The movie technique is an EMDR technique that helps to create distance from your memory
and it helps to develop self compassion.
So stick around and I'm going to walk you through it.
I'm Barbara Heffernan and I've been working with clients for over 15 years, helping them
recover from anxiety and trauma and I've created this youtube channel to help you do the same.
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The movie technique is fairly simple and it's a very helpful one that can be utilized in
EMDR therapy and you can also do it for yourself.
If you've been through an event that you feel is traumatic and you've identified the negative
statement about yourself that goes with that event, then this can be a very useful exercise
for shifting how you see it.
If you're continuing to have flashbacks about an event and you can make it into a movie
that might help to create enough distance for you to actually begin to see it as a storyline,
which is part of the reprocessing of the memory.
And the exercise is basically just to imagine yourself in a movie theater.
Like really imagine yourself in a movie theater with popcorn on your lap or whatever you happen
to eat my favorite is chocolate.
And you're looking up at a big screen and you picture what happened to you happening
to somebody else.
So bring that to mind for a moment.
Now I know it's upsetting and it's upsetting if we're watching a movie and we watched something
like that.
But if you can really picture it happening to somebody else, notice how you feel about
that person in the picture.
And my guess is that if you are negative cognition about yourself with something about your being
defective or stupid or bad, and you watch it as a movie, you will have much more compassion
for the character in the movie than you have for yourself.
And if you can bring up that feeling of compassion for the person in the movie and really bring
that compassion to mind and feel what it feels like in your body and it's a feeling.
Compassion is a feeling of, I really wish that person were not suffering.
And often it's you know that this is not that person's fault.
And even if they made a mistake that got them there, they didn't deserve this, and really
bring those feelings of compassion to mind and then try to apply those feelings towards
yourself.
This is something that you might want to experiment with if your trauma was not too overwhelming.
If you have complex PTSD, these techniques won't work very well and probably aren't the
best thing to do by yourself via much better to do it with a trained therapist.
I've put together a pdf that walks you through the movie technique as well as two other techniques.
The Link to the PDF is below.
So those are techniques to try to see if you can detach and desensitize yourself to a memory
and then also kind of reprocess it because of the compassion, shifting the negative cognition
about yourself and also reprocessing it in terms of, I'm safe enough now.
I got over that, I got through it and I'm okay now.
Please comment in the notes below whether this exercise was helpful for you, whether
you could access it and whether it helped you to shift how you feel about the event
and yourself.
For more information on EMDR, PTSD, and trauma, please watch a few of my other videos.
I think you'll find them very helpful.
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And thanks for watching.
I look forward to the next time.