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 everyone. I'm Dr Caroline Lloyd and welcome back to the EMDR doctor.
podcast. We are well into February now and very soon I will be working with a new cohort of clients for my Heal Your Past course, which I'm so looking forward to. This group will in about six weeks time have covered off on six of their most upsetting memories. So if you would like to be part of that group and get those results, just go to my website emdrdoctor.com.au forward slash heal. That's H E A L.
and start that healing journey for yourself. You can do it. Anyone can do the work to feel better, move forward and get unstuck. So I would encourage you not to wait. The sooner you start doing the work, the sooner you start seeing the benefits and improving your relationships, sleeping better, feeling your mood lift, reducing the rumination, whatever it is that the trauma or the difficulty has left you with. So today I'm going to be talking about one of the classics about PTSD.
which is much more common than we all realise and not just reserved for the armed services or for frontline workers. Certainly those groups have more than their fair share of PTSD, but PTSD can certainly be a result of other traumas. Commonly I see it with medical trauma. So because I'm a GP, people talk to me a lot about their medical trauma and the operations they've had, their journey through cancer, their perinatal experience.
Rebecca Saunders (02:12.206)
sometimes medical intervention as a child. In fact, from my experience, there are a couple of procedures that should be banned before the age of 15, like something called the MCU, which is, I won't go into the details, but it's an awful experience for kids who have repeated urinary tract infections and they have to have a series of x-rays. I won't go into the details, but I have actually seen quite a few women who have PTSD.
from that investigation and it has affected their whole lives up until when they get some EMDR to resolve that memory. So I've gone off on a bit of a rant but to get back on track let's explain PTSD a little bit more. PTSD is a trilogy of symptoms arising from a traumatic experience. These three symptoms include hypervigilance, re-experiencing of the trauma and avoidance. Let's break those down a little bit more.
So hypervigilance is that sense of being on edge, being tense, stressed, anxious, always on the lookout. It can manifest as general anxiety or what used to be called a nervous disposition. One of the classic signs is someone who always has to sit in the corner or at the wall of the restaurant facing the door, or someone who needs a view of the whole classroom, for example.
This is a protective mechanism because if we can see exactly who is coming in and out of a room, then we can more fully assess for danger and risk. And if we have our back against the wall, then we can more easily defend ourselves. Sometimes you see this in kids who are traumatized or have PTSD from their experiences. They love to sit at the back of the room because of their hypervigilance and being told to sit at the front and look at the teacher can be almost impossibly anxiety provoking.
And then they get in trouble for constantly turning around to see if there's someone who is about to whack them from behind. Hypervigilance can also look like controlling or over planning. If I plan every step of this holiday, then less will go wrong. If I make someone do what I ask them to do, then we may avoid a disaster. If I make a list of everything that I won't forget something and get a belting. If I can be perfect or control everything,
Rebecca Saunders (04:40.258)
then I won't have to suffer the dire consequences. Of course, the consequences are not so explicit. We often don't realize the trauma behind that behavior. But if we dig down into the reasons why people do these controlling actions, then we often find trauma, hypervigilance, and PTSD. Sometimes all this hypervigilance can go hand in hand with irritability.
It takes a lot of effort to always be on guard and we can get really short tempered if something gets in our way of trying to make sure that we are kept safe. So that's a little bit of a summary of hypervigilance. And what about re-experiencing? And this is bit of a technical term for flashbacks. Our brain reenacts the trauma and replays it either during the day in flashbacks that can seem incredibly real, like it's
The whole event is happening in the here and now. So flashbacks can be whole movie reenactments or they can just be intrusive single images like a still photo that can't seem to be erased. Flashbacks can be spontaneous or maybe they're related to particular triggers, maybe a noise or a smell or a color can transport us back in an instant to that scary situation we are trying to recover from.
And we do the same thing at night in our dreams when we reenact the trauma and turn it into a nightmare. The brain replays the trauma and warps it into new situations of fear and loss and threat. And then we wake up in panic, feeling like we're back there again. And then, of course, follows the sleep deprivation, sometimes even sleep phobia. If we're afraid of going to sleep because of the threat of nightmares, then we'll be chronically sleep deprived.
