Music. Welcome to Mr. and Mrs. Therapy, the podcast that empowers you to transform life's challenges into opportunities for personal growth and healthier relationships. We're your hosts, Tim and Ruth Olson, licensed marriage and family therapists and trauma experts. As experienced therapists with backgrounds in addressing trauma and mental health disorders, we believe there is hope and there certainly is healing.
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We're so glad that you're here with us today. So we had started a series two episodes ago addressing the potential potential criticisms of EMDR. So what we're addressing today is the concern of the risk of re-traumatization. And so we're just going to jump right into today's episode and really the thought of the risk of re-traumatization. It makes sense to me why that is a concern because when we look at EMDR, we're working a lot of times with the trauma.
And so it's an intense emotional experience that people go through and it requires clients to recall distressing memories, which can lead to what we call clients being activated or having that intense emotional experience. But when we look at re-traumatization in the context of trauma therapy, it can occur a lot of times when traumatic memories are activated without adequate coping mechanisms in place.
And so part of the EMDR process, the eight phases, is to make sure that you're resourced and that you have the coping skills and the tools needed to help you work through things because you are addressing various forms of trauma, and that could be really hard. So before we even jump into the processing piece of EMDR. We address the need for coping skills. And I do think definitely there can be some scary moments in EMDR.
And if you're not adequately prepared for it, that that definitely can freak you out a little bit. And so part of this is kind of on the therapist to make sure that clients are prepared for it. Now, the majority of the time that clients go through EMDR, they don't necessarily have a gigantic negative emotional response. But in fairness, it is not an uncommon thing for it to happen.
And so being prepared and knowing like, OK, this can be difficult, but if I just keep pressing through, I will be able to get through to the other side and I will feel dramatically different if I just kind of keep plugging along.
Plus, also having the benefit of what you were saying, Ruth, is having those coping mechanisms in your back pocket ready to pull out if you're struggling throughout the week or even in the midst of the session can help you to feel more comfortable when you're confronting those events. Right. And I think one of the things about EMDR is that we aren't tiptoeing around what happened.
We're jumping right into the trauma. And I think it's easy to look at that and think, well, you're just re-traumatizing someone. But you have to look at it from a different perspective and reframe that understanding that during EMDR sessions, it can evoke strong emotional responses. But that really is part of the healing process.
But I do also think that it's not necessarily a fair criticism because I think it's a very common practice in therapy where you are going and you are addressing and you're working through or processing through your fears. And so it is a very common thing where other forms of therapy are doing the exact same thing or presenting the exact same potential problem is, hey, you're getting in there, you're working on something unpleasant.
And so there is a risk that you could be triggered off or in therapy, we call it decompensating, where you kind of get really emotional and you kind of feel like it's a runaway train and you can't manage it. And so that's to say there's kind of risks with anything you choose to do. But part of it is if you have a competent therapist, that's part of their job and a part of their deal is to be able to help that runaway train, help it to stop and help get you back on the right track.
And I know that we shared this in the last probably couple episodes where we talked about a couple of kinds that we've had who really were just at a point where they knew they had to address the next trauma. They had already seen success and had completed some traumatic memories and had found healing in those. But for both your client, Tim, and my client, they were running up to a traumatic memory that they knew had to be processed.
And both of our clients took a year-long break and then came back and both had completed their target and their traumatic memories. and both of them said very similar things that they wish they didn't wait a whole year to address. Because when you think about, even though it is scary and it's a lot to feel like, oh man, I gotta face this trauma head on. I gotta re-experience some of the emotions and the memories and the pictures and the feelings I experienced during that traumatic memory.
If you choose to not do EMDR or not address that trauma, you're still going to be experiencing all of that. Maybe not in such an intense way, but in your everyday life, you're going to be thinking about it. You might be having flashbacks about it. You know it's that big elephant back there that needs to be addressed. And so even though you don't necessarily want to address it, you're addressing it every day in different ways. And I think that's an important thing to understand.
It can be scary to hit it head on. But by avoiding it, you still have consequences. It's not like you're avoiding it and you're not experiencing anything negative from the trauma. So really, our goal is to address it head on. And to bring full healing to it so that there isn't any negative effect.
Actually, that's a really good point, Ruth. One of the things that I like to tell my clients is that that trauma, it's basically like you take a little time-release poison pill and you drop it into your glass of water and you're slowly drinking it. And even though you're not getting a dramatic effect now, over the course of time, the negative effects definitely do build up.
