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 to the EMDR Doctor podcast. I'm Dr Caroline Lloyd and today I'm talking about Beyond PTSD, EMDR for other mental health conditions. And I want to talk about this today because I just happened to have a conversation last week with someone that I had worked with in the past, possibly about a year ago, for six sessions for PTSD and
I ran into this person and they reported to me that their PTSD symptoms had disappeared, which was fantastic news. So they were thrilled with that, but the depression was still there. So they were thinking about changing medications and thinking about ways to address their depression in that sort of more traditional medical model way. And they hadn't come back to see me.
because their assumption was that EMDR was just good for PTSD. Now EMDR is very famous for treating PTSD. The early trials with EMDR were all about combat veterans with PTSD. But over the last 30 years, we have actually expanded our scope and we've realised that EMDR is incredibly useful for a huge range of issues.
Rebecca Saunders (01:59.904)
EMDR is a memory based therapy, which means that we work on a memory which is distressing and using EMDR, we can remove the distress from that memory. We can unhook it from the emotions and then we can figure out what we need to learn about ourselves in regards to that memory. So using the PTSD example, if we take a memory of say, for example, an assault as an adult and we take
we use EMDR and we take all the fear and the fright and the terror away, then we can unlearn whatever it was that we learned from that event. For example, we may have learned that I'm weak or something similar. It could be the world is unsafe or I failed. Whatever that learning is, we can unlearn that and learn something better about ourselves, more adaptive. So we can learn then maybe I can cope.
I'm strong enough. I survived. Or maybe it's around I can recognise an unsafe person. I can do my best to keep myself safe. Something along those lines. So the important thing to take away from that is that when we treat the emotion associated with that bad memory, then we can learn something better about ourselves. So if we move away from the PTSD examples and we look, say, at depression,
which is what it was for this person that I, this previous client that I ran into, then we're looking for the memories that were instrumental in causing the depression. And they may be very clear. So they may be quite obvious, loss of a parent or bullying, for example. And we can process those memories. And once we get to a critical mass of processing, we clear enough of the memories that cause the depression.
then we will find that that depression just lifts or becomes much easier to treat or the episode of depression lasts a shorter time or they're less deep or they're less consuming. They're easier to get yourself out of. And sometimes we can't immediately identify the big memories that cause the depression. So there might not be the big T traumas that are easily identifiable.
Rebecca Saunders (04:22.85)
So in the trauma world, there's a common explanation of trauma in being trauma of Big T and Little T traumas. So I'll just explain that briefly. In a nutshell, the Big T traumas are what you may see on the news. The car accidents, war, assaults, murders, bus crashes, et cetera. So they are obviously identifiable. Little T traumas.
are often what didn't happen as opposed to what did happen with the big T traumas. So little T traumas are often traumas of omission. What didn't happen might be the support I didn't get after the event, or it might be being left out of the biggest party of the year as a teenager, no one coming to my 18th birthday party, being alone in an empty house every afternoon after school for my whole primary school career. So there
their traumas of omission. So nobody would put these events on the news, but each of them represents a hugely damaging void of care or love or acceptance or validation. And what we might learn from these events are those negative cognitions of I'm unlovable, I'm bad, I'm alone, I'm worthless. And with depression, what we find
When we look underneath the symptoms and we look at the schema or the negative cognitions or in CBT therapy, they're called the negative core beliefs. What we may find are these very pervasive beliefs about ourselves, often that were developed when we were quite young. And how does this relate to EMDR? Well, with EMDR, we can target these beliefs and we can go looking for the small T traumas that caused them.
We can focus on those and we can process them out so that they are no longer distressing. And then we can learn something better about ourselves. And we may learn that we are not alone. We have support, that we are lovable, that we are valuable, that we are worthy. And certainly many other therapies aim to help people to learn these positive beliefs. This is not a new concept in therapy, but other therapies
Rebecca Saunders (06:49.698)
usually try and impose them from the top down or the outside in just by telling yourself repeatedly, yes, I have support. Yes, I'm a worthy person without resolving the traumas that cause them in the first place. So for example, CBT, whilst it can be very helpful, sometimes it feels to people like they are guest lighting themselves because they just, you know, just trying to tell yourself that you're a good person.
