Healing Trauma with EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) with Rana Kalo Jaroudi

WAYS TO GROW

In this second episode, Rana Kalo Jaroudi presents to us EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) technique. Rana is a licensed Psychotherapist, a certified EMDR therapist, and a trained CBT therapist.

Here are the highlights of this session:

EMDR is an approach, a specific approach to psychotherapy, and psychotherapy, as you may or may not know, is what we call talk therapy. So, it gets the help of the science behind psychology to be able to help people with their psychological difficulties, psychological disorders, emotional difficulties, that they're going through. So, it's there to alleviate their pain, their suffering but also to help them fulfill the best of who they are and the best of their capacity.

EMDR is one of those approaches that was discovered or found by Francine Shapiro, some 30 years ago haphazardly. It is there like any other psychotherapy approach to reach these goals. But it uses specific, very specific, standardized techniques to get there. There are certain protocols that we follow to get there and that involves what we call in one of the phases, Bilateral Stimulation.

The EMDR rests on a model called Adaptive Information Processing, which believes that all the dysfunctions that you are experiencing today as a human being, the difficulties that you have in the ways that you're thinking, that you're feeling, that you're behaving, come from a certain place that we call in EMDR, Traumatic. Traumatic means disruptive. A certain disruptive life event.

There are two kinds of trauma in EMDR and we all have them, so "no one can say I've never been through a trauma in my life", according to EMDR. These traumas are in two groups: There are the Big T traumas, with a big huge T that involves traumas like war, traumas of violent death... all the things that come to mind readily. But then, there are the small t traumas which are actually everyday life events: My classmates used to mock me at school… bullying, the first boyfriend that I've ever had at age 15 cheated on me with a friend of mine...

How do you know that you are not over it? That you have not successfully processed that? Is when anything that can give you the same or a familiar feeling, or touch upon this negative belief, triggers you… Then you know that there is a wound out in there that hasn't closed well. And it's going to show in the way you react or you behave. Therefore, it's going to affect your personal relationships, your internal relationship with yourself, your relationship at work with your co-workers, with your boss, with everyone else. So, there are three components: How you feel, what you think or what you believe, and then, how you behave.

With Bilateral Stimulation, we're just nudging your brain, we're helping it just connect or wire up between the two hemispheres.

Research has linked a lot of similarities to what happens in REM sleep or that sleep phase where our eyes are moving right-left, right-left, and where we know that our brain is processing things that happen to us during the day, and trying to make sense of it.

EMDR strongly believes the science behind it and the idea is that your brain can heal, as well as, and has the same capacity for healing as your physical body.

One of the most important parts of any psychotherapy is to assess. Really get to know the person that is sitting in front of you because therapy is a relationship. It's not the technique that you do on something and then that’s it, they're gone. It's a relationship. It's a collaboration.

Ayadi is a blessing because it has made it much easier for these people who haven't crossed this barrier yet to reach out for help, in the privacy of their own room.

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