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.
We've spent our lives supporting people through the ups and downs, and we want to share these insights with you. Together, we'll unravel the layers of personal and building healthy relationships. Each week, we'll bring you engaging conversations, expert insights, and practical strategies to help you heal from the past, foster healthy communication, and develop enduring love.
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Hey everyone, welcome back to Mr. and Mrs. Therapy Podcast. We're so glad that you're here with us today. In the last episode, we focused on reflecting on the last year to identify unresolved traumas and triggers, and we introduced EMDR as a powerful therapy for addressing these emotional wounds and really to help heal it. So in today's episode, we're going to continue that conversation of EMDR by highlighting exactly what EMDR looks like in practice.
Like if you were to come into a session with Tim and I, what would we do in the EMDR process? So if you've been on the fence about trying EMDR or just curious about how it works, this episode is for you. All right, let's jump into today's episode. So first we want to do a brief refresher. EMDR helps our brain to process disturbing or traumatic memories in a way that it helps reduce the emotional charge. Actually, we're not just looking to reduce the emotional charge.
We're looking to completely eliminate the emotional connection. When we're going through EMDR. So in order to do that, what we do is we identify a very specific memory to go after. Now, this memory is just our starting point. It's something that helps us to get our foot into the door and understand what our trauma really is. And so when we're going through EMDR, what we have our clients do is we have them identify a very specific moment of the trauma.
And what we're looking for is the most traumatic point or the most uncomfortable point of the memory. And a lot of times people have a story along with the memory, but what we're looking for is that one pinpointed moment. So I was sitting there and my parents were yelling and screaming at each other, and I just saw my mom's sad face. And when I saw that, it just broke my heart or it made me feel fearful or something like that.
Even though there's a video recording in your mind of the memory, we're asking our clients to find a point to pause it at. If you pause at the point where it feels the worst, that's what we're looking for. Now, again, the EMDR process is obviously very uncomfortable when you're thinking about even just the first point of EMDR where we're identifying this one particular moment. It's not fun to identify that moment, but again, it's a little bit of a trade-off.
You're going to experience discomfort up front, but then you'll have alleviation from the discomfort for the rest of your life after that. And so that's the wager I always like to make with my clients. Like, hey, I know this is uncomfortable, but once we get through it, you never have to have this problem again. Now, once we have identified this memory, this gives us insight into what our actual problem is. And so these were the negative beliefs we were talking a little bit about in
the last podcast. So it could be something like, I'm unlovable, I'm in danger, I can't safely feel or show my emotions, I have to be perfect. And we have a whole list of the negative belief systems that people can have or develop. And as a matter of fact, we will also post that on our Facebook page so that you can see what we're talking about when we're talking about these negative belief systems.
But that negative belief system that really is the thing that we're working on and we're going through the EMDR process you won't stick with the memory you will jump around to any memory that is connected with this negative belief system and so if your negative belief system for example is I'm in danger you're not going to stick to that pinpoint or pause point of the memory where you felt in danger it's going to take you to other situations in your life where you
felt in danger that have a negative impact on you today. And so just to let you know, right, that memory, again, it's just the gateway. It just gets us to what we're really looking for, which is that negative belief system. Then the next portion of what you do is, after you've identified the negative memory and the negative belief system, is that then you try to identify, okay, what are the feelings that I'm now feeling as a result of this?
I might be feeling fearful, sad, angry, embarrassed, nervous, any type of negative emotional response. And it's not about what you should be feeling. It's just about what you are feeling. And so if you think logically I should be feeling this thing over here, that's not a part of the equation. It's just whatever it is that you're actually feeling right now. And then once we identify what that negative feeling is, we're also going to identify what the intensity of that negative feeling is.
We rate it on a scale of 0 to 10, 0 being it doesn't bother me at all, or 10, it bothers me as deeply as I can imagine something bothering me. And what we call that scale is SUDS or subjective units of disturbance. Now, after we've identified what the SUDS is, then we're going to identify, okay, what body sensations are we feeling? When you're feeling sad, angry, nervous, where do you feel that in your body?
