My Therapeutic Approach
Our work together will integrate EMDR and a variety of creative activities that allow you deep reflection, a change in thinking, and the processing of adverse events.
What is EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy like?
EMDR is one of the most effective and research-supported ways of resolving trauma.
EMDR triggers the brain’s natural healing abilities by using bilateral stimulation (your eyes going left to right, or you tapping on the right and left side of your body, etc.) after we choose a traumatic memory (the target) and you answer a few questions that are intended to activate (upset) you.
The bilateral stimulation will bring up all the related emotions, bodily sensations, memories, and thoughts associated with the event. As they come up, the bilateral stimulation helps your brain reprocess and desensitize them so that they are no longer distressing.
Once we’re finished, you won’t find the event disturbing anymore, and the symptoms associated with the event (i.e., anxiety, self-esteem deficits, negative beliefs, hypervigilance, flashbacks, etc.) will be gone.
I’ve had clients tell me it feels like magic once they are done.
The Importance of Preparing for EMDR Therapy
If that description of EMDR therapy made you a little uneasy, then you’re in the right place. The Desensitizing and Reprocessing portion of EMDR therapy is destabilizing by nature, which is why it’s essential for the client to be properly prepared and ready for it before we start.
We will start our EMDR work with a full background interview, so that we both get a better understanding of what happened to you.
This phase alone can be deeply healing or validating for clients, as I will help you understand what went wrong for you, that you weren’t at fault for what happened to you, but rather that you didn’t get what you needed from the people who were supposed to love you the most.
The interview also helps us plan our EMDR targets (memories, triggers, etc.) that we will eventually use in reprocessing and desensitization.
Next, we need to screen you for dissociation.
If you haven’t heard of dissociation, it’s one of our brain’s natural ways of protecting us from trauma or stress that happens unconsciously and automatically. Normally, it starts early in childhood, and we don’t even notice that we are doing it. Without treatment, it will continue to happen when you’re triggered by similar events that lead to it starting in the first place.
It’s important for us to screen you for it and treat it if it’s present, as it can interfere with the reprocessing and desensitization process by blocking memories, keeping you from being able to feel your bodily sensations, or causing intense emotional dysregulation, as a few examples.
For screening, I will send you a dissociation assessment, which you complete at home. You send me the results, and then we go over them together in session. Once we see if and how you dissociate (and most trauma survivors do dissociate at least a bit), we use this knowledge together with what we learned in the full background interview to start our preparation process.
To prepare you for EMDR, you need to be able to tolerate what’s called your “inner experience”, which is all the emotions, bodily sensations, thoughts, and memories associated with your trauma. This will enable you to tolerate all of the uncomfortable stuff that ‘comes up’ during the bilateral stimulation phase (i.e., the eye movements).
We will have learned a lot about your ability to tolerate your inner experience from your full background interview and dissociation assessment. I then use this information and match it to a variety of interventions, like Internal Family Systems (IFS), child work, empty chair, emotion charts, somatic experiencing, to get you ready for reprocessing and desensitization.
Once you’re prepared and feeling ready to start, we will start selecting the memories for reprocessing and desensitization.
What if I don’t want to do EMDR?
Not all clients are interested in EMDR work, and for others, it may not be a fit. Not to worry, we can still work together if you do not want to do EMDR. This means we will focus on talk therapy, with the integration of other therapeutic activities like IFS, childwork, learning to tolerate your feelings and bodily sensations, learning to set and reinforce boundaries, activities that help you move towards a secure attachment style, etc.
What if I want talk therapy & EMDR?
This is a common choice for most clients. There are normally immediate issues that a client would like to deal with before starting EMDR work, and sometimes issues arise while we are working through EMDR. We can go back and forth between talk therapy and EMDR as you need, not to worry!