When I first came into the field of Psychology I understood trauma as something very different to what I now know. Things changed for me when I started to learn more about EMDR. If you too are interested in finding out more about how to understand trauma in EMDR therapy please do read on.
Is trauma the event or the experience of the event?
I first starting working in mental health way back in 1997! I was taught to understand trauma really by how the DSM diagnosed PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) which is:
“(1)The person experienced, witnessed, or was confronted with an event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others.
(2) The person’s response involved intense fear, helplessness, or horror.”
So trauma was the event and the person’s response to the event. This might include car accidents, accidents at work, experience at war, sexual assault, rape etc.
What I started to notice with the clients I saw in mental health services was that they would have trauma symptoms but not have experienced an event like those described above. The main difference was that the experience was not life threatening or left them at a risk of serious injury.
So how else do we understand trauma in EMDR?
I saw a mixture of clients. Those who had neglect in their childhood. Children who’s parents who were mean, abusive, horrible with their words. This had lead to my clients often being full of fear in their world and unable to function.
I worked with clients may have been bullied and ridiculed at school. This often led to them believing they were never good enough and struggling with symptoms of depression.
I was seeing symptoms in the here and now that appeared to be connected back to the past. Back to the there and then. My clients symptoms were something that had happened in our clients past. But these things were often not what I had previously seen as being a trauma.
In the Myth of Normal, Gabor Mate writes Trauma is what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you. This is a much wider way of understanding trauma and thinking about how we can help our clients.
Trauma is not therefore the event but more about how we experience the event.
What happens when we experience something as traumatic?
If something is experienced as traumatic, overwhelming, just too much it can leave a trauma wound. This leaves an imprint both in the body and in our neural networks in our brain. It can therefore continue to have an impact on functioning a long time after the actual event is over.
Just like a physical wound it hurts and as Gabor Mate says like scar tissue this wound can become rigid, inflexible with no real feeling, there’s no room for growth. So these trauma wounds can continue to impact our growth and development.
A trauma wound might be a person who had very strict parents who would punish them with a heavy handed smack if ever they had done something wrong. This may lead to an inability in later life to function with people in authority or a fear of talking up in meetings for fear of getting things wrong and getting into serious trouble. If the person does make a mistake (and actually they may frequently make a mistake as this is part of being human) but this could easily lead to a downward spiral of depression and negative self talk that is not good for anyone’s mental health.
How can we help people who have trauma in EMDR?
This is where EMDR (Eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing) therapy can really help.
Trauma in EMDR therapy can be healed at any time because it’s a wound sustained by something that happened to us as individuals. We can never ever change what did happen to someone but we can change how they think and feel about what did happen. We can change the impact that this has about how they feel about themself. This is great news as EMDR therapists we can help people heal their trauma wounds. No matter how long ago that trauma happened and no matter how long they have held onto these beliefs for.
The trauma wounds of the past keeps on being activated and showing up in the present. So as therapists we need to ask ourselves. “What is happening to our clients now in the present that is a shadow of their past?” Is there an imprint of what has gone before that is stuck and has been left with our clients?
Trauma disconnects our clients. EMDR can help our clients to feel connected again.
To find out more about Mindsync EMDR training (click here)
Who are we at Mindsync EMDR Training
Caroline van Diest – our Senior trainer. Having started her career as a learning disabilities nurse in the NHS, she trained initially in CBT before starting her EMDR journey. Caroline has worked for many years delivering EMDR training for therapists. She is the co-founder of Mindsync EMDR Training. She is a dynamic trainer, with an interest in storytelling. Caroline likes our delegates to have a clear understanding of EMDR. She will use a lot of clinical examples and story telling in her teaching. There is never a dull moment when Caroline is teaching!
Caroline has a special interest in working with neurodiversity, when she is not delivering training Caroline sees clients for 1-1 work as well as running many supervision sessions and fitting in the odd pottery class!
Dr Hannah Bryan – is our Facilitator and trainee Trainer. She started her career in the NHS as a Clinical Psychologist. Hannah worked in secondary mental health services. She started her EMDR journey in 2005 and has seen the positive impact EMDR has on clients where other types of therapy seemed very slow going.
She is the co-founder of Mindsync EMDR training. Hannah has worked as a training Facilitator since 2019 and is really passionate about supporting delegates to grow their confidence and skill in EMDR.Hannah has a special interest in using EMDR within a coaching framework, she also sees clients struggling with their mental health due to their past experiences as well as providing supervision in EMDR.