Skip to main content

Tag: Trauma

What is EMDR?

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Counseling, OCD.

When people first hear about Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), they are often skeptical. That’s OK because I was too once. I wasn’t sure how waving my fingers back and forth in front of my clients was going to change how they felt about the past. However, I was desperate. Cognitive behavioral therapy for the treatment of trauma just wasn’t cutting it for the complex client presentations I was seeing. We could talk for hours about how the abuse a client experienced wasn’t their fault. They could give me the right answers, but didn’t feel it. They could change their thoughts, but their bodies were still reactive. Once I started using EMDR and saw first hand how great my clients were feeling, I was hooked.   

What is EMDR?

EMDR is an experiential therapy that allows clients to process trauma at a brain level to access healing at a different level than traditional talk therapy. Other approaches to healing from trauma such as Exposure Therapy or Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) require the individual to tell the entire story of the trauma repeatedly in order to become desensitized from it. However, with EMDR, telling the story of the trauma is not a requirement. This brings a sense of relief for clients who do not want to retell the entire story, cannot remember the whole story, feel it would be too lengthy to tell, or are bound by security clearances. 

The other difference between EMDR and cognitive based therapies is that EMDR addresses body sensations associated with traumatic memories. A rape victim may no longer believe the rape was her fault (changing the thought), but may still carry a sense of shame and distressing body sensations that accompany that emotion. Trauma is often stored in the body can manifest as physical sensations such as chronic digestive issues or panic attacks. I have seen several clients have a reduction in physical symptoms after EMDR therapy. 

What is the EMDR process like?

There are eight phases of treatment in EMDR. The initial phases involve screening and preparing the client for being able to reprocess the trauma. The therapist works with the client on building awareness of their present experience emotionally, physically, and mentally. The client also develops skills to tolerate a variety of emotional states and cope with day to day symptoms such as anxiety, nightmares, or intrusive thoughts/memories about the trauma. Clients with an extensive trauma history may take months to prepare for trauma processing. On the other hand, clients who have had previous talk therapy and have coping skills to manage their day to day life may find more value in doing an EMDR intensive. 

The next phases are focused on targeting traumatic memories to reprocess the various aspects of the trauma. The client may see pictures, feel intense emotions, and experience body sensations that were happening at the time of the trauma. This process can be difficult and disturbing to the client, which is why not rushing the preparation phase for clients with complex PTSD is crucial. Bilateral stimulation to the brain is utilized through the use of eye movement, tactile stimulation, or alternating audio sounds. The bilateral stimulation is not painful and does not cause the client to go into a hypnotic trance. The client will be present during the reprocessing.   

EMDR allows the traumatic material to get unstuck and connect to more positive, adaptive material in the brain. At the end, memories that were highly distressing are no longer distressing to the client. Sometimes the change is very surprising because the client expected to always be bothered by the memory! By healing from these past wounding experiences, clients are able to respond to present situations in new ways. Sam no longer blows up every time there is a conflict at home. Susan is no longer having frequent pain attacks. John still has intrusive thoughts related to OCD, but he is able to dismiss them instead of giving into compulsions.    

How do you get trained in EMDR therapy?

If you are interested in learning more about EMDR therapy, you can visit www.emdria.org. This is the website for EMDRIA, the EMDR International Association. Therapists who have been trained in EMDR through a training approved by EMDRIA have completed six days of training and 10 hours of consultation. Training in EMDR therapy is an experiential process. The therapist has to perform EMDR on others and receive it themselves in the client role. Those who have been certified in EMDR have completed an additional 12 hours of advanced training along with an additional 20 hours of consultation with an EMDR consultant. An EMDR consultant has gone through additional hours and has had their consulting supervised by another consultant.    

I was initially trained in EMDR in 2013, pursued certification, and became a consultant in 2019. Over the years, I have been able to help clients suffering from PTSD, recent traumatic experiences, anxiety, phobias, panic attacks, OCD, depression, and dissociation to name a few. I have also started providing intensive therapy in EMDR for individuals who are looking to heal faster in a shorter amount of time. 

Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP of By The Well Counseling is a Licensed Professional Counselor who specializes in helping clients with trauma, anxiety and OCD get to a deeper level of healing through EMDR via individual and intensive therapy sessions. Carrie is the host of the Hope for Anxiety and OCD podcast, which is a welcome place for struggling Christians to reduce shame, increase hope, and develop healthier connections with God and others.

How Do You Know If Your Childhood is Affecting Your Adulthood?

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Counseling.

How do you know if your childhood is negatively affecting your adulthood? You don’t want to be a victim to what happened to you as a child and blame everything on your parents, but you still feel that childhood experiences may be holding you back. If you have worked hard to avoid thinking about the difficult things that have happened to you, you may believe you have put the past behind you. After all, you made it through the past fires and they aren’t burning anymore. You’ve moved out of mom’s house. However, things still aren’t going the way you hoped they would. Here are four indicators that your childhood may be affecting your adulthood. 

  1. Your intimate relationships follow a negative pattern you can’t seem to escape.
     If you’ve dated several versions of the same guy with a different name who is all wrong for you, you know what I am talking about. You may find yourself responding to others the way mom or dad responded to each other. Typically, people end up in a romantic partnership with someone who treats them very similarly to how they were treated as a child or a partner who is on the opposite end of the continuum. For example, if you were raised by an emotionally neglectful parent, you will most likely have an emotionally absent partner or one who is emotionally dependent on you in an unhealthy way. You will gravitate towards someone who treats you how you believe you deserve to be treated. You may even push away healthy people because you don’t believe you deserve the love they have to give to you. The healthier you are, the healthier people you will attract into your life. The reverse is also true.
  2. You have intense emotional reactions that don’t match the present situations.
    If you react to a situation with an emotional level of 8 when the situation calls for a 3, you might be reacting out of trauma. Understand that your brain is constantly linking situations together in order to protect you. When you  experience something similar to when the unsafe event happened, the emotions and body sensations connected to that memory flood in faster than you know what hit you. This can happen without a specific picture or memory coming to mind. You may not even be aware of what triggered the emotional reaction or why. If you have experienced trauma, you might say, “I feel crazy.” Often, an immense amount of guilt and shame follows these emotional outbursts. You feel like you should be more in control of your emotional responses and have tried to change, but the same things still keep happening.
  3. You can’t stop thinking about your childhood or you can’t remember it at all.
    These are two extremes that can happen as a result of trauma. You may have frequent flashbacks of the difficulties that happened in childhood or frequent nightmares. These are classic symptoms of PTSD. On the other hand, you may have difficulty remembering anything before a certain point in your life such as age 10. Not remembering large periods of your childhood is a symptom of dissociation. Dissociation happens when what you experience in the present is too much for your nervous system to bear, so you have to disconnect from it. This can happen without conscious awareness. If you lose large periods of time in the present where you “zone out,” this can also be a symptom of dissociation.
  4. You don’t feel fully adult.
    You can point to many of the adult things you do such as working full time or attending college, and raising children. However, you don’t feel it internally. You regularly encounter situations in which you feel like a child: helpless, lost, and alone. You may know mentally that you can leave your job, but emotionally, you feel stuck. You may know that you can say no or set a boundary, but when you try, your voice is shaky. 

The good news is there is hope.
If you believe that your childhood is affecting your adulthood, therapy can help. Learning new ways of coping, relating to others, and processing trauma can get you to a place where the past is truly in the past. When you are no longer haunted by the experiences in your childhood, you can progress forward into a more healthy adulthood.   

Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP of By The Well Counseling is a Licensed Professional Counselor who specializes in helping clients with trauma, anxiety and OCD get to a deeper level of healing through EMDR via online counseling across Tennessee and in person intensive therapy sessions. Carrie is the host of the Hope for Anxiety and OCD podcast, which is a welcome place for struggling Christians to reduce shame, increase hope, and develop healthier connections with God and others.