You might feel it in your face where you feel like you're going to cry or your face might feel flush or you might feel heaviness on your chest or you might feel it in your heart. Or I've even had people say, oh, my arms and legs, they feel weak or they feel numb. Any type of body response that you all of a sudden got when we started poking around at that memory is what we're looking for.
And so our emotions and our body cues, Because these are important factors to tell us later on in the process, how much have we actually processed or worked through, or if we're actually nearing the end of our process. And then once you've identified all of these factors, so we have the image, we have the negative belief, we have our suds, we have the emotions, we have the negative body sensations that you're experiencing.
That's when the EMDR process actually starts. And when you're starting that process, essentially what happens is we're going to ask you to have in the forefront of your mind three things. That image, the negative belief system, and then also that body sensation that you feel. And then depending on your therapist, whether you're seeing me or you might be seeing Ruth, you're going to get a little bit of a different experience.
Ruth generally just has her clients tap along with. I like to play a beeping sound that helps keep the cadence of the tapping down. And then I have my clients also tap along with it. Whether you do the way I do it, or the way Ruth does it, or you have another therapist who might stick with the original eye movements, they all will end up helping you to produce the positive result at the end. What's important is just that regular bilateral stimulation.
What's going to happen is you're going to be tapping along and letting your mind just wander to wherever it takes you. Now, this is a process where people really get jammed up a lot of times. They feel like there's something I should be doing, or I need to be solving this problem. And the way I like to tell my clients is, we have set up an equation that your brain is going to solve itself. You don't have to solve it. You just have to sit there and go through the experience.
That's what's going to end up solving that problem for you. A lot of times in our lives, we're trying so hard to focus and pay attention. But when you're going through the EMDR process, it's kind of the exact opposite. You almost just kind of want to let yourself daydream, let your brain go wherever it takes you.
So how I expand to my clients is the analogy of a train. First of all, as a therapist, I'm supposed to stay off, quote unquote, the tracks and let your mind do the work that it's going to do. God's created your mind in an amazing way. And so Tim and I try to stay off the track and let it go down the route it's supposed to go. And so I tell my clients, it's like looking out the window of the train. We're stopped. I'm going to tell you where to start. You're going to be looking out the window.
I'm going to give you the image that you told me earlier, the negative beliefs we landed on. And then where you feel it on your body. And I'm just going to say, okay, look out the window. That's where we're starting. And then let your mind go wherever it's going to go. So a lot of my clients will close their eyes as they're doing the tapping. Because I think it really helps them to focus more. But also get out of their kind of cognitive thinking.
And more into experiencing it. And taking themselves back to that time. And so you'll be tapping. And you won't say anything to me. You're just allowing your mind to go wherever it's going to go. You're looking out the window and either thoughts, feelings, body sensations are things that you might experience during this. And so during that process, you're just tapping. And then at some point, I'll say, OK, take a deep breath.
You'll take that breath. And that's when you'll begin to recount to me everything that came up in that set. And one of the important things is to not censor anything. And I think, like you said, this is where people get tripped up at. They feel like, well, was that me thinking? What am I supposed to be thinking? This has nothing to do with what I was originally thinking. Why would I talk about my grocery list? Why would I tell you something that does not even matter?
But it's important to not censor anything. So I'll give my clients an example at the very beginning of what might come up. So I'll say something like, think about that time that your dad yelled at you in front of your friends. And the negative belief of I'm not good enough. Notice that you said you felt it in your chest. Start there and go with that. And then you're just going to start tapping, letting your mind go.
And then when you're recounting it to me, it may be something like, well, I saw my dad yelling at me in front of my friends. And then I saw the looks on my friends' faces.
And then I thought about a time where I went to the zoo and I tripped in front of people and they were laughing at me and I was really embarrassed and then I thought am I even doing this right and then I felt kind of sick to my stomach and then I thought oh man I gotta go to the store later today and I thought of another time where I was really embarrassed and I tripped again at school in the lunchroom and I saw everybody laughing at me and then I thought again am I you've been doing this right?
