Hello, and welcome back to the EMDR Doctor podcast. I'm Dr Caroline Lloyd, and I hope you've all had a really good week. I've had quite an exciting week this week. So this time last week, I was assisting with some training for a whole bunch of very newly minted EMDR practitioners. So the training was run by a wonderful trainer called Larissa Meysner, and she works with psychology training from WA here in Australia.
And the training was really quite a joyful experience for me. I can't speak for the other people who are actually entering into the EMDR world for the very first time. But to watch Larissa train this group of psychologists and doctors, there were a couple of doctors there. So to see Larissa train these quite experienced and very thoughtful, talented group of individuals was really something.
I did notice a few things had changed a little bit from when I did my basic training quite some years ago, which was really interesting to note, and there was a really interesting shift away from the very basics of EMDR to a slightly more finessed kind of version. So these young therapists were being taught straight away, in the first day of basic training, how to get their clients out of trouble in an EMDR session.
So they were being taught the basics. Larissa was very thorough, went through all of the basics, but also she was teaching some really quite sophisticated techniques, and I think nowadays these techniques, which I learnt as kind of advanced trainings, are becoming more and more standard for EMDR. And this was kind of topped off by a conversation that I had this morning with another therapist who does another brand of therapy.
She uses, uh, something a little bit different, which is also a somatic therapy. But her, and she talked to me about her experience about EMDR, which was quite a, an experience that kind of focused on the cognitive, which I found really interesting. So I just wondered if maybe, you know, her therapist at the time had perhaps done their training some time ago, and didn't therefore have this focus more on the somatic side of people's experiences.
So I guess my use of EMDR has been really heavily influenced by some further trainings that I've done. So I do a little bit, I incorporate a little bit of schema therapy, so sometimes with a particularly bad memory, we might just rewrite the scene. So we do a little bit of imagination work, and re- we rewrite that scene into something completely different, and when that's paired with bilateral stimulation, like the eye movements or the tapping, when that rewriting of the scene is paired with the basics of EMDR, which is the bilateral stimulation, really the results can be extremely fast and quite magical, and those, what were quite awful memories, can even change into something a little bit light-hearted and a little bit fun So referring back to the basic training that I assisted with last week, there's this really lovely element of fun that Larissa brings to her training, and I really hope all the new EMDR therapists that came out of that had a little bit of a sense that working with these memories that can be anything but fun, they can be really dreadful and dire memories that we help our clients with, but we can do it with a bit of a sense of a light-heartedness, a little bit of a sense of fun, and we can incorporate our own personality into the session and use our imagination, and use all the other aspects of healing that we've learned through the years, and bring that to EMDR.
So I'm just having a little bit of a rant today about the joys of EMDR because I really was just so inspired by going back and seeing these beginner EMDR therapists be trained, and it really got me reflecting on my practice, and how far I've come, and what the influences to my work have been. So I use a bit of schema therapy, I use a bit of, uh...
I use a lot of EMDR 2.0, which is this really revolutionary style of, of EMDR that has come out of the Netherlands, Ad de Jongh and Suzy Matthijssen. I've talked about EMDR 2.0 before on my podcast and, uh, if you are an EMDR therapist listening to or watching this podcast, and if you haven't done EMDR 2.0, I'd highly, highly recommend going and doing that training because it really will, um, change how you work, and really it's like turbo boosting EMDR.
So I also use a fair bit of what we call relational integrative EMDR. So this is a different flavour of EMDR that also incorporates a lot of attachment-focused imagination work and attachment-focused healing work that I think is really quite an exceptional, beautifully gentle, very nurturing way to use EMDR in the session.
So these are the things that I'm excited about with my EMDR practice at the moment, alongside of intensives, and alongside of really getting into the nitty-gritty of what people need to do right now to heal. So I'm going to briefly chat about a little bit of a philosophical difference that is emerging in the EMDR world, and that is one of safety versus efficacy.
What I mean by that is there are some sectors of our community who are very, perhaps overly, focused on safety, and so they spend a lot of time with their clients doing a lot of resourcing, really doing a lot of narrative therapy around the trauma, and a lot of CBT-based therapy around the trauma before they get into EMDR.
And they have a rationale for this, and certainly I would agree with them that not everybody is suitable for EMDR as soon as they walk in the door But, and this is the flip side of the debate, in my view, most people are. So in my view, 99% of the people that I work with are resourced enough and exceedingly ready to get rid of their traumatic memories, or I shouldn't say get rid of, I should say resolve the distress of their traumatic memories, because EMDR doesn't wipe the memory, but we can certainly relieve the memory of the distress.
So with my work, I have been, in a sense, pushing the boundaries for myself with starting EMDR as soon as I possibly can. And I'm going to really shock some of our colleagues who go for the more, the more conventional, the more conservative style of EMDR, of extended resourcing, and say that the other day I actually did an EMDR session with someone in their first meeting with me.
Now, I'll preface this, or I'll, I'll, I'll just surround this with a little bit of context. So if a client is well-resourced in the rest of their life, if they have a steady job, maybe a partner, or maybe some good close friends who they can rely on, if they have stability in other realms, if they have stable housing, and a regular income, and perhaps pets that they find very resourcing, if they have already done a lot of therapy, if they are able to speak about their trauma without too much emotion welling up immediately, these are all really good indicators that someone is ready for EMDR.
And this particular scenario was a little bit special, so I do say that I don't usually start EMDR the very first time I meet someone. But this person was about to go into a situation that was quite challenging for them because of a memory that they had to do with the situation that they were going into.
So I can't give you too many details So for them, time was of the essence, and we didn't have another opportunity to schedule a, a separate session. And so I made the decision very early on in that session that we would do some EMDR. And I kept it quite safe, so I kept it quite restricted. I made sure that that person was very well-regulated by the end of the session.
But that person was really, really thankful that we could do that. So it was kind of like rescuing them from the distress of the previous memories in order to bolster their resources for going into this new scenario that was going to be quite stressful. So I was really pleased to be able to do that for them.
They were really, really pleased to be able to do that with me for themselves, and I'm really looking forward to hearing the rest of their story and working in a deeper way with them. So, so just exploring that idea of when can we start doing EMDR, and b- by that I mean phase four of EMDR, which is the active reprocessing of the difficult memories.
Because of course, for an EMDR therapist, even taking a history is part of that whole EMDR process and ethos. We're listening for what we need to work on, we're making a case conceptualization virtually from the word hello. So the point I wanted to make is that for some clients, session one is a very good time to start EMDR reprocessing.
For other clients, it might be session two, it might be session five, and for the very, very rare client, it might be session 10. But if you are postponing it past session 10, if you're an EMDR therapist, and you're postponing it past that stage, then I think that there might be some other block that is prohibiting you from going forward If you are a client listening to this and you're seeing an EMDR therapist, and the therapist hasn't suggested to you to hop on into some difficult memories and relieve you of the pain of those memories, if they haven't proceeded past the resourcing stage, then perhaps you may like to talk to them about why they haven't, and just explore for you if it's possible to go there now.
So every person is different, every EMDR therapist is different as well, so every scenario plays out in a different way. But I would encourage you to hop on in, because the sooner we can relieve the distress from that trauma, the sooner you feel better, and then the less resources you actually need to build because you are inherently resourced.
If you have less trauma, you have more resources. If you have less distress, you are more able to think of yourself in a positive way, and know that you are safe now, and know that you can cope with things. All right, so today has just been a little bit of a informal chat about EMDR, and the training, and the suitability of hopping into processing.
So I hope you've enjoyed it, I hope you've got something out of it, and I look forward to talking to you again next week. In the meantime, take good care. Bye for now
