Eagle Spirit Therapies

Lori Miller-Freitas

EMDR

EMDR Poster Girl Continued

by

PG continued processing old stuck issues from childhood.  Each session we successfully disolved more old stuck messages.  PG began to feel at peace with herself her negative belief system began to crumble and she felt it was safe to feel good about herself.  Her migraine headaches began to decrease in intensity and frequency.  To date she has an occasional head ache.

I see PG a few times per year for tune ups otherwise she is doing much better than the initial session.  She has been able to make more positive changes in her life and continues to grow.

EMDR Poster Girl

by

EMDR Poster Girl

The next discussion is about a woman in her fifties that had been suffering from Depression most of her life.  She had tried conventional therapy and medication with only minimal improvement.  Poster girl also suffered from migraine headaches.  She researched different therapies and found EMDR then found me.  We decided it was a good fit and began treatment.  I will call her PG from now on.

 

PG had a history of being put down when she did well in school.  Her parents were dysfunctional and did not know how to praise her for her talents.  She is very bright and talented but felt stuck in her life.  So, at the beginning of treatment I took a thorough history charting incidents that seems to have emotional charge to them to prepare a treatment plan to help move PG out of her depression.

 

At the beginning of treatment, I used some ego strengthening techniques to prepare for processing.  This took a couple of sessions between history and strengthening.  Then we were able to begin dissolving the old stuck negative beliefs by the third session.  PG s issues were from childhood and her treatment is much different from Bob the Core man.  PG had more issues to target that would be considered smaller but the smaller issues that come from childhood are harder to move.  They are like pulling out splinters as opposed to one or two big events.  Next entry I will talk about more on how PG responded to treatment and some of the differences.

Bob…Core man……Continued

by

This session Bob was having intrusive thoughts about when his vehicle was hit. No one really made it in his vehicle except Bob and since it is his duty to care for the wounded (medic), Bob had survivor’s guilt. This was one of the worst memories that Bob came in with and when he told me the story of what happen it was very emotional. Since we had dissolved so many layers of the war trauma with TAT in previous sessions I decided to use EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitizing Repossessing). I wanted to make sure that we were clearing all the trauma and not leaving fragments and EMDR can be very powerful and deep and has been proven to work on trauma.

So I set up the standard EMDR protocol which involves focusing on the picture of the event the negative belief, positive belief, emotions and body sensations, while using bilateral stimulation such as eye movement, audio or tactile (more on EMDR at my web site). It also involves using 2 subjective scales to measure progress in treatment. Since Bob had made so much progress it felt like the appropriate time to use EMDR. However, about one minute into the processing it became too much for Bob and he felt like he was back there. I do not believe it is my job to make people feel worse and Bob was definitely flooded by the images and feelings. So, within 2 seconds I switched the processing to Gentle Reprocessing (formerly called gentle EMDR) www.gentlereprocessing.com . Gentle Reprocessing uses imagery to buffer the intensity of the trauma while processing. Within minutes Bob was calmer and able to continue processing the incident. By the end of the session his guilt was gone and Bob felt he did the best he could in the situation, after all this is when Bob received his traumatic brain injury and an injury to his shoulder. He didn’t remember most of the incident.

This session reminded me that great therapies that work are not always appropriate for a particular person. Healing is something that is fluid and needs to be flexible for the moment and the person. Bob left the session feeling more empowered and definitely much calmer. I felt enormous gratitude for being witness to his work. With all the work I do I feel I am the facilitator to a process that happens inside my client and I help guide them. We all do have the innate ability to heal. My next entry will be a summary of Bob’s experience and then future entries will be about others who have volunteered to let me tell their story.
Look for my entries on Fridays either weekly or every other week depending on my schedule.
Be Well,
Lori