Felt EMDR
Felt is a self-guided platform for body-first trauma therapy, designed for users who arrive overwhelmed and in crisis. This project is a study in designing for high-stakes, dysregulated moments. After launch I caught the intake survey screening people out by the wrong signal, turning away the users it was built for. I am rebuilding it to gate on real safety signals.
Product
Web
My Role
Founder Product Engineer
Timeline
Mar 2026 - Present
Team
Carrie Eschler (Consulting Therapist), Christine Vogt (Marketing)
What is Felt?
Felt is a web platform focusing on body-first experiential therapies such as Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Somatic Experiencing, and creative association. It is designed for people doing the hardest kind of inner work.
Who is it for?
It addresses a massive underserved segment of the population that runs up against the efficacy ceiling of cognitive-first models, primarily Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. (CBT). These are people dealing with deep-seated trauma, chronic stress, and treatment-resistant anxiety, who often feel functionally stuck within traditional talk-therapy paradigms.
The Design Challenge
The users are, by definition, often dysregulated, overwhelmed, or in crisis when they arrive. That argues for maximum gentleness and guidance. But trauma processing requires friction. How do I honor the necessary friction of healing while surrounding it with as much support and as many guardrails as the moment demands?
Highlights
Arrival story telling
The landing page earns trust by establishing emotional resonance before mentioning protocols. The craft and restraint signal a human care behind the tools.
Establish emotional resonance
Offer solution
Session autonomy
Inside the session, the philosophy is "never trap the user". Therapeutic tools (BLS, breath, body scan) appear ambiently inline; grounding (with guided anxiety modules and crisis resources) and exit buttons are always one tap away; progress is subtle and non-pressuring.
Felt EMDR session UI
Tracking: The Meadow
Each session ends with a user hand-drawn flower that grows on a grassy field. This replaces metrics (streaks, percentages, "60% healed") that read intrusive to trauma work, which isn't linear and shouldn't be scored. This also double a subtle practice of art therapy through low-stakes creative work, where cognitive patterns surface as artistic signals.
Meadow with a user-drawn flower per session
Launched, what's next?
The signal came from the front door. Felt's intake survey screened by symptom severity — and in practice it turned away the people it was built for, gating out anyone with serious trauma symptoms.
That felt backwards, and researching EMDR readiness confirmed that symptom severity isn't the main factor determining whether processing is safe to begin, tolerance for uncertainty is, and a static form can't catch it. So the check moves off the front door and into the session, where that tolerance surfaces objectively.
The lesson being — don't gate on the loudest proxy, but find the real predictor and measure where it actually surfaces.
Next steps
Guide the whole arc — read readiness live, from in-session cues of openness and dissociation, so support adjusts to the state someone is actually in. And when processing hits a serious block, a dedicated flow to move through it — not just stabilize and stop.
A public education library — open resources on the main site so anyone can get oriented before they begin.
A broader experience library — extend the same interaction philosophy to more therapy types.
