It's important to think about the nature
of trauma, and trauma is not some
unpleasant thing that happens to people.
Unpleasant things happen all the time,
and we're actually quite well equipped
to deal with unpleasant things. Trauma is
something horrendous, something that
makes you stare with horror. Trauma is
about horror. Something that you stare in
the face, and it's too much.
You cannot possibly imagine what you can
do. You think your life is over. An
experience like that is an experience
you don't want to remember. And so then
at the core of of trauma is this need to
push it away and to try not to remember
it.
Trauma treatment is about
making it safe for people to remember.
Making it safe for people to stare
reality in the face. Having Post-traumatic
stress reactions is about being
unable to face the truth. And so at the
end, exposure treatment is important, but
not blasting people with a memory of their
trauma and confronting them with
it because that is traumatizing for them
again.
Now, we need to make it safe for people
to observe what happened back then.
Without them becoming freaked out and
overwhelmed by remembering. So our job is
conditions to make it safe
for people to remember what happened to them
back then, and for them to come to
the conclusion
yes it's happened to me, it's terrible,
but it happened a long time ago. And
that's the core skill of becoming a
trauma therapist is the capacity to help
people to safely remember.
The first modality that taught me that it's
possible to help me help people feel
safe was EMDR. And for me, EMDR
is an indispensable modality of treatment.
If I could not do EMDR, I don't think I
could be a good trauma therapist anymore.
That may not be universally true.
I believe if you're a very good body
oriented therapist as Peter Levine or
Pat Ogden or some other people teach...
You can probably process trauma as well
through those modalities as you might do
it for EMDR. I also suspect that if you
are very good hypnosis expert
that you might be able to help people to
come to a very safe place where they can
actually observe what happened. But for
me, EMDR has always been a very important part.
And so with EMDR you can allow people to
go to a place where they become quite agitated.
For example in my book, but
I have so many examples. Let me give an example from my recent practice.
A guy came to see me from a local school
here in Boston where we have so many
schools. He was crushed in a car accident.
He was riding his bike and a
car came from the side road, drove over
him, hit him as he was riding his bike
and dragged him along and the driver of
the car was unaware that somebody was
been dragged underneath her car. And in
the process of being dragged he lost
most of a leg. Terrible thing. He walked
into my office on crutches looking
terribly distraught, and he's an athlete...
and I feel like oh my god,
there's probably nothing I can do for
this man because it's so horrible.
But you know I've done this
EMDR research that shows that eighty
percent of people with that condition
get better in between three and eight sessions.
And so I have this data
somewhere in the back of my mind even
though as a person I can't imagine how
this guy can ever overcome the horrors
of that memory of what happened to him,
and basically the loss of his leg.
And so I say, somewhat despairing in a way myself,
let's do some EMDR. And we start doing
EMDR, and i'll talk more about EMDR in the
course itself, and as you do the EMDR
he at some point starts smiling. And I say,
"what do you get now?" He says "You know I was
so strong I was being dragged underneath
the car but I could hold onto the
shafts of the car as I was dragged along. And if I'd
let go, the wheels of this car would've driven over
me. But look what a strong guy I am." And
he recalled how powerful he was. So he
himself came up with this image of power.
Didn't come for me, his own brain was
able to generate it, and that's what you
see all the time in these good
treatments is that you liberate the
healing power of people's own minds and own
brains. And so I go on with EMDR and again
little while later he smiles again and
we already has.... joy in his
face, and he says "you know I'll never
play sports again because this leg is
basically gone for me, but you know that
leg saved my life because if the leg
hadn't sorta held on, my pelvis would
have dragged along the floor and my
pelvis would have been destroyed and
there will be dead by now. So I'm
really grateful for that leg for sacrificing
itself so I could be alive."
You know that's stuff we cannot make up for
other people. And so EMDR was able to
to liberate these creative forces in
people's minds, and this is what we see
in other people also is that people
come up with their own solutions and all
that we do is we're technically
proficient enough to help people to find
solutions. So think about the impact that
EMDR
and helping people to just let their
memories dissipate and become memories
of something bad in the past...what that
will do for your practice.