Rebecca Saunders (00:03.864)
Hello and welcome to the EMDR Doctor podcast.
This is a podcast for clients where I share and explore information about all things EMDR. My name is Dr. Caroline Lloyd. I'm a mental health GP and an EMDR practitioner. And my goal is to demystify EMDR or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing to help you on your EMDR journey. EMDR is a powerful therapy which helps to reduce the distress from difficult memories. And my goal is to make it accessible to everyone.
hope you enjoy this episode. Hello and welcome back to the EMDR Doctor podcast. This week I want to talk to you about something that is not a very popular topic with clients, preparation. Now I can hear you groaning from where I'm sitting so and I fully agree with you prep is something that we don't always love. I'm thinking about meal prep or painting the walls prep. It always feels like hard work.
before you can do the creative side of things. much like painting an unprepared wall, if we go ahead with EMDR without the prep, then the paint might not stick. And some walls only need a quick wash down while others will need a more thorough preparation. So like this analogy, some people only need a tiny bit of prep. Other people will need more extensive sessions. Otherwise, EMDR might not go the way that we want it to.
Now I am naturally quite an impatient person. I love the results that EMDR processing brings, but I have learned to be a little bit more thorough with the prep so that we can all relax knowing that the process will be smooth. So what exactly do I mean by preparation? So phase two is resourcing and preparation. And we do this before the phase four memory processing. Phase two is one.
Rebecca Saunders (01:58.35)
of the eight phases of EMDR. So when we do phase two, we are actually doing one part of the EMDR process. In the memory processing phase, we're gonna do some big work with delving into painful memories and we want to make sure that you are ready to tackle them, you have enough capacity to cope with the pain of facing up to those memories even briefly and be able to stick with it just long enough to shift it.
So we don't want people to be overwhelmed with a deluge of emotion. We have to establish ways to titrate it, to let it go a little bit at a time and to be able to tolerate that. So for some people, the issue is to not be flooded with the emotion. But for other people, the concern is being able to access the emotion at all. Sometimes we push the memories so far down that we can't reach them in order to process them.
or we live in our head or our thoughts too much as the emotions are too big, too out of control, or we fear that they may be too big or too out of control. So we don't allow the emotions just to be there at all. And this is going to be a problem in processing because you do need to be able to feel it, to heal it as they say. So if we've shoved those emotions too far down, then we may have to do some work to be able to feel them a little bit.
in a titrated way so that we can process effectively. So if we process a memory without allowing ourselves to feel any emotion, it's unlikely that the EMDR will have the desired results. So to carry on the paint analogy, if we've wrapped our wall in plastic, the paint won't be able to stick to that and we won't get a good result.
So another aspect of preparation is that we also need to know that you're able to access your body. And by that, I mean to be able to notice a little bit about how your body is feeling. And why are we doing that? I hear you ask. Surely memories are in the brain. Well, yes, they are, but the body is a major part of the memory.
Rebecca Saunders (04:11.64)
For some people, their body was a horrendous place to be in when that memory was created. And they've spent a lot of energy over the past years in trying to ignore and trying to distance from the body as much as possible. it can be very hard to notice body sensations. And we need to establish a little bit of connection before we start the EMDR. So we have to be able to access the memory.
We have to be able to access the emotion and the body in a just enough kind of a way in order to start processing. I often find that clients who have done lots of work with a talk therapist or who have done say a DBT course and they use those skills that they learned there or they've done some body work like trauma informed yoga or some work with a trauma informed exercise physiologist, for example.
So those people are really ready and really all prepped for EMDR and then they are able to able to process very readily. So even though I can confess to being very biased and I do think that EMDR is the best therapy every time for everybody, I also have a great regard and a respect for other therapies and I think that the combination of other therapies
either before EMDR or in conjunction with EMDR can be a really powerful strategy to use. So that is some of the reasons that we need to do the preparation. But what do we actually do in that phase? So your therapist will likely make sure that you have a way of calming yourself, like being able to do some grounding exercises, maybe the calm place activity and a way of putting your difficult memories away.
So we often use some sort of container exercise for that. So they're the two most basic exercises that every EMDR practitioner will use. So they're taught in the basic training and all EMDR practitioners use them very frequently. But others may use some other methods of recognizing and enhancing your personal strengths, maybe by noticing and paying attention to the good things that you already do in your life.
Rebecca Saunders (06:31.414)
And other therapists will use some imagination exercises, which are often a big part of my work to help you feel more protected, more loved, more in control, or more of whatever quality it is that you feel that you need more of. And this is really beautiful work. And this could be pretty quick at helping you feel better about yourself, even within the first one or two sessions of seeing your EMDR therapist. And if we aren't ready,
to do the phase four work with the classic EMDR processing of difficult memories, then we can certainly utilize some other techniques to help with the distress, like four blinks or flash, or we can work with tiny fragments of the memory to just gradually approach it with care. And this can be a nice way to prepare for the classic EMDR processing sessions.
So another aspect of preparation is the relationship between the client and therapist. So in my practice, I've often found that as we get to know each other, there's more trust built up, more positive regard, and this affects the EMDR processing in a good way. So we're both able to relax more. And so therefore the processing is deeper and more thorough and it's easier in some ways. And we get into the flow of the processing and we
get further with each session and this is a really joyful and lovely thing to be a part of. So while we can't really shortcut this trust process, for some people allowing enough time for this to unfold and for this to develop just organically is really important and really not to be hurried.
Rebecca Saunders (08:21.932)
And the last aspect of preparation that I want to talk about today is the information about EMDR and how the process works. And this is the exact reason that I've created this podcast so that you can get some pre -therapy info so that you can understand the whole thing in a bit more detail and be more prepared for your journey with your therapist. So I really hope that this is helpful to you.
And please feel free to contact me with any questions or reach out via my social media, EMDR Doctor Facebook or Instagram accounts or my website, EMDRDoctor .com .au. So I hope you have a great week. I hope this has been helpful to you. Until next time, bye for now.
