of the work is your clarity and freedom of choice, not a prescribed outcome about the relationship.

This is one of the most common reasons people come in, and it is a realistic focus of treatment. When your account of events was repeatedly questioned or rewritten, self-doubt becomes a learned reflex rather than an accurate signal. EMDR targets the beliefs that were installed, such as "I cannot trust myself" or "I am overreacting," along with the specific moments that taught them. Over time many people notice they need less outside confirmation, spend less energy rehearsing conversations, and can register their own reaction to something without immediately arguing themselves out of it.

Yes. Some of the most lasting effects come from a parent, caregiver, or sibling, because the patterns began before you had any way to name them or compare them to anything else. When criticism, conditional affection, or being blamed for another person's moods shaped your earliest relationships, the resulting beliefs can feel less like beliefs and more like facts about you. Belief-focused EMDR works well here, because it follows the belief backward to its earliest connected memories rather than treating a single recent incident in isolation.

Yes, telehealth EMDR is a well-established way to deliver this work, and for many people it is preferable. Sessions happen somewhere you already feel reasonably safe, with no commute afterward, which matters when a session has been emotionally demanding. Bilateral stimulation is adapted for video, and preparation, resourcing, and somatic tracking all translate directly. What is required is a private space, a stable connection, and a plan for grounding at the end of each session. All Beyond Talk EMDR sessions are online throughout California.

Often yes. Sessions are billed as individual psychotherapy, and Beyond Talk EMDR is in network with Aetna, Anthem Blue Cross of California, Blue Shield of California, Carelon Behavioral Health, Cigna, and Health Net through Sahih Therapy. Coverage, copays, deductibles, and eligibility vary by individual plan, so your benefits will be verified before treatment begins rather than guessed at. If your plan is not listed, private-pay sessions and extended EMDR options are available, and a superbill can be provided for possible out-of-network reimbursement.

The goal is not to become cold. It is to become free.

Warmth is not the problem. Losing your own signal was. When the charge comes off these memories, you keep the softness and get your judgment back with it.

Healing does not require pretending the relationship meant nothing. It can mean remembering without becoming consumed, setting a boundary without feeling cruel, trusting your perception without needing their agreement, and allowing peace to feel safer than chaos.

Clinically reviewed by

Hira Kissana, MA, LMFT

California LMFT #162077

Last reviewed August 2026

You do not need to prove exactly what happened before you are allowed to receive help for what it did to you.

A free consultation with Hira. Come with what you remember and what still does not make sense.

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