And I've had clients over the course of time, they said, you know, like they had this trauma that happened when they were a child, and then now they're in their 40s or 50s. And when I talk about confronting that trauma, they're like, listen, I've had that trauma for decades and it hasn't been a problem.
And I said, it has been a problem, but now you're just finally seeing the manifestations of those problems, that those problems are now just becoming so obvious to you when before the problems might have been much more subtle. Oh, for sure. I definitely have had older clients who have just lived with that trauma for their entire lives and not even just one trauma, but multiple traumas. And they just felt like this is just my lot in life. This is just what I'm always gonna have to endure.
But it does come out in different ways. It comes out in the way they sabotage relationships because of the fear of getting hurt again because of whatever trauma they experience.
Or it comes out in psychosomatic symptoms or in the way that their body is dealing with different diseases and in their body and not understanding why their body is breaking down, but really looking at it and seeing that this trauma is weighing a lot heavier on you and you do not have to endure it for the rest of your life.
I think if there's one thing that we could get across, it really is to instill hope that these traumas that you've tried different ways to deal with it or you've talked through it and I've done everything I know how to work through it and even those that you feel like, I think I've really processed through it, that it is important to re-look at it and just make sure that every part of that trauma is cleared out and healed because it is possible and be able to see hope come
back and just a release of the pressure and stress and effects of trauma that they've carried for such a big part of their life. And I think one of the things that's interesting, especially about this idea of going through EMDR and getting triggered by the experience, is that when you're doing EMDR, I tell my clients we're actively looking to start clipping some of your triggers.
We're looking to go in and those things that could trigger you off or have triggered you off in the past, we're looking to make those basically neutral where it's like, oh, that happens. And then it doesn't make me think about the event or it doesn't make me have a negative emotional response. A good example of this might be if somebody in the relationship had an affair and you have worked on the relationship, you've.
You've decided you're going to stick in the relationship for the long haul, but then let's say you and your partner, you sit down and you watch a movie and the movie has content about an affair. And then that emotionally triggers you off, right? One of my favorite things going through EMDR is saying, hey, let's not avoid those triggers.
That's going to be proof that EMDR is working. And so when you're coming in and we're working on this thing, don't avoid those things because those could be great insights where all of a sudden you can start feeling like, oh, actually, you know what? That did really bother me last week. and now this week it doesn't bother me.
I wasn't necessarily sure if it was working, but now that I'm confronted by something that usually makes me uncomfortable and now doesn't, now I can easily see that this has done a great benefit to me. And so part of it is, yes, you are going to be confronting trauma and yes, that can be very uncomfortable.
And yes, there is some level of risk to that. But then if you keep working through it, the things that have made your world much smaller because you can't handle a lot of it, now will then start to expand and you will be able to access much more of the world because you're not having to restrict or avoid things because it brings up those negative or unpleasant feelings. Oh yeah, another example I just thought about is birth trauma.
And for a long time when I was working a lot with birth trauma, there was a concern and a fear that, gosh, if I do EMDR while I'm pregnant, all those emotions and all the things that I'm going to be experiencing will be transferred to the baby. But when you think about it, yes, there is a risk, especially earlier in the pregnancy.
You want to be careful and you want to be mindful and make sure that you are under the care of midwife or physician but when you think of the whole term of pregnancy you are going to be experiencing the emotions and the stress and anxiety and the panic attacks and the depression all the things that are a symptom of your trauma you're experiencing it anyway kind of like what But you said, Tim, with that slow-release pill, over the course of that entire pregnancy,
you're having these emotions anyway. And so a lot of times when I work with people who have had birth trauma, it's amazing to see the difference that they experience in their pregnancy and just that process in the fears, the worries that they have, but also in the labor and delivery. There's a huge difference in that as well.
And so I think that's a really good example of facing the trauma head on and dealing with it or avoiding it and not really wanting to deal with the trauma because of all the emotions that will come up and the fear that that won't be good for the baby. But if you can clear that out and really work through that trauma in a short amount of time, the rest of the pregnancy, you'll experience a freedom from clearing out these traumas. So then how do you minimize the risks?
And one of the things that I would say about this, the therapist qualifications. So how experienced are they in working with trauma? How much experience that they had doing EMDR. And also, this is just kind of a rule of thumb about any professional, whether it be doctor or a contractor, is that not one of the professionals are ever created equal. People have different skills, different experience levels.
