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. I hope you enjoy this episode. Hello and welcome back to the EMDR Doctor podcast. I'm coming to
you from Wurundjeri land and I'd like to pay my respects to the Elders past, present and emerging. So you'll be glad to know that this episode is not about Christmas. I did consider doing a Christmas podcast, but EMDR doesn't really have a seasonality about it. So I kind of abandoned that idea. And also we are about to be bombarded with Christmas content and I don't really want to be part of that frenzy this year.
Even though mental health and Christmas can be very interwoven. So today I'm going to be talking about one of the most common fears around EMDR. Am I doing it wrong?
But before I get started with my topic today, I want to let you know about a very new idea that I have been developing recently. This idea has come about as a result of a question that I'm asked several times a week. Most of my Cabrini clients, when they go home, they ask me if they can continue their work with me as an outpatient. And it's a little bit heartbreaking for me to say to them that my private practice is full and I can't take on new clients.
Rebecca Saunders (01:52.054)
I haven't been taking new clients now for probably at least a year. But I have now worked out a way to do just that, to be able to continue working with my clients with a membership. So the membership will include a monthly EMDR session with me online.
in a group of clients who have all experienced EMDR sessions with me already. So they may have worked with me as an inpatient or maybe doing one of my EMDR intensives as an outpatient. So this is going to be a cohort of women who already have the hang of doing EMDR and who want to continue their journey with me. So
If this applies to you, please head over to my website to the membership page and there will be more details there. And that's kind of a, you know, it's a bit of an emerging offering. So just keep an eye on the page and there'll be more details to come. So with the end of the calendar year coming, it might be a great way if you are at the Medicare threshold to utilise the best benefits of being at the medical.
Medicare threshold and using those benefits before it resets on the 1st of January. So if you don't get in before then, then the cost of the sessions will contribute towards your Medicare threshold next year, of course. So at the end of the year, everyone's benefiting from reaching the threshold, which is this wonderful Medicare initiative for those who spend a lot of money on health care for the year. So it's great to be able to utilise that.
So this membership will be a way to have a monthly group online EMDR session and every month I'll be releasing a new resource to help you with some general mental health skills. So all the details will be on my website, emdrdoctor.com.au on the membership page or feel free to reach out to me via my email admin at therapynest.com.au and I can answer any questions that you may have.
Rebecca Saunders (04:03.402)
So today I thought I would talk a little bit about one of the common fears that I come across, especially with people new to EMDR. So there's often a little bit of stage fright or sometimes some performance anxiety about EMDR until we can kind of get into the swing of it. It's really common for me to hear that question, am I doing it right? And I can answer you right now. Yes, you are doing it fine.
There is actually no doing it wrong and everyone is different with how they process. So for some people, the process is mainly intellectual with a little bit of emotion thrown in. For some, it's highly emotional with a little bit of thinking thrown in. Some people, it's all about the body. Some people whiz from this memory to that one in very broad.
brushstrokes and others stick very closely to the starting point, to the starting memory, and they explore that in miniscule detail. So there are about 50 million right ways to do EMDR. But there are some commonalities. Very, very often, the first time we do EMDR, there will be a couple of sets of eye movements just getting into the swing of things.
So this is where people often express their concerns or worries about doing EMDR and that is fabulous. So that might look like the client expressing these thoughts of, this won't work for me, I can't do this, I'm hopeless, I have to get this right, this just looks like hocus pocus and lots of other beliefs or concerns. And at that moment, when these concerns come up, we just need to let it be there.
We just need to notice what is coming up. Notice the worry or the desire to do it the best or the desire to please the therapist or the desire to run out of the room or, you know, to eat a Tim Jam. So sometimes we just need to notice a little bit about the process, how weird it feels to be looking at this pointer going back and forth, thinking about memories or how it feels for the eyes to move back and forth.
