Getting Past Your Past With EMDR

Mount Tamalpais, CA

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)

The human body possesses an enormous, astonishing, and persistent capacity to heal itself. When you cut your hand, this process will automatically kick into gear. Just as the body is not able to heal a wound when there is debris in it, the brain often cannot process a disturbing experience and becomes like a blocked wound. In order for it to heal, we must clean it so the body can do its job.

EMDR unlocks what is natural within each of us. It is our innate healing process that has been blocked and can be unblocked with EMDR. There is an inherent wisdom within each person that is already whole, it is just obscured by negative images, feelings, and beliefs. Our job as therapists is to help clear the blockages so that our clients can have access to their natural states of well-being and emotional balance. 

Major traumas, such as war, assaults, rape, abuse, natural disasters, accidents, and loss can understandably cause disruption and blockages. However, a person does not have to undergo an overtly distressing event for it to affect them. An accumulation of smaller “everyday” or less pronounced events can still be traumatic: conflict in relationships, insecurities, humiliations at a tender age, work dissatisfaction, having a child, financial difficulties, racial / sexual discrimination, verbal abuse, social media, that "look" your Dad gives you. In addition to specific upsetting memories, EMDR can help you overcome persistent negative beliefs like, "I don't belong," "I have to be perfect," or "I'm worthless." 

In EMDR, we activate the brain processing  systems by asking you to focus on a "target" related to the trauma, such as a memory with the image, emotions, body sensations, and negative beliefs associated with it. Through this target we are attempting to stimulate the memory network where the trauma is stored. After stimulating the memory network, we add alternating eye movements ("follow my fingers with your eyes to the left, right, left, right") or other bilateral stimulation (gently tapping on your right knee, left knee, right knee, left knee ; listening to a sound in your right ear, left ear, right ear, left ear). Bilateral stimulation activates accelerated information processing, a multidimensional free association of thoughts, feelings, and sensations that enables you to tap into insight and understanding in a previously inaccessible way. Forgotten memories, fragments of images, beliefs, seemingly random connections, body sensations pass through rapidly. Everyone has his or her own unique processing style. 

Each set further unlocks and unblocks distressing information and accelerates it along a path toward natural healing. The emotional charge is reduced or eliminated and there is an objective understanding of the event: "It's over," "This happened to me and it wasn't my fault," "Now it feels like I'm reading about it in a newspaper." EMDR helps get you in touch with a felt sense of freedom and truth. 

How does it work?

In truth, no one knows how any form of psychotherapy works neurobiologically or in the brain. EMDR seems to have a direct effect on the way that the brain processes information. The process of bilateral stimulation is similar to what occurs naturally during dreaming or REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. It is during REM sleep, which is characterized by "rapid, jerky, and binocularly symmetrical eye movements," that the brain's memory systems are programmed. We can't possibly store all of the information we receive in a day, so REM discards, filters, and files data into our memory banks. Therefore, when we re-enact this process with bilateral stimulation, we are going directly to the source. 

EMDR therapy is an eight-phase treatment. Bilateral stimulation is used during one part of the treatment. The therapy involves attention to three time periods:  the past, present, and future. Focus is given to past disturbing memories and related events. Also, it is given to current situations that cause distress, and to developing the skills and attitudes needed for positive future actions.

The Proof?

Repeated studies show that by using EMDR therapy people can experience the benefits of psychotherapy that once took years. More than thirty positive controlled outcome studies have been conducted on EMDR therapy. Some of the studies show that 84%-90% of single-trauma victims no longer have post-traumatic stress disorder after only three 90-minute sessions. Another study, funded by the HMO Kaiser Permanente, found that 100% of the single-trauma victims and 77% of multiple trauma victims no longer were diagnosed with PTSD after only six 50-minute sessions. In another study, 77% of combat veterans were free of PTSD in 12 sessions.

There has been so much research on EMDR therapy that it is now recognized as an effective form of treatment for trauma and other disturbing experiences by organizations such as the American Psychiatric Association, the World Health Organization, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Over 100,000 clinicians throughout the world use the therapy.  Millions of people have been treated successfully over the past 25 years.

Please get in touch if you're interested in giving it a try!

EMDR Institute
Getting Past Your Past by Francine Shapiro
Tapping In by Laurel Parnell
 

Why You Should Not Have Sex With Him

Faye Dunaway & Steve McQueen, "The Thomas Crown Affair" (1968)

Ladies, hear 83-year-old feisty relationship expert Pat Allen: No sex without commitment! 

Women who are interested in a longterm relationship must signal men before sex that they are moving toward that, or too often the women will be hurt and time will be wasted. 

Most liberated, sexually active women believe they can maintain control over their emotions after sex. What they may not realize is that casual, non-committed sex for many woman can trigger a bonding that verges on physical addiction. This is due to a sexually stimulated hormone called oxytocin. 

Oxytocin is a pleasurable, bonding hormone released when you are on your way to orgasm, and when you orgasm. It increases the feelings of love, well-being, peace, affection, nurturing, security and attachment and causes humans to want to stay together and organize as family units. Since it is released in a man's semen, it literally is the glue of the family structure. 

Men and women both have oxytocin, but women have much more and it affects them differently. A woman will bond to her man after one instance of good sex. A man may feel bonded too, but he can easily go off and bond with other women as well.

Women get attached to the man's smell, his touch, the sound of his voice. If you keep contact with these things, you can stay bonded to a man for a year or longer, from one sexual encounter, as long as you keep getting a fix, even if it is only via his voice.

Other brain chemicals also play cupid during this time. Whether you like it or not, neurotransmitters are highly involved in your sex life and your romantic passion is largely a function of your own endocrinology. When you're thinking about him to the point of obsession, you're soaked in a cocktail of serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine more potent than a martini and similar to the chemical combo found in obsessive-compulsive disorder. A jigger full of dopamine gives you the same high as that from alcohol or drugs. 

So what is building is a chemical connection with the emotional g-force of an atomic bomb. The chemical portion alone is enough to super glue you to this guy. According to Dr. Helen Fisher, author of Why We Love: The Nature and and Chemistry of Romantic Love, "These are truly intense and insane attachments that produce a crazy energy drive, emotional elation, mood swings, emotional craving, separation anxiety, childlike possessiveness and total madness."

All of this can set women up for heartache. You think that if you're easy-going, cool, not needy, that the guy will want to be with you. However, giving yourself to a man too early, if what you want is a monogamous, committed, sexual relationship, could leave you longing for a man who can't give you what you want. 

To alleviate this epidemic, try drawing a line and NOT having sex with men unless you have a commitment. This commitment is for continuity, longevity and monogamy. You want to know that he has time to spend with you, intends to be here for an extended time, and will only sleep with you.

Getting to I Do by Dr. Pat Allen

Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love by Dr. Helen Fisher

Women Who Love Psychopaths by Sandra Brown