If you still have those old traumas hanging around sitting just below the surface, if you have those old traumas and you still have the distress from those old traumas, that new belief will just sound silly. It'll just sound unbelievable or out of range or like something that somebody else can have. But that's just not for me. One of my clients recently gave me the beautiful analogy of CBT being like being on a debating team.
and having to make the argument for a topic when you believe in the opposite viewpoint. So you can put forward a beautiful, elegant, persuasive argument for it. You just don't believe it. So with EMDR, what we do is take the distress out of those memories and it does that valuable work of releasing that trauma so that the positive connections can be made.
positive belief can be just that. It can be whole and sound and believable and it can sit deep within you and so that you know that I am worthy, I'm good, that was not my fault, whatever it may be that you need to install there. So that is a little bit of a summary about depression. So similarly to depression for anxiety,
we can look for the big T traumas. And if they're not obvious, we look for the small T traumas, or we follow the trail of the negative cognitions for anxiety, which may be around, I have to be perfect, or I'm responsible for everything, or the world is not safe, some of those cognitions, and we work from there. So we follow them back and the brain just has this
Rebecca Saunders (09:11.166)
amazing ability to find those memories that need resolving. And when we start an EMDR session, we might start with a memory that may not feel particularly distressing. But if we follow that negative cognition, the brain just goes to where it needs to go and resolves all of those little tiny small T traumas that are sitting just underneath the surface. Addiction responds really well to EMDR.
So I might do a whole episode on addiction a little bit later, but in a nutshell, many addictions are a response to the pain of trauma. People are looking to self -medicate their pain with alcohol or other drugs or shopping or eating or gambling, whatever the addictive behavior is. And once we use EMDR to work through those painful memories,
then we can start work on the addictive behaviors themselves. And EMDR is great for disconnecting the behavior from the pleasant sensation of the result of the behavior. Anyway, as I said, I might devote a whole episode to that in the future because that's, there's a lot more to dive into there. So other issues like eating disorders, OCD,
complex grief. Those sort of problems can be treated really successfully with EMDR2 and it can be used to enhance performance working on the beliefs of say for example sports people post injury they may need to work on some beliefs around my body is strong or say for someone in the public speaking arena
They may need to work on some beliefs around I deserve to be heard or I am valuable or I have something good to offer people. Might be success in business. We might look at working around some core beliefs of my services are valuable or just I am good enough for people struggling to commit to putting their services out there in public. Or maybe even my knowledge is valuable to others for someone with a new podcast.
Rebecca Saunders (11:36.512)
So I hope that's given you a little bit of a sense of how EMDR can be used outside the arena of PTSD. pretty much anything that causes distress. yes, I might just add this in too. So quite often with my clients, I work with recent traumas like divorce, and there's not going to be a diagnosis that goes with post divorce.
upset. But divorces have relational trauma and just the loss of the relationship, sometimes the actual trauma that is involved in, you know, threats or the settlement that comes after divorce or the the argy -bargy that goes around access to children, those sort of things are super traumatic and
I know from personal experience that it can take a very long time to get over that unless you have some decent help. And so for people who are going through divorce at the moment, just know that EMDR can be really, really helpful for those kind of traumas as well. And even though the situation is still there, it just helps you get over the upset of the situation much more quickly than if you just try and
put it behind you and just keep on carrying on. So I just wanted to put that in there because I know a lot of people going through a divorce at the moment and EMDR can be really, really helpful for that. And I hope if that's your situation that you can find some assistance with an EMDR therapist. So I hope that's helpful to you. Until next week, stay well. Bye for now.
