Using EMDR Therapy to Heal Your Past: Interview with Creator Francine Shapiro
Francine Shapiro, Ph.D, first discovered and developed EMDR therapy (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) in 1987 to help people process traumatic memories. Today, EMDR is recognized by the US Department of Defense and the American Psychiatric Association as an effective treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Traumatic memories come in many types. While some may involve violence or physical abuse, others involve everyday life experiences, such as relationship problems or unemployment, according to Shapiro in her recently published book, Getting Past Your Past: Take...
Read MoreEMDR Can Build Self Esteem Faster than Talk Therapy
Self Esteem generally gets established based on a) Feedback from the people around us–especially during childhood, and b) How much sense of mastery in our world we develop. When feedback from parents, siblings, peers, teachers, etc is shaming, children often don’t develop good self-esteem. Children take feedback that is punishing, contemptuous, insulting, undermining, teasing, mean, neglectful, unappreciating, bullying, abusive and so on as information that they are not worth much. When this is the source of low self-esteem, EMDR can often help, because each of these...
Read MoreRape or Childhood Sexual Abuse and Feelings of Anxiety
Rape or Childhood Sexual Abuse and Feelings of Anxiety In my clinical practice I see many women presenting with symptoms of Anxiety: Excessive anxiety and worry Restlessness Fatigue Difficulty Concentrating Irritability Muscle Tension Sleep Disturbance Distress or Impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning. This Anxiety is due unprocessed sexual trauma stored in your midbrain as unconscious material. This unconscious material can be easily triggered and set in motion as high survival anxiety and panic attacks. When an event triggers a neuronal connection...
Read MoreWhy Time Doesn't Heal All Wounds
If we cut ourselves, unless there is an obstacle, we tend to heal. If we remove the block, the body goes back to healing. That’s why we’re willing to let ourselves be cut open during surgery. We expect incisions to heal. The brain is a part of the body. In addition to the millions of memory networks just described, we all have hardwired into our brains a mechanism – an information processing system – for healing. It is geared to take any sort of emotional turmoil to a level of mental health or what is called a level of adaptive resolution. This means a resolution that includes the...
Read MoreEMDR: Trauma & the Brain
WHAT IS TRAUMA? There are large “T” traumas such as rape, war, assault, sexual, physical & emotional abuse, accidents (or witnessing one), natural disasters, divorce, chronic/acute illness, etc and there are small “t” traumas such as betrayal, mild forms of bullying or negative feedback, lack of proper emotional support as a child, etc. Events happen to you that you are unable to process and you are left feeling overwhelmed, with symptoms that just won’t go away, that’s also considered a trauma response. Memories are stored in the brain and symptoms can also be experienced...
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