Ep 68 - Mothers in EMDR therapy
Hello, and welcome back to the EMDR Doctor podcast. I'm Dr Caroline Lloyd, and it has been a very packed couple of weeks for me with being away at the EMDRA conference, that's the E-M-D-R-A-A conference. And that was incredible, and exciting, and full of so much great information. It was really brain overload, but in a really exciting way, and I managed to catch up with a few of my consultees, and a few of my friends who I know from other consultation in training groups, and other trainings, and, talked to a few of my idols as well. So, that was a really, such a great experience. And then the not so great experience was that I caught COVID at the conference. So, on the last day of the conference, I started to get some symptoms, and , then of course had to rearrange my whole week after that, and it caused a little bit of a havoc. So yes, I got COVID. COVID is still around, but luckily, not as bad as it was before, so I made a speedy recovery. Thanks to everyone who sent me well wishes. And I'm doing fine, and back in the clinic again. And of course, this weekend is a big weekend because in Australia, Sunday the 10th is Mother's Day. So, a day where we celebrate mothers of all sorts, and we celebrate perhaps practicing mothering in a not so traditional way. So, a big congratulations goes out to everyone who is mothering in, in a way that may not be the traditional, two parents, two kids kind of style. So, everyone who is step-parenting, everyone who is mothering in same-sex relationships, or single parenting mothering, because they, all of those things have their own challenges- And a special thought goes out to the people whose lives have reached that turning point where we stop thinking so much about mothering our children and start thinking about taking care of our own mothers. So for some people, that happens sooner rather than later. But for some people, that doesn't happen at all. And of course, sometimes people lose their mothers at an early age. So Mother's Day can be filled with grief and difficulty in so many different ways for so many different people. And it can be a day where we reflect on our own mothering that may or may not have been all that we had hoped that it would be, or on the mothering that we, we received, which the same sort of thing may not have been all that we had hoped. And over the last year, I've worked a little bit with a group called Mums Matter. So I was holding a group EMDR course for some of the clients who were waiting to be seen on, on the Mums Matter waiting list. So it's a psychology group that's based in Australia that takes care of mainly mothers. So they have an ethos which is all about low-cost effective counseling. So a bit of a shout-out to them. If you're needing mother-specific care, they're a great avenue to go through. So I did some group EMDR with Mums Matter, and so I got to know quite a few clients who were going through that phase of life, perhaps the early mothering phase, and helped them through some of their traumas. And this was really quite a privileged place to sit because even though in the group EMDR, we don't talk about trauma, in fact, there's very little talking done at all in group EMDR, except by me leading the group EMDR process. There was a sort of a sense of solidarity among these women because they were on a Zoom call with other women who were aligned in some way with the Mums Matter. So there was a sort of a sense that they were all working not so much on the same traumas, because no woman's trauma is the same as the next woman, even if you narrow it down to a specific age group. And in fact, no person's trauma is the same as the next person's trauma. And there's a quite a famous quote by Chekhov that said something, and I'm terribly misquoting this now, but something along the lines of "Every happy family is happy in the same way, but every unhappy family is unhappy in a different way." So I just thought of that a little while ago when I was considering unhappiness in families. So everyone's trauma is a little bit different, but EMDR is so fantastic for that because it just provides the process. It doesn't provide the answers, it doesn't provide advice or solutions, it just provides the process whereby somebody's brain can just work through the problem, work through the grief or the hurt or the difficulties, and find its way to the adaptive knowledge about ourselves. So somewhere deep inside, we have adaptive knowledge. We have knowledge that we are good people, that we are innocent, that it wasn't our fault maybe, that we do have agency, all of those positive beliefs. So we have access to that, we just have to find it, and EMDR just clears the way to that good, positive knowledge about ourselves. So the bilateral just reduces the distress enough so that the brain's natural capacity to heal takes over and, and it brings healing. So EMDR is actually really adaptable to the group process because I don't have to have the answers to everybody in the group. Nobody has to think of an answer. Your brain just processes through the difficulty and finds the answer just naturally by itself. So I'm just providing the scenario or the tool to use to allow each individual to resolve their own trauma. And of course, I keep an eye on what's happening via the chat box. People send me their level of distress intermittently throughout the process, um, through the chat box. So sometimes with the Moms Matter group, some of the themes were around perinatal loss or miscarriage, and that can be an issue that comes up a lot on Mother's Day because that loss is kind of underlined by our whole society kind of celebrating mothers, and then if a mother doesn't have a baby, then they may feel like they're not actually a mother anymore. Which is completely untrue because even with miscarriage, even with perinatal loss, those mothers still have done mothering. They still are mothers. They still have the baby, even if it's not with them. So that's a kind of important realization for them to come to at some stage, that they still deserve and need to celebrate Mother's Day, even if they've had that terrible loss. So with moms in that situation, we might process, for example, the time that they found out about the miscarriage or perhaps some of the medical trauma that they may have experienced to do with the miscarriage, and certainly, that can absolutely count as medical trauma. And then we might process other important times like the due date, that sort of thing. So, sometimes those anniversary type of dates may hold a lot of pain and a lot of loss, and we might process through those kind of issues. And as we process through those issues, what we're not aiming to do is take the grief away because we- In a sense, we can't take the grief away. We can take the trauma away. EMDR is really great at taking away the trauma to do with loss, but it doesn't actually take away the grief to do with loss. And I always tell my clients that before we start, if we are processing a loss, because, it's just useful not to have the wrong expectations. So, so we can take the trauma out of it, but we t- can't take the grief out of loss. And so the grief can actually become a little bit more obvious, a little bit more explicit once we take away the difficulty of the trauma. So sometimes that's just a layer that we have to work through.
So, as you know, my children are now young adults, so my experience of mothering is definitely in a different phase. They still need me, but in a really different way. So it's such a pleasure to be in this phase of life and have a more grown-up experience of children and, and mothering, and with all of its challenges and all of its joys, - And at the same time, remembering those beautiful early years of little chubby hands and heartfelt hugs can really just go by so quickly. And suddenly they're all grown up and graduating and leaving home and having careers, and that's a beautiful thing too.
So this has been a little bit of a rambling podcast , this week. Just really a series of my thoughts on mothering, in honor of Mother's Day this Sunday. So to all of those mothers, mothers-to-be, grandmothers, stepmothers, to all those women out there, regardless of your mothering status, I hope you have a wonderful day, and manage some self-care, and maybe get treated to brunch or something fun and delicious. And just know that you're doing a great job. Keep going to the best of your ability. You are loved. You are lovable. You are important, and you have choices. And I hope that this has been interesting or helpful to you in some way, and I will speak to you again next week. In the meantime, bye for now. Take good care. Bye-bye.
