Rebecca Saunders (00:03.855)
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. Welcome back to the EMDR Doctor podcast. I'd like to pay my
respects to the elders past, present and emerging of the Wurundjeri lands upon which I live and work. And the lands upon which I live are currently quite hot tonight. It's a hot summer night in Melbourne and as a result all the cicadas are out in force. So they're frantically chirping away in the background so I hope that they're not going to be too much of a distraction for you when you listen to this podcast.
So today I'm widening my scope a little bit in the spirit of a holistic approach to healing. Just because I am an EMDR therapist, it doesn't mean that I am opposed to other therapies. In fact, when I first trained CBT was my preferred approach. I think mainly because as a new therapist, I needed a kind of a firm framework to be able to organize my thoughts and give myself a hanger on which to shape my sessions.
And as I grew more comfortable in the therapeutic role, I started to explore other therapies. And while I was doing my placement at Family Life in Frankston during my course, my amazing supervisor suggested EMDR. So I just went and did the training and opened up a whole new world. So my early training was in CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy.
Rebecca Saunders (02:07.854)
And CBT is more of a thinking or top-down therapy, which helps with understanding trauma. I personally don't see it as a trauma therapy as it doesn't release the trauma. And the work is very hard to do. It's like imposing a whole new thought pattern on top of the feelings and the body symptoms. And for some people, this feels a bit like gaslighting yourself, trying to convince myself that I am
worthy or powerful or lovable, whatever it may be, when I feel so worthless, powerless and full of shame and trying to convince myself is really an uphill battle and it just feels like a lie sometimes. But the benefit of CBT is that people who have done a lot of CBT type therapy
They do have an idea of where they want their thoughts to be at. They have the map, so to speak, of the journey. And they know logically where they want their thoughts or beliefs to end up. So they want to end up believing, I'm worthy, I have power in my life, I'm a lovable person, that sort of thing. So it is a bonus if you already have the plan or the map. It does mean that EMDR can work a little bit more.
more quickly and more easily and it can connect those dots with a lot more ease. And CBT has had a few iterations over the years and now there are what are referred to as the third wave CBT styles and this is more about the process of the thoughts instead of the content. So for example, mindfulness, which is a third wave CBT therapy focuses on
becoming aware of the thoughts and accepting them rather than pushing them away. Act or mindfulness can be helpful in grounding, in staying present, in becoming used to just letting the thoughts be present. And that is a skill that is useful within the EMDR process as well.
Rebecca Saunders (04:20.869)
There's some mindfulness techniques like body scanning or breathing exercises can help a person stay in the present moment whilst undergoing the emotional intensity of an EMDR session. It can make it easier to process difficult memories without becoming overwhelmed if people have practiced a little bit of mindfulness. However, I just want to add a little clause here. Sometimes with intense trauma,
Practicing mindfulness or act in the community or outside of the therapy room can be just too hard. If I experienced awful trauma, especially during childhood, I may have spent my life trying to not think about the trauma, trying to run from it, to block it out, to obliterate it with lots of different methods, maybe sometimes substances or dissociation or overworking hyper-focus.
all of these things are strategies to avoid the awful fear or the terror or the disgust or the shame or whatever it may be that's associated with those memories. So asking me to just sit and just notice all of that avalanche of emotions associated with the trauma is just too hard and actually quite distressing and not trauma-informed.
So mindfulness, whilst great in some situations, can be just awful in others. So I'm never gonna push someone towards mindfulness, just the same as I wouldn't push someone towards meditation, for example, because it's a little bit similar, just forcing your body to sit still and noticing where your thoughts are at can be very, very challenging. So some people with a lot of trauma,
And also to be fair, a lot of people in the normal population who haven't had a lot of trauma do find meditation very difficult. So another third wave CBT therapy is DBT, dialectical behavior therapy. And DBT is all about managing the emotions, having a plan to work on grounding or staying present, not allowing the catastrophizing to take over.
Rebecca Saunders (06:41.253)
having a strategy to kind of talk yourself down, so to speak. So if you can master some of the DBT exercises, they really do help with avoiding the spiralling that goes with triggers or maybe interacting with difficult family members. So DBT can be really helpful to cope with the emotional effects of the trauma, but it does not heal the trauma. It can work really well hand in hand with EMDR.
in that it gives some great life skills to cope with the trauma and then EMDR can actually resolve the trauma. So they're very complimentary. Another different type of therapy is psychodynamic psychotherapy and this is also a really great initial therapy. So psychodynamic psychotherapy is all about understanding ourselves and how we got to where we are.
the history behind the symptoms and the family dynamics that intrude on us even when our family is no longer surrounding us. Recognising patterns of behaviour, recognising the influence of our early life on our current life. So that's also a great first part of the journey to understand the history, understand the dynamics of the current situation, how it all relates to family wounds or family systems.
