What is EMDR?
EMDR is an acronym for Eye Movement and Desensitization and Reprocessing. This doesn’t really explain a lot, does it? No worries – I didn’t really understand it either when I was first introduced to it waaay back in the 1990’s (gosh this ages me!) With age comes wisdom though, hey?
Allow me to explain...
Imagine your entire life as a filing cabinet drawer. At the far back of the drawer is your age zero file (your moment of conception); then your age one file, two, three and so on…all the way up to your current age. For some of us, there are a heck of a lot of files in this drawer – some not as many. It doesn’t matter how many files are in this drawer.
As we go through life, certain good and not so good things happen to us. Each of these events are stored in the file of the age you were when it happened. If that particular event was difficult, painful, and/or traumatic and it is not fully processed or integrated, it gets carried over into your next years’ file. If you don’t process it in the next year – if it gets ignored – hoping it will go away on its’ own – it gets moved along – year after year – file after file – up until the age you decide to work on this stuff.
Life being life, you are bound to have other difficult, painful, and/or traumatic events. If these are not worked through, they simply get added to your “pile” of painful events. And then before you know it, your current age file is bulging at the seams from unprocessed experiences. When our files are bulging and our crumpled and torn pages are slipping out, we may find ourselves being triggered in our present day life by these old pages. We may not even know why we are getting so upset by something – we just do. These triggers can overwhelm us and take away from our current quality of life.
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EMDR processes your past files, creating room in your mind, heart, and body for peace, contentment, and resiliency. These pages are not put through the shredder – you don’t forget them – what happens is that the emotional responses to them are gone. Yippee!
What is Somatic
Experiencing 101?
Somatic Experiencing (SE™) aims to resolve symptoms of stress, shock, and trauma that accumulate in our bodies and nervous systems. Trauma, from an SE lens, is focused on how it shows up in the nervous system and how that dysregulation impacts life. When we are stuck in patterns of fight, flight, or freeze, SE helps us release, recover, and become more resilient. It is a body-oriented therapeutic model...for healing trauma and other stress disorders from a nervous system lens. It is based on a multidisciplinary intersection of physiology, psychology, ethology, biology, neuroscience, indigenous healing practices, and medical biophysics and has been clinically applied for more than four decades. It is the life’s work of Dr. Peter A. Levine.
The SE approach releases traumatic shock, which is key to transforming patterns that get stuck and impact people’s daily life. It can be used to support the resolution of PTSD and developmental attachment trauma. It offers a framework to assess where a person is “stuck” in the fight, flight or freeze responses and provides clinical tools to resolve these fixated physiological states.
Trauma may begin as acute stress from a perceived life-threat or as the end product of cumulative stress. Both types of stress can impair, sometimes seriously, a person’s ability to function with resilience and ease. Trauma may result from a wide variety of stressors such as accidents, invasive medical procedures, sexual or physical assault, emotional abuse, neglect, war, natural disasters, loss, birth trauma, epigenetics, systems, or the corrosive stressors of ongoing fear and conflict.
The Somatic Experiencing approach facilitates the completion of self- protective motor responses and the release of thwarted survival energy bound in the body, thus addressing the root cause of trauma symptoms. This is approached by gently guiding clients to develop increasing tolerance for difficult bodily sensations and suppressed emotions and working to complete defensive responses previously thwarted from bringing resolution to the nervous system and, therefore, to the individual.
Dr. Levine was inspired to study stress on the animal nervous system when he realized that animals are constantly under threat of death yet show no symptoms of trauma stuck in their systems. What he discovered was that trauma has to do with the third survival response to a perceived life threat, which is freeze. When fight and flight are not options, we freeze and immobilize, like “playing dead.” This makes us less of a target. However, this reaction is designed to be time-sensitive, in other words, it needs to run its course, and the massive energy that was prepared for fight or flight gets discharged, through shakes and trembling. If the immobility phase isn’t complete, that charge stays trapped, and, from the body’s perspective, it is still under threat. The Somatic Experiencing method works to release this stored energy and turn off this threat alarm that causes dysregulation and dissociation. SE helps people understand this body response to trauma and work through a “body first” approach to healing.
Taken from: Somatic Experiencing International
If this interests you, I will begin to get to know you and your story. Through this process, I determine if EMDR & Somatic Experiencing is right for you at this time in your journey. This is not something we jump into first or second session without proper assessment and preparation.