EMDR & Other Trauma Interventions
Being traumatized is an illness of not feeling fully alive in the present.
In many cases, talk therapy alone may not suffice to heal deep-seated childhood wounds that unknowingly get triggered repeatedly in adult life, creating a painful and challenging existence. When this occurs, the past drives your present-day perceptions and reactions to people and events subconsciously, limiting you from realizing your full potential.
Talk therapy primarily activates the cerebral cortex, the brain area involved in logic, analysis, and understanding. However, it doesn’t reach the deeper parts of the limbic system where childhood memories are stored. Therapies that engage both the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system simultaneously promote the integration of information between these brain regions, opening up the nervous system to change and allowing for memory reconsolidation, where painful memories can fade. Therapies such as EMDR, Inner Child Work, and Somatic Therapies facilitate this process.
ATTACHMENT-FOCUSED EYE MOVEMENT DESENSITIZATION & REPROCESSING
EMDR is one of the most evidence-based interventions for psychological trauma, with repeated studies showing that the mind can heal from psychological trauma much like the body recovers from physical trauma.
Founded by Dr. Francine Shapiro, EMDR facilitates access to the traumatic memory network, enhancing information processing with new associations formed between the traumatic memory and more adaptive memories or information. These new associations result in complete information processing, new learning, elimination of emotional distress, and development of cognitive insights.
EMDR therapy incorporates bilateral stimulation through tapping, alternating sounds, or eye movements into a comprehensive approach that processes and releases information trapped in the body-mind. This frees individuals from disturbing images, body sensations, debilitating emotions, and restrictive beliefs.
Attachment-Focused EMDR (AF-EMDR) differs from traditional EMDR by emphasizing a reparative therapeutic relationship through a combination of resource tapping, EMDR processing, and talk therapy. A crucial component of AF-EMDR is the therapist-client relationship, with interventions tailored to the client’s attachment style.
"EMDR processing combines psychology and neurology. The repetitive eye movements; or other forms of left/right brain stimulation, evoke subconscious memories to the conscious brain, unblocking the freeze containing the images, emotions, body sensations and negative beliefs involved in the event. The neurons rewire, given the brain’s plasticity, where memories are moved from the old limbic part of the brain to the prefrontal brain."
Inner child work
Utilizing Pia Mellody’s Post Induction Therapy (PIT), and the Inner Child Model, also referred to as Healing Our Core Issues Model (HOCI), the concept of the Inner Child is conceptualized as the part of the self that emerges as a post-traumatic stress reaction to present day events, where as an adult, one gets triggered into painful reactions, that may feel overwhelming at times, making it difficult to “respond” from a healthy place but rather drives a “reactive-toxic” response that could be self-destructive and/or abusive to others.
Once psychoeducation is completed and a client understands their Family of Origin dynamics, how it informs their emotional development and an understanding of how these wounds gets evoked in adult life, we move into Inner Child work that utilizes Guided Imagery. Guided Imagery can be a powerful exploratory tool that helps to further reveal childhood attachment wounds and how client’s adapted to their family system as a survival strategy. As a client’s inner landscape gets further revealed, we move into a re-parenting model that enables memory reconsolidation and healing.
Pia Mellody’s Inner Child work allows for self-directed healing. The model can easily be applied once clients leave therapy. Clients will have the skills and insight to recognize when they are in a relational trauma reaction (also called post-traumatic stress reaction) and the tools to re-parent themselves for self-soothing and self-regulation.
Somatic Therapy
Somatic psychotherapy is a therapeutic approach which engages body awareness as a powerful tool and intervention in therapy. Somatic approaches are used to engage the relationship between mind, body, brain, and behavior. Somatic focused therapy is about getting curious, getting descriptive and staying close to the experience that’s happening in and around your body. Tension, anxiety and trauma memories get processed as long as you can track, contact, describe and allow the experience to move through you.
Steps in somatic psychotherapy include developing somatic awareness and ways to cultivate body awareness. Becoming aware of the body and body sensations is a prerequisite to creating change. By focusing and amplifying the sensations in your body you begin to deepen your healing experience and allow for change that gets experienced in the body.
Other aspects of somatic therapy can include resourcing, the ways we strengthen a sense of stability in the world, grounding in the here and now, working with movement, boundaries, and experiments with an eye towards achieving ‘Acts of Triumph’, a term coined by Pierre Janet and later, Peter Levine and Pat Ogden in Somatic Experience and Sensorimotor work.
Acts of Triumph references a trauma or event where the body needed to engage in an act of defense or a way of protecting itself and couldn’t because you didn’t have the strength, or it may have been dangerous to do so, and the cells in your body are still connected to that past event. In somatic therapy you let the body go back to that experience and through experiments you allow the body to do what it needs to, thus restoring the body to a deep sense of calm and relief.
How can Somatic therapy help you?
- Create awareness of your bodily sensations
- Learn to navigate and cope with negative thoughts and feelings
- Learn to feel safe in your body
- Reduce stress within your body
- Explore your emotions, memories, and thoughts
- Build resillience