If you are a working mother then you understand the guilt of feeling like you’re not good enough for everyone. In this week’s Intentional Living we talk to a licensed EMDR therapy provider about an older type of therapy that is really making a comeback.
EMDR is a kind of therapy originally designed to threat trauma victims–
that has been growing in popularity around the nation. Dr. Nicole Black explains what EMDR is. “EMDR stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy..It is a type of therapy that helps the client, identify negative beliefs that are problem for them. And then find memories that are connected to those beliefs, where that belief has come about. and it helps them to desensitize those memories and reprocess them using something called bilateral stimulation, which is a really fancy way of activating both sides of the brain, so that the brain can really just process and work through things much more quickly than a typical talk therapy session.
You don’t have to be a trauma victim to be a good candidate. Dr. Black says anyone who struggles with their self worth or perfectionism is a good candidate. Dr. Black says, “A lot of times we carry these beliefs that I’m not doing enough. I’m not good enough. I’m worthless, I need to, I need to prove myself I need to try harder. I need to be better. I just have to keep doing doing doing, and it’s never enough, no matter what we do, we never feel fulfilled.
And it can show results faster than traditional talk therapy. “One of the great things about EMDR is that it lets the individual in all of their capacity to heal. To do that, and it allows the individual to to heal from the inside without having to be bogged down with months and months and months of talk therapy.”
So how exactly does it work? So EMDR is an eight phase model, and the first couple of sessions would focus on getting to know the client building that relationship, getting a history of the problem and in assessing what exactly is going on. And the next phase is called resourcing, and that phase is focused on helping the client develop all of the skills that they’re going to need to have in order to one be stable in the moment. And then the next eight phases are developing your treatment plan, finding the negative belief, finding the memories that are connected to this negative belief, and then reprocessing them in EMDR is actually a three pronged approach, which means that we focus on what’s presently causing the person problems. What is your life like right now that you don’t like we go back to the past, to find where these things have originated. we work on them and then we come back to the present, check in with that to see if it’s still a problem.”
Dr. Black says this type of treatment can be used alongside medication and other forms of therapy–and is appropriate for both kids and adults.
it can be covered by insurance.
You can reach Dr. Black at her practice at 806-412-7043. She says there are always openings since therapy is something people rotate in and out of.