And so some people are just going to be really great at it, and some people are not going to be as great. And if you are in particular somebody who is really struggling or having a lot of emotional difficulty, you definitely want to swing for the fences and try to get the most qualified professional that you can. somebody who can navigate those difficulties.
If things are going pretty well for you and you're like, hey, I just want to kind of check under the hood and I want to make sure everything's going good, you could take a risk with a less experienced professional. And I definitely don't want to knock less experienced professionals because I was there, right? And I needed to have experience with people and work with people to get to the position that I'm in today.
And so it's nothing bad against them. But if you're in a pretty emotionally vulnerable spot, it could be a little more dangerous for you to take on a less experienced individual. But also experience experience doesn't necessarily make you great either. You can have a lot of experience, but then still not be very good at your job. And so this depends on how much the person actually invests into continuing to try to hone their craft and trying to be as good as they can.
But then also just some people just are more naturally competent than other people are. And so it can be hard because there's not necessarily like a therapist grading system out there where you can say, oh, I can see this is going to be a great professional. Time does have a tendency to indicate that they're going to be more well-rounded in their career. And not necessarily just the length of time, but how much time do they put into EMDR?
Just because an EMDR therapist has been doing EMDR for 10 years, but if the majority of their practice, they're working on something else or they use other modalities, which is totally fine. We use other modalities as well, but we're very passionate about EMDR and the way that it works and the benefits you can get from EMDR.
So we use EMDR a lot. And so just because somebody has been training EMDR for 10 years or 20 years, but they don't use it very often, it doesn't mean they're going to be as good as someone who maybe has been trained for three years, but uses it extensively. But I think the beauty of EMDR is that there's a process in place that can help your therapist really do well with you and work through the process.
Because I think of the experience that you had, Tim, when we were in training and how that brand new therapist that had been trained and was getting bad marks from the trainer still did well on your memory. Oh, yeah. And I think that if the therapist just doesn't get in the way, and I don't think that therapist was getting in the way, but they were just taking me through the process.
It's the process that's effective most of the time, not the therapist, because they're just a facilitator of the process. Now, don't get me wrong, a therapist can kind of interject and get in the way. And I think a lot of times people kind of direct or kind of monkey around with the EMDR process because there are kind of a lot of offshoots or a lot of different subcategories of EMDR.
But for the majority of the time, it's just we do straight EMDR, just kind of the original way that it was crafted. And that's how we go through it. And we end up getting the results. So we We haven't seen a need to really go in and try to change or alter the process in any way, shape, or form. And the only areas that we have changed, I think, are areas that we feel has really enhanced the process. Oh, yeah. And it's not a departure at all, I think, from the main idea of what EMDR is.
I think one of the only things we really did, which I think is kind of a stroke of genius that you had, is that now when we go back in, if you're not feeling anything, when you think about the negative memory, you still have them explore the negative belief system to see if that creates any negative emotion still left over. And so for me, that's not any kind of departure from really the main direction that EMDR goes, but it's an extra enhancer to check and make sure that no rock
is left unturned before you move on to the next phase. Right. So I think that could feel like maybe we just contradicted ourself with, you know, working with qualified therapists that's well trained and experienced in EMDR. But then we're also saying, but the EMDR process itself is beneficial and enough. But I think it really is a combination of both. because even you and I have different styles of the EMDR process that we do.
And going back to a couple of episodes ago where we talked about the therapeutic alliance and the connection you have with them could be beneficial even in the EMDR process. Oh, yeah, for sure. Because you're going through a difficult, uncomfortable event. If you don't feel like trust or connection to your therapist, that can make it harder for them to assist you in walking out of a very uncomfortable
or highly emotional moment. But if you feel more of a connection or trust for your therapist, then it's like, OK, I know they'll get me through it, even though this is really hard right now. So that's one of the ways to minimize risk in EMDR is to find a qualified therapist. Another way is client readiness. That as much as I want this for my clients, as much as I wanted it for that client who had stopped for a year and then came back, I had worked with her for a long time.
And probably even you were excited to see the healing from that event. Oh, for sure. And I loved working with her. But she wasn't ready. And so I really had to honor that and respect that. And part of that client readiness isn't just any emotional readiness, like, OK, I'm ready to jump in. But it really is what we talked about early on. Just making sure that you have the tools and abilities to cope with things as they come up.