Rebecca Saunders (06:21.378)
how to get into your head and notice the memories as it is a transition out of the room, being in the room with a therapist and into your head, into the memory, and that's okay. We just notice the transition and then we get into the groove of it. Some people get worried that during the session, when we get into the body of the session, some people get worried that they are experiencing too much emotion.
And this might come about as a result of having grown up in a family or a culture that has decided that emotion is intolerable and must be suppressed or ignored or felt only as body symptoms. Sometimes that concept of I'm feeling too much emotion comes about as a result of having been overwhelmed in the past by emotion and fearing that that emotion will be unmanageable.
or overwhelming and that they might actually die from it. Now I do believe that I can say that no one died from crying too much and that much of the pain that is felt with the excess of the emotion, the pain actually comes from the resisting of it. So many times in EMDR, if we just allow that fear or pain or sorrow or anger
or whatever it is, if we allow it to just be there and to just notice it, then it reaches a peak in usually less than a minute and then it ebbs away. So your therapist will support you and will encourage you to just notice the emotion and keep going and let it be there until it reaches its natural peak and then it subsides. And then the emotion is done with and gone.
That particular emotion having been worked through in the EMDR session in relation to that particular memory does not need to come back. It's discharged itself. It doesn't now need to be avoided or suppressed or rationalized away because it's been felt, it's been processed and it is gone. So I'll just speak a little bit about too much memory here.
Rebecca Saunders (08:45.762)
So sometimes too much emotion can come with too many memories. So this can happen with flooding and your EMDR therapist will know if that's happening and they will help you stop that process and titrate the memory and just restrict it back to what is manageable. So your EMDR therapist will have ways and means and techniques that can help you if
If we open the gates too far and let too many memories in, your therapist will help you with that. So on the flip side of too much emotion is too little emotion. So some people get worried that they're experiencing too little emotion. But perhaps for them, for that person, that individual, that emotion's been stored in their body and is felt as bodily sensations.
So maybe the nausea that they've been feeling in their stomach or the pain in the shoulders or the tightness in the jaw or however it's expressing itself, that will be worked through during the EMDR session. if something just like I've just spoken about with emotion, with bodily sensations, if something's coming up, being noticed and worked through, then the EMDR is working. And if there is no emotion,
and no somatic or body sensations, then that's okay too. And we work through the memory as pictures or fragments of pictures. It's all very individual and very normal and all is okay. It is really, really rare for me to come across someone who doesn't feel or notice anything with regards to a memory. And even when that happens, it doesn't mean that the person is doing anything wrong or bad.
or that EMDR isn't working. It just means that we've been given some information about that person's processing style, that we may need to look at dissociation or another defense mechanism and then figure things out from there. And it is not wrong to have dissociation. And if that's you in an EMDR session, it's not wrong, it's not bad. You are doing everything right and there's a reason for the dissociation.
Rebecca Saunders (11:11.638)
And I'll talk about dissociation in another podcast episode. I think I have promised that before, so maybe I'll get to it sooner rather than later. So I might do an episode on dissociation next week. So in fact, dissociation is an amazing thing that the brain does, and it might be the only way that a person can do EMTR with a bit of dissociation on board. So it's all just information, and it helps us work out the way forward. You are not doing anything wrong.
So there is always a way forward. You can't do EMDR wrong. It is an intensely personal and individual experience. And EMDR therapists are very flexible with adjusting to people's individual ways of processing within this framework of an EMDR session. So an EMDR session is, you know, it has a fairly tight framework. So we set the memory up in a certain way.
We do the process for a certain amount of time and then we wrap it up in a certain way. So, and I've talked about that with the eight phases of EMDR in one of my very early podcast episodes. So if you're curious about that or if you don't know what I'm talking about when I talk about eight phases of EMDR, perhaps go back and have a little listen to, yeah, I think it was one of my very early ones, maybe episode one or two or three.
So have a bit of a listen to that. So there's quite a tight framework that we use, but within that framework, everyone's really individual and you can't do it wrong. So I hope this has been interesting or helpful for you. I will chat to you again next week. Have a great week. Bye for now.
