Amy Henderson, LCSW (she/they)

I have been in the mental health field for over 20 years. I have been many things during that time, including a mental health therapist since 2014. 2018 was a big year for me …. I founded Inner Journey Counseling and completed my EMDR Basic Training with EMDR Consulting (a training that changed my life, both personally and professionally).

At Inner Journey Counseling, I specialize in providing individual therapy, skills groups and skills classes to adults and older adults wanting to heal from trauma, especially complex, early childhood, developmental trauma. My primary and preferred treatment approach is neurobiolgically-informed EMDR. I also integrate attachment-based modalities, Internal Family Systems (IFS), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and ketamine assisted psychotherapy (KAP) into my EMDR work with clients. I am especially skilled with modifying EMDR to create a gentler EMDR experience for individuals with complex trauma (years and years of trauma beginning in childhood), individuals who have used dissociation as a way to survive, persons haunted by shame, folx with pre-verbal trauma (trauma occurring to us before we have language) and/or individuals who have had ineffective or traumatizing experiences with EMDR in the past. I also love working with fellow healers, especially my fellow mental health therapists (we all need support through this human experience!). I have found it to be especially amazing to provide EMDR intensive sessions (sessions lasting a minimum of 2 hours, with 4 hours/session preferred). Research and my clinical experience supports that EMDR intensive sessions are more effective than traditional 45-60-minute sessions.

In addition to being an EMDR Certified Clinician, I am also an EMDR Basic Training Coach with EMDR Consulting & an EMDRIA Approved Consultant, coaching clinicians and providing EMDR consultation services to support clinicians as they learn to integrate EMDR skills into their clinical practice. I also coach clinicians during IFS-informed EMDR trainings with the Syzygy Institute and provide IFS-informed EMDR Consultations. Additionally, I facilitate DBT skills groups for adults with my wonderful colleague Trish Sullivant, LCSW, where we teach 4 core skills: mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation & interpersonal effectiveness. 

At Inner Journey Counseling, I also provide individual KAP sessions and I collaborate with my brilliant colleagues, Jeff Belnap, LCSW, and Laura Springhetti, CRNA, to provide group KAP experiences.

In my free time, I like to daydream about a world where people everywhere are supported in their journey of healing from trauma and every human is taught mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation and interpersonal effectiveness skills. I am a native Utahn who currently lives in Salt Lake City & enjoys road cycling, Qi Gong, plants, trees, gardens, animals, yoga, rescuing traumatized huskies (I’m known as a “husky whisperer”) and loving on my very own rescue huskies, Desmond (pictured on top) and Marco (pictured on bottom).

“When it comes to therapy, my hope is to collaborate with each of my clients to identify their unhelpful negative core belief patterns at the source of distressing problems and then collaborate to understand, accept, heal and change those unhelpful belief patterns to create a more adaptive way of being. In short, my goal is to help my clients manage symptoms so we can treat the underlying causes, healing from the inside out.

“I have expertise in many treatment modalities AND my clients are the experts of their lived experience. Healing trauma takes both of us working TOGETHER. I encourage my clients and fellow clinicians to NOT just ‘trust the process’, but to develop their own relationship with therapy, EMDR, me, ketamine, etc., by allowing the process to unfold and trusting the process if we earn it by behaving in trustworthy ways.”