This process is so weird. And that's all I got. So then all I'll say is, okay, start there and go with that. So it's almost like wherever we stopped on the train, that's now your new starting point. You're looking out the window and you're going to let your mind go again. You're going to tap, tap, tap, tap. And a lot of times people, I think especially people who are very logical, need to process the process, right? They need to go through the process of, am I doing this right?
I don't think I'm doing this right. Is this me thinking this? Or is this how it's supposed to go? Why am I going to tell her about the grocery list that I had? But after you start getting into it and start going, it's really cool to be able to see how the things that are coming up relate to that negative belief. And a lot of times my clients can't see it because I cannot tell you how many times clients tell me, I don't even know what this has to do with it, but I thought this.
And they'll tell me and I'm like, oh my gosh, that has everything to do with it. And I can see it because I'm watching these themes. I'm watching the connections. And as you kind of get into the process of it, it becomes a lot easier. And you're able just to kind of recount things, even though you don't see a connection.
And it may be stuff from childhood, right? I may think of, okay, then I thought of a time in second grade where I was doing a spelling test and my teacher thought I was cheating. So she took my paper away in front of everyone. And then I saw the curtains that my mom had when I was a little kid. Oh, and then those curtains made me think of the curtains that I had in college. And your mind will just make all these connections that just seem so random to you.
But your mind is bringing up things in a way where it needs to process it. And it's going down these nodes that you have to go through. And how I explain that to my clients is it's almost like a social media comment thread or an email thread where you start at one place and you're working all the way through to the end and then maybe a new comment comes up or a new thought starts and then you kind of work all that through to the end but it starts with an original thought or comment.
Yeah and one of my favorite thoughts about EMDR is that just coming in with the perspective when you're processing through stuff that everything is relevant. And again, I'm a very logical person. And so trying to look at it and trying to figure it out, I remember at the beginning, I was like, this just doesn't make any sense. But then over the course of time of watching it, I think Ruth, you and I, we've developed a level of experience where we can see where this threat is taking you towards.
Now, even sometimes your mind might give you what I like to call a bridge memory, where it doesn't currently make any sense right now. But then in just a little bit, it will make total sense. And so just as an example, you might be processing through and then all of a sudden you might be thinking about this blue car. And you're like, what does this blue car have to do with it?
And then all of a sudden in the next set when you're processing through, that blue car will then make you think about, oh man, my ex-girlfriend, she was wearing this blue dress when she broke up with me.
The blue car didn't really have anything to do with what we were processing except for to help bridge your mind to what it really did need to be thinking about, which was, oh, then there's this other traumatic piece where I was thinking about, oh she was wearing that blue dress and yeah that was a very painful or uncomfortable time for me and sometimes your brain will give you something like that where it doesn't feel in context at all
or it doesn't feel relevant but it's helping to bridge the gap to get your mind to something that it does need to be thinking about and so when you're processing through you do have to just have this understanding like i'm going to be just in this very unfamiliar territory but i'm just going to trust that this process is going to get me to where it needs to take me to and i'm going to trust, my therapist is going to know what to do with each thing.
And the vast, vast, vast majority of the time, just like you're saying, Ruth, when you tell us what's going on, we're going to just say, okay, go with that. And if something is wrong, or we feel like it's kind of going off the tracks, we are going to do something to try to correct that. But 99% of the time, you're going to be telling us all the stuff that's going on. And we're going to say, okay, go with that. And then we'll go into the next set. And we'll keep processing the next set.
If there is a little bit of a problem or we do feel like, okay, maybe something's not happening here. There's a couple cues we're looking for. So one of them is if all of a sudden you hit us with three rounds where it's no negative things are coming up or it's positive things coming up, we might bring you back to that original negative memory to see if that memory has any juice left in it or if that negative belief has any juice left in it.
And then we'll try processing it. Okay, go with that. And if more negative thoughts and memories keep coming up, then we still have more work to do. For a good example, you're saying like, why am I thinking about my grocery list? That's also tending to be a cue that we're reaching what Ruth has talked about, the end of a node. Or we could be reaching the end of the negative belief system.
And so then we'll jump back to that original image and the negative belief system, and we'll process again to see if anything else pops out. And it can be sessions where we're just doing that over and over and over again. A lot of times some clients can get impatient, like, how long are we going to be doing this? And it's like, as long as it takes. And people always ask me, they're like, does this ever not work on anybody?