And this of course contributes to a vicious cycle of symptoms worsening with time. So just on a side note there, there are some helpful medications that reduce nightmares. So if this is something that's bothering you, please do go and see your GP and have a chat about what's available for you. In Australia at the moment, it is very hard to see a psychiatrist, but your GP may well have the knowledge and the experience to help you with some medications that might suit you. If they
Rebecca Saunders (07:04.066)
don't, they can then phone a psychiatry hotline that's available. So that's just a little handy hint for people in Australia who are listening. The last three of the main symptoms of PTSD is the avoidance. Sometimes what this looks like is avoiding certain family members because they remind us of the trauma. We may avoid driving or going to the doctor or certain smells.
we may be able to happily avoid certain things like an area of the city for many years. And then when it becomes necessary to go there, the anxiety and flashbacks can become unbearable and we get a panic attack or something similar. So sometimes people after they've experienced medical trauma, they get a little bit of an avoidance of going to hospital or going to the doctor and they can then possibly avoid that for some years until they really need to go to see the doctor for something and then
that becomes a really anxiety provoking experience. Sometimes we avoid being in our body. If our body was an unsafe place to be, we can totally avoid thinking about our body or experiencing anything in our body. And we can do that through dissociation. That's kind of getting into the complex PTSD arena. And sometimes
And sometimes our avoidance of everything means that we turn to unsafe coping habits like alcohol or drug use or overworking, being so busy with our work or our daily life, being compulsively busy that we don't stop even for a minute because if we stop then the thoughts or intrusive images or flashbacks may catch up with us and that can be intolerable.
Sometimes self-harm or eating disorders are a method of avoidance. If I'm hungry enough, then I can't think about what happened. The hunger blocks out the capacity to think. So once again, that's kind of tending towards the CPTSD arena, which I'll cover off on next week. So I'm not going to talk about CPTSD today. So it's important to remember that not everyone has the same set of symptoms. One person's PTSD can look a bit different to another person's symptoms.
Rebecca Saunders (09:21.654)
And if the symptoms have only been there for a short period, then we tend not to be firm about making the diagnosis as symptoms can ease up over the first few months after a traumatic incident. But if the symptoms have been present for six months or more, it's unlikely that PTSD will get better by itself without proper trauma treatment. And what's the best trauma treatment? Well, I guess you know what I'm about to say, but I will try and be fair about it.
So there are a few helpful therapies for PTSD. So Trauma-Focused CBT is one of them. Cognitive Processing Therapy is another. There is the dreaded Exposure Therapy, which is certainly effective, but it is exceedingly hard work. There's a high dropout from Exposure Therapy because it requires people to sit with their trauma for prolonged periods of time. And then there are the Somatic Therapies.
EMDR, brain spotting, somatic experiencing. So all trauma therapies that I know of will ask the person to go towards their traumatic memory in some way. None of them are pain free, so to speak. Some of them are more gentle than others. And EMDR does have the benefit of being a lot quicker than the other therapies. So the discomfort of having to be in the memory, of having to hold the memory forefront in our minds,
is less than other therapies. And many people at the end of the session are really impressed that they could do that, that they're really happy that they were brave enough to be present with it and come out standing. And I do tell people that the memory reprocessing is not as hard as going through the trauma was, that you survived the trauma and you will survive the therapy for the trauma.
And many EMDR therapists have a lot of strategies to help with the difficult parts and to keep you as safe and as calm as possible. And we can also like chunk down the memory into small pieces to work on it little bit by little bit if it's too overwhelming to go towards the event as a whole. So we have ways to keep you safe, ways to keep you regulated. And on the whole, there is that promise that you will be much better at the end of the session.
Rebecca Saunders (11:42.582)
I probably should rephrase that or I'll get into trouble with APRA as doctors in Australia are not allowed to advertise with a promise of results. So what I will say is that there is a lot of evidence that EMDR is very effective at reducing and eliminating symptoms of PTSD, including the three main symptoms that I've outlined of hypervigilance, re-experiencing and avoidance. So I would invite you to come and try it.
look up an EMDL therapist near you or come and do my online experience from wherever you are. So that's it for today. It has been a pretty heavy episode so I apologize for the seriousness of the content. Next week I'll be exploring and explaining CPTSD which is complex PTSD, complex post-traumatic stress disorder. Another light subject. In the meantime, have a great week, take good care, bye for now.