And if people haven't done this initial work, sometimes if we are doing EMDR, we need to pause and do some psychoeducation about the roles in families, the responsibilities, the wounds, the needs of children in early life. All of that sort of information can be really helpful and great psychoeducation to help facilitate processing in EMDR. So psychotherapy can be a really great
Prelude to EMDR, can help get people ready for EMDR in that they have a much greater understanding. They don't have to kind of work through all of those layers of understanding within the EMDR session. So art therapy is completely different and it's a really popular and a wonderful way to communicate and work through lots of aspects of trauma. And I have clients who pair their EMDR sessions
Rebecca Saunders (09:06.991)
with an art therapy session afterwards to help to integrate the new learnings or explore the positive cognitions that we end up with at the end of an EMDR session. Or art therapy can help release the emotions that were stirred up within the session. Trauma often affects people on a deep emotional level that might be hard to articulate with language. So speaking about trauma involves a different
part of the brain to art or creative work. So art therapy allows individuals to access and express their feelings and experiences in a symbolic and nonverbal way. So when paired with EMDR, which facilitates the emotional and the memory processing, art therapy can help the client integrate and make sense of the reprocessed material in a more embodied and holistic manner.
And this creative process can also promote a sense of empowerment and self-expression and helps clients regain control over their narrative. Sometimes people have a really strong visual aspect to memories. And by the end of the session, the original picture of the traumatic event has been replaced with a lighter, positive, colorful representation of themselves or of the event.
And exploring this visual in the art therapy can help the new positive aspect of the memory embed and become more firm and grounded and real and really help to integrate it into people's lives and futures. At Cabrini, the inpatient unit where I work, the art therapy sessions are always really popular. And the idea is to facilitate healing.
not to make a masterpiece. Sometimes people need to kind of lose sight of wanting to make a nice picture and actually just explore their inner world rather than making a piece of art. So even just exploring the colors or the shapes or the themes or the links is a really powerful adjunct to the other therapies that we offer.
Rebecca Saunders (11:27.764)
And at Cabrini, we also have a wonderful experienced exercise physiologist who works with trauma-informed movement. And moving the body or exploring ways to move either gently or vigorously in a safe way, in a safe environment is a truly wonderful adjunct therapy. So the body holds a lot of tension. It holds memories. It holds protections.
And exploring these can be such a marvelous part of therapy and it can create a sense of safety and control and power, which is so integral to healing holistically. So body-based therapies are relatively new. The somatic therapies like trauma-informed yoga, breath work, somatic experiencing, these are all awesome therapies, especially for people who need help to be able to
be in their body safely. So for example if my body was a very unsafe place to be when I was young I might be too afraid to notice what is happening in my body and somatic therapies can be really great to start to feel present and safe and grounded in my body. This can be really really helpful either before starting EMDR therapy or during the process or sometimes
as self-care after the session. And now I'll just mention briefly about parts work. So parts work, that term kind of covers a few different therapies. Gestalt therapy, schema therapy, IFS, which stands for internal family systems and ego state therapy are probably the main ones. So there are quite a few differences between these therapies.
but they all involve the concept that we as individuals all have parts. So we are not one uniform thing that thinks the same thing all the time and feels the same thing all the time. Like I might have a part of me that on Friday night wants to go out and go to that party. And another part that really does prefer to stay on the couch. And speaking personally, I have a 15 year old
Rebecca Saunders (13:51.606)
quite feisty part that comes out perhaps in meetings when I'm confronted with sexism or discrimination. My 15 year old can come out swinging so to speak, not actually swinging. And many people have very hurt parts and they are sometimes hidden by protector parts.
So when we're doing an EMDR session and if we get a little bit stuck along the way, often EMDR therapists and myself included, we use a little bit of parts work to help the process along. So this is not actually pure EMDR, but it's an adaptation that many, many EMDR therapists use and it can be really, really helpful. So today I haven't done a really deep dive into parts work just due to time constraints today.
but it is a great combination with EMDR and many EMDR therapists have had some sort of parts where training and this can kind of dovetail in with the trauma processing within a session.
So I hope today that I've given you a little bit of an idea about how EMDR can be complemented by and can weave in with other therapies. No therapy can be a one-stop shop, even EMDR. And, you know, I am a little bit shocked to hear myself say that because I am very firmly in the EMDR camp. But they are all really useful and no therapy is wasted time.
They all have something to offer. We can always learn something about ourselves from whatever therapy we participate in. And EMDR can be a powerful complement to other approaches that address cognitive or historical or family systems aspects or body-based physical therapies or creative therapies. I didn't even mention music therapy anyway.
Rebecca Saunders (15:54.228)
I'll have to talk about that another day. So all of these therapies can help healing be more integrated and make recovery from trauma quicker and easier, which is what we all want. So if EMDR doesn't sound right for you just now, then I would encourage you to explore some other therapies and just see what resonates for you at this moment in your journey.
So all the very best with whatever modality you choose right now. I hope this has been helpful. Take care and I look forward to talking to you next week. Bye for now.
