In Part 1 of this series on EMDR, Dr. Carrie describes her experience with EMDR and what to expect when embarking on this type of trauma therapy.
Dr. Carrie greets the audience and sets up the topic of trauma therapy, mentioning EMDR and brain spotting. She signals that the video will focus on her experience with EMDR.
She recounts a friend's initial curiosity, the painful early sessions, and the subsequent improvement over days. The anecdote illustrates how EMDR can feel intensely distressing at first but lead to noticeable relief if you persist.
Using a filing cabinet and hashtag metaphor, she describes how traumatic memories are stored, triggered, and linked to sensory cues. She explains that EMDR doesn't erase memories but scrambles or retags pathways so triggers evoke less distress.
She encourages viewers to stick with multiple EMDR sessions before quitting, previews more videos about her personal EMDR experiences, and closes the video.
Hey cadre family, Dr. Carrie here. Today I'm gonna share about my experience with trauma therapy. The most common form of trauma therapy that I'm aware of is EMDR, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. And the other one that I have tried is called brain spotting. But I wanna today talk about my experience with EMDR. And I know this is a becoming more of a buzz, you know, becoming more of a topic that people have heard about this kind of therapy and they're looking into it. And I remember the call that I got from my friend about a year ago who's had a lot of trauma in her life.
And she said, I know you've done EMDR therapy. What do you think? And I said, it is one of the hardest things I've done in therapy. It's painful. It is so not fun. but it is also the most freedom that I've ever experienced through therapy. And I promise you that if you stick it out, you will have positive results. She's like, okay, I'll try it. Then she calls me after her first session and she goes, Oh, it wasn't so bad. We kind of just talked about what I want to talk about when we do the actual EMDR.
And she said, Next time we're going to get going on. We're going to talk about a couple of the memories. And she's like, So I'm feeling encouraged. And then she called me after a second session and she said, I can't sleep. There's no way in hell you would get me to do that again. That was horrible. And this was like, less than 24 hours after the session. And I said, I want you to call me in two more days, and then we're going to talk through how you're feeling. And so two more days go by. She calls me back, and she goes, OK, I might start to understand what you're talking about.
So my brain has been thinking about it nonstop, and I've had some really interesting dreams. But I'm just feeling a little bit more at peace, just a tiny bit. And was it worth it? I don't know, because it was such hard work and it dug up all that painful stuff. But maybe. And I just said, keep going, just keep going. And that's really what I could. offer you if you are embarking upon EMDR is just the hope that it will get better. It's such, it's like an exponential curve, okay, on a graph. Like it starts off with like a little bit of progress, a little bit of progress.
And then after a few sessions, you start to see this and then you might plateau and then you go even higher. And the progress you will make after a few sessions is so profound. It's just so so unbelievable how well it works and I just want to encourage you to stick with it. So I'm going to be sharing another video in this series about kind of like my my different experiences with it but I just wanted to give you encouragement that if you have ever thought about doing EMDR or brain spotting or other trauma therapies just know that it is really hard work and you sometimes have to stick with it to see the benefits, but once you start to see the benefits, it is so profound.
And I want to explain to you just a little bit in this video also how EMDR works a little bit. So this is how I understand it. I am not a licensed therapist. I have never done this as a therapist, but I do have some understanding of how it works. So a traumatic memory is stored in your brain and it's usually associated with triggers. And I describe this like filing cabinets. So when you have an event happen, it goes into a filing cabinet and your brain remembers it, whether it was a happy memory, not so happy memory.
And there's little tags or let's just call them hashtags, things that are associated with that memory. So you might, you know, a certain smell might invoke like for me, when I smell chocolate chip cookies, it reminds me of the first day of school because my mom always made chocolate chip cookies for us on the first day of school. So there might be like a scent or something you see or something you feel that brings you right back to that memory because there's a hashtag associated with that memory file.
But then there's also negative things that are associated with it, like a trigger. So for me, for my sexual assault experience when I was attacked at knife point, walking outside at night could be a trigger for me. The first time I wore flip flops in the summer in Minnesota, 'cause my sexual assault happened in June, it was one of the first few times I had gone out wearing flip flops. That was a trigger for me because my brain goes, Ah, the last time you put flip flops on, you were assaulted or the most traumatic time that I put flip flops on.
So your brain associates these tags with the memory, and then it pulls out that file and says, huh, we're going to recall this right now. And so there's these really quick electrical pathways that follow when you experience the trigger and your brain goes, oh, we know exactly what to do. And it pulls out that file out of the final cabinet right away and says, all right, we're going to relive this, we're going to re-experience this. And what EMDR does is you do have to pull those memories out of the file cabinet, but you're in a really safe place to do it.
And what you're essentially doing is rewiring the pathway. So you're changing some of the hashtags or you're making it a little bit more jumbled as to how quickly that file gets taken out and your brain remembers it. So when you have a trigger, I think of it as like it plops down right on your hand and it follows this electrical pathway that just immediately takes you to that And when you do EMDR therapy, things get just a little bit twisted up. So the emotional reaction that you have when you get that trigger won't evoke the same emotion.
It won't be the same re-experiencing and it won't be as painful and traumatizing. as maybe the other times that you've recalled it. So it's not saying that that file is going to get erased from your memory, but you're going to rewire some things in your brain so that the memory becomes less disturbing. And it's so powerful, so, so powerful. So I'm going to do some other videos in this series about my experience with EMDR, but I just want to explain a little bit of the basis of how I understand it works and how it worked for me.
And just know that if you are embarking on this journey of maybe going to I would highly encourage you to stick it out and give it a few sessions before you say, Ugh, that was too painful. I don't want to do it. So stay tuned with me to the next video in this series as I talk more about my personal experience with this. Thanks guys.
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