You have distress tolerance techniques that can really help you through the process. And actually, I think this is another good point, too, because I'll see a client and And especially if they seem particularly emotionally vulnerable. After we go through their trauma history, I'll offer them, I'll say, hey, listen, we can either pick something and we can kind of dip our toe in something that seems a little bit easier, or we can swing for the fences.
And so they let me know if they're prepared to dive into something that potentially could be very uncomfortable, or if they want to tackle something that's a little bit easier so they can get more of a feel for the process. But actually, normally I'm pretty surprised is that majority of people are like, nope, let's swing for the fences.
I think they kind of feel like, hey, if I'm going to bother getting into this at all, I may as well just go for the hardest stuff right away so that then I can get the benefit right away. But that is also another potential thing that you can do is you could see like, OK, if I'm really nervous about this or I'm uncomfortable or I feel like I might not be able to handle it, you can try to tackle something a little bit lighter first, get a little bit of emotional relief.
Belief and then also a little bit of understanding for the process and then think, okay, do I want to go in deeper? And so I think that's also another thing too, that if you go on to see somebody and then you're working through it and you get nervous, your therapist might be like, hey, talk about your memories. This seems like something I want to go after. And then if you're like, oh, that seems like a big thing. I'm scared.
I would encourage you to tell them that, hey, can we start off with something a little bit later? I want to see how this goes first so that you then can get that feel and then also develop a little bit of a trust for the process and say, okay, I see it got me through this little thing. Now maybe it can go on to a bigger thing, or maybe I can go on to even the scariest thing I can think of.
And the last way that we'll talk about minimizing the risk in EMDR is really just the AIP model or the adaptive information processing model in and of itself really helps to minimize the risk of re-traumatizing. Because this is a foundational model for EMDR, and it really shows that your mind can heal from psychological trauma, just like the body recovers from physical trauma when it's given the right conditions. So I know we reviewed briefly the AIP model in one of the recent episodes we did.
But just to explain it really quickly, this model explains how the brain processes and stores information. Particularly traumatic experiences, and how when we go through a trauma, our brain can store it in a maladaptive way, which then leads to the distress that you see and the distress that people are experiencing. But EMGR is designed to help reprocess those memories that are stored maladaptively. And then integrate them into a more adaptive and functional memory network.
So really, when the memory is stored in a dysfunctional or kind of this frozen state, and it remains unprocessed, it allows you now to reprocess the memory in a safe way. And it, in a sense, unlocks the memory from its frozen and maladaptive state, and then integrates it in a way where it's more adaptive or even helpful to you and less distressing.
So the memory isn't experienced anymore as an immediate threat, but as part of your past, something you've experienced and you're able to separate out what was helpful from it, you kind of keep that adaptive thinking and then you get rid of the rest and you desensitize it and kind of send it on its way.
And actually that reminds me of an analogy that I used to talk to my clients about where EMDR, just like you were saying, it's not necessarily healing the brain, but it's helping the brain to heal itself. And so the analogy I always used to like like to give people is if you get a cut, and then that cut gets infected, and then you take antibiotics to heal that infection, that's not healing the cut. It's removing the infection that's preventing the cut from healing itself.
And EMDR is doing the exact same thing. EMDR is not healing your brain or healing your trauma. It's going in and removing the negative emotions that prevents your brain from healing itself, that prevents your brain from coming to healthy alternative terms to that trauma that you've gone through. All right, guys, that's all the time that we have for today. So just as a quick recap, when you're doing EMDR, absolutely, it can put you in a more emotionally difficult position.
It's causing you to confront very uncomfortable and emotional things. And if you go to the right therapist, you go to somebody who helps prep you for that, the risk of re-traumatizing is really minimized. And then you can go through and you can process that trauma and you can remove triggers and you can remove the emotional overburden that's left over.
But you do want to make sure that you are well prepared or if you do go into EMDR, you let your therapist know if you're nervous or scared about proceeding that you want to start off on something a little bit lighter compared to swinging for the fences. But that in the end, the risk of the emotional difficulty you're going through in Ruth and Tonight's experience is always worth it compared to holding on to or avoiding dealing with that.
All right, guys, thank you so much for listening. And remember, your mind is a powerful thing. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of Mr. and Mrs. Therapy. We hope that you enjoyed today's episode and found it helpful. If so, would you take 30 seconds and share it with a friend? Also, we'd love for you to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It lights us up to know that this podcast is helping you. If you have any questions or a topic you'd like discussed in future episodes,
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