And my response to that is, anybody who have done as much EMDR wanted to on, it's always worked for them. Now I've had people who've dropped out midway through, but anybody who I've done as much as I want, we've always ended up reaching the end of a memory.
So now that you've processed through the different nodes, you're going through this memory again and again, I like to go through again and scan the negative belief and just find any other time in your life where you've experienced that same feeling or that same belief.
But once you're at a place where you've processed it and things are just neutral or you are now having adaptive thinking where you're able to pull the lessons and pull the positive things out of the situation and see your strengths in it. That's really awesome for us to see as therapists because it came from this negative belief and this negative cognition that was so entrenched in not just how you thought, but how you felt.
And to be able to see the change in that and to see really you begin to have these positive thoughts and these adaptive thinking. Then what we'll do is we'll take you into the next phase, which is where we do the reinstallation of the positive belief. And so usually that is on the other end of the spectrum of what the negative belief is. So if it's I'm in danger, the positive cognition would be I am safe.
Or if the negative belief is I'm not good enough, the positive belief is I am enough or I am good enough. And what we want you to do at that point is to hold the original memory with this positive belief. And we go through that process again and again until it begins to strengthen to the point where you truly believe that positive belief is true. Because a lot of times when you're starting the EMDR process, if I say, okay, how true does I am enough feel to you?
Most of the time people feel like that's a lie. Like they cannot believe that that's true. But by the end of the process, that belief is strengthened. And this is a stark contrast from the previous phase, because you're going from thinking about a bunch of negative things to now those negative things all being challenged and thinking a bunch of positive thoughts. And so now you're moving into this more positive sense, it started to feel a whole lot better.
And when you're processing the negative stuff, that can take weeks or months generally to get through that. But then when we're processing the positive stuff, generally, that's like 15 to 30 minutes of processing.
Once you get to that positive installation phase, it's a very quick process because now there's no real barriers anymore that inhibit you from just accepting but not just believing but also feeling these positive beliefs that you're going to be installing and so like you're saying if your negative belief was i'm in danger it changes to it's over i'm safe now but you actually feel that's true it's not a mantra you have to convince yourself of now because that negative belief
and all the trauma that was related to it was process through, your brain is now able to accept it's over and safe now as being something that is true in your life. And then you'll start operating as though that's true. So in areas and ways where you might have been way more cautious or nervous or worried about negative outcomes, you're going to be able to have a lot more confidence and feel a lot more secure than you did before you went through the EMDR process.
And then after that, there's the final phase, which is doing a body scan where you think about the original image and the positive belief system and then you just think about the top of your head all the way down to the bottom of your feet and you think is there any place you notice any tightness tension or unusual sensation and this is just kind of a last check to make sure we really did root out everything and if something does pop up
you just notice that body sensation and then you go right back into tapping and most of the time if you do notice something you'll notice that body sensation you'll do the tapping then that sensation will go away and then all of a sudden we'll do another body scan and then top of head down to the bottom of your feet. Do you notice anything?
No, I don't notice anything anymore. And then boom, you've completed your first memory and now you get to have the benefits of leaving behind all that trauma, but then accepting these new positive belief systems about yourself. And again, it's not something that you have to try to think differently about now. It's something that has been programmed now into your brain that is now your new automatic way of thinking.
All right, guys, that's about all the time that we have for today. we hope that diving in and giving you guys a little bit more of a deep look at how the actual EMDR process works is helpful for you and if you're on the fence a little bit about getting it done that it made you feel a little more secure to want to proceed forward and start working on it so if you'd like to work with us we have a link in our description down below where you can set up a consultation
appointment where we can talk to you a little bit more and see if we're a good fit or if you'd like to just set up an appointment and start right away we have another link that's also available for 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?
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issues, or feeling hopeless or suicidal, you are not alone. Help is available. Please seek professional help or call the National Suicide Hotline at 988. Thank you again for joining us on Mr. and Mrs. Therapy. Remember, there's always hope and there's always help. Music.