Hello and welcome back to the EMDR Doctor podcast. I'm Dr. Caroline Lloyd, and I have to say that tonight I am a little bit excited because I haven't been at work today. I've been busily packing to go away on holidays. Which is really exciting for me. I don't often go on holidays, and I've been having a really quite a busy time at work recently, so this is actually a really, I feel like it's a well deserved holiday.
And pretty exciting because this time next week, actually, probably by the time that you are listening to this podcast or watching on YouTube, I will be on the back of a camel in the middle of South Australia, and we'll be riding through the desert and camping out under the stars and watching all of the beautiful Milky way in that beautiful black desert sky.
So that's what I'm looking forward to at the moment. And I have to say, as I've gotten a little bit older holidays have started to become a little bit more about me. Again, I know that a lot of you will relate to that. When you are a bit younger and you have young kids, holidays are much more about the kids, and it's kind of more like just going away with your children, it's not so much a holiday for you. It's more of a fun time for the kids. It is still fun. But it's definitely not the holiday that you had when you were young and carefree. And I feel like right now I am coming back to that phase again, that my holidays are more for me and I can choose what to do.
So this time I've chosen to go away to ride on the back of a camel. So, many people have told me that I will regret that decision and that in a couple of days time I'll be walking like I've been injured. But anyway, it's gonna be fun and it will certainly be something a little bit new and a little bit of an experiment.
And what's life If you can't have a little bit of an experiment and do some things that you haven't done before? and that kind of brings me to my topic tonight, doing things we haven't done before. EMDR is a very different therapy, and it is a bit of a jump, a bit of an experiment to kind of jump into a memory and just see what's there, what it connects to. We sort of peel back the layers of the mind and just explore what's there.
Even though we set the EMDR memory up in a specific kind of a way from there on the therapy is just led by the person, the client who's having the therapy. We just follow their brain around and we just let it unfold and we just see what's there and there's a little bit of guidance from the therapist.
It is quite exciting sometimes to see where the brain goes. The brain has an immense capacity to heal, and if we just follow that brain where it needs to go, it will go to other memories or other incidents or other aspects of the memory that seem to be important that we may not have found if we just talked about it.
If I'd led the client, if I'd led you to where I thought you needed to go, then it would unfold in a different way than being so client led. So people talk about EMDR as being very formal or formulated, but it's just really the setup that is kind of that formal part of the EMDR. After that, it gets quite fluid, it gets quite client led.
It can even get quite creative. So sometimes when I'm working, I will bring in a creative aspect to my work, and sometimes this means that we use some, what we might call re-scripting aspects. So we might follow that memory to a particularly distressing part. And if that distressing part of the memory feels a little bit stuck, or if I feel that that person needs a little bit of help, what we might do is introduce some imagination aspects.
Now, sometimes we've nutted these out before we enter into the memory. And sometimes we just have a little vague sketch of what we might do. So, for example, I might use what we call attachment figures, which are like a wise figure or a strong figure or a nurturing figure. And if we get to a stuck point in the memory, then we might bring in the nurturing figure or the wise figure and just say, what did you need back then when that was happening? And this is just a really beautiful way to uncover. Part of the client's natural wisdom or natural nurturing instincts or natural protective instincts for themselves, they use their own imagination, and so it's them doing the work in a way that they would have liked to be rescued or would've liked to be advised, or would've liked to have been loved or nurtured at that time.
So being creative is just one way that we can get a little bit adventurous. With EMDR, we can also follow the memory back into the past. So sometimes if we sense that there are some resonances with some, some other themes from the past, we can actually kind of follow that memory back into the past. And that's another really creative way to kind of get the best out of a session with a client, we can really uncover what underlies the distress of that particular memory by finding the origin of the distress. And the earlier we go often the better results we have. So there are a couple of ways that we can be creative with EMDR.
So as I was getting ready for my adventure of a holiday today, I thought about a question that people often ask me about getting ready for their adventure of an EMDR session, which is how do I prepare? so this is very, very individual, and the answer won't be the same for for two different people, but sometimes we work on those imaginative resources, the wise figure, the loving figure, the protective figure.
And sometimes I don't. Sometimes I just do that on the fly. I like to hop in and work quite quickly with people because I think the sooner that we can get to the trauma and work on it, then the sooner that person will feel better. But what can you do to prepare for an EMDR session? Well, coming to meet your EMDR therapist for the first time, if you haven't met them before, then have a bit of a think about what's bothering you and what. Memories you think are very kind of predominant in your mind, what memories are kind of replaying for you quite often if you get flashbacks, what memories you flashback to.
Some people even do a little bit of a list doing the top 10 worst memories, which I think is a kind of a brutal exercise to do.
I did that for myself and I found that it was actually quite difficult. I really procrastinated on doing that job for a while because it felt too big. It felt too hard. So, I wouldn't encourage you to do that unless you feel that you can quite easily sit down and do that. This kind of information is what will be uncovered in your first couple of sessions with your EMDR therapist anyway.
So really there's no need to do homework before an EMDR session, but if you wanted to do some then I would probably advise you to have a look on YouTube, see if you can find a calm place exercise. I think I actually might have one on my YouTube channel, so, I probably should have gotten organized and really just advertised that.
But have a bit of a look and see if you can find a Calm place exercise. Some people call it a safe place exercise. It does have a little bit of a different flavor if it's a safe place, but either one, a calm place or a safe place exercise. And if you practice doing that, it takes just a few minutes a day.
If you practice doing that, then you will be more, what we call resourced more ready to do EMDR and. You'll be able to access that calmness in your day-to-day life, which is always a benefit. So you can do that exercise. Or any kind of meditation. Meditation's very hard. I find meditation virtually impossible.
I don't particularly like to just try and empty my mind. I much prefer some sort of creative visualization. So self hypnosis is another way to do that. If you look on YouTube, you'll find about a million self-hypnosis tracks. And what they do is they give a kind of a guided visualization. So they walk you through an exercise where you imagine a nice place to be.
That might be a beach scene, or it might be a garden scene. So at some stage I will get organized and record a self, self-hypnosis track to have on here for people to utilize.
So being prepared in terms of your own mental health and having a way to relax or calm yourself down, or feel a little bit serene is a really good idea. Having some idea of what you want to work on is also helpful, but it, you don't have to, so in fact, your EMDR therapist should lead you really easily through the process of taking a history, finding out what's bothering you, putting together what we call a formulation, which is just a kind of a story about what we understand about how you came to be in the place that you are and what has influenced you and what has upset you and where we think will be a nice direction to move for you.
And that's always a collaborative effort.
So your therapist will talk to you about how to understand yourself and your history and what brings you into their room.
So I hope that's a little bit helpful. It has been a very short episode tonight, and , I will. Talk to you again next week. So I'm going to pre-prepare something for next week because I will be out of town and then I will be, , back recording again the week after. So I hope you have a good few weeks, and in the meantime, take good care.
Bye for now.
