Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - How to Use EMDR for Emotional Resilience at Midlife with Kambria Evans

Episode Date: September 18, 2023

Kambria Evans is an EMDR Consultant and Brainspotting Clinician, and in this episode she delves into the powerful realm of EMDR and its impact on mental health. With a background in psychotherapy and extensive EMDR expertise, Kambria not only helps Dr. Mindy navigate her personal journey but also empowers listeners to explore EMDR techniques for quick trauma resolution and cognitive rewiring. The episode offers a lifeline to women facing emotional challenges during menopause, emphasizing the importance of feeling heard, presenting actionable answers, and promising a valuable resource list for global support. Explore EMDR therapy, focusing on support for women in menopause, with Kambria Evans. In this episode, she discussed how EMDR works, its ability to neutralize disturbances, and the interplay between the menopausal brain and hormones. She also stresses the  importance of validation, choosing narratives, and finding skilled EMDR clinicians is emphasized. You will learn about techniques to interrupt looping thoughts and the power of creating our own mental curriculum. To view full show notes, more information on our guests, resources mentioned in the episode, discount codes, transcripts, and more, visit https://www.drmindypelz.com/ep197. With a Masters in Education from Vanderbilt, Kambria has been creating trainings and teaching adult learners for over 20 years. As the Director of Education and Quality Improvement at Stanford Medical School, she created ease in complex systems, thereby giving medical trainees successful learning experiences. Now, as a dedicated mom, therapist, and EMDR Consultant, Kambria knows what it means to do things efficiently, effectively, and in a learner-centered way. When she isn't podcasting or creating online courses, you can find Kambria playing with her twins on a beach in California.  Check out our fasting membership at resetacademy.drmindypelz.com. Please note our medical disclaimer.

On this episode of the Resetter podcast, I bring you Cambria Evans. Now, let me tell you a little bit about what you're about to hear because I have been doing personal EMDR work with Cambria. And she not only has an extensive psychotherapy background, not only is she a trained EMDR clinician, but she actually trains other practitioners how to do. EMDR. So in my book, she is a specialist in the topic of EMDR. Now you mix that with a huge heart and a woman that sees the mission that I'm on, which is helping women through the metapausal journey, helping women with hormones. And I think what you're going to find in this episode

is a real resource for where you may be going mentally at this moment in time. So EMDR, not familiar with it, is a form of therapy that really has a way of getting to the root of our traumas very, very quickly. And what I learned in my own EMDR experience with Cambria is that it can actually rewire the way my brain thinks in all the wonderful ways, in all the ways of looking at trying to find more hope and possibility in this world, trying to undo looping thoughts, trying to overcome adaptations that maybe hold us back, that I have found an incredible tool in EMDR and Cambria is an expert in it. So I wanted to bring her to you all. And as you will hear throughout this conversation, I share a little bit about my journey, some of the work that I've done on

with her, but I also wanted to bring you some real-time resources. So there's really three things I want you to get out of this podcast. First is I want you to feel heard. Please, please, please, those of you that may be struggling women that are going through menopause that are finding that the emotional ups and downs are really difficult. I want you to know that I hear you, Cambria hears you, you are not alone, and you're going to hopefully hear this throughout the whole thread of this conversation. Second, you are not out of answers. And what you're about to hear are a lot of answers that don't cost money, that don't mean you have to go find an EMDR specialist that you can do right now. And she actually, some of them are just being aware of certain things,

which she talks about. And then others are actually real EMDR techniques that you can use immediately. And then the third thing I want you to know, and I've asked Cambria to do, is to create a resource list. So we are a worldwide community. So if you are listening to this episode, you're resonating with this conversation, you're needing some support. Please know that we are putting together a resource list for you that we will link in the notes. So this is a real personal one for me. I bring a lot of people on this podcast and I adore this woman and she has helped me greatly. And I can't wait for you to witness her brilliance, but more importantly, I can't wait for you

to see what's possible for your own mental health. So Cambria Evans, EMDR, I am from the bottom of my heart from the deepest place of love. I offer you an incredible conversation on what's possible for your brain. Enjoy. Hey, Dr. Vindy here and welcome to season four of the Resetter podcast. Please know that this podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again. If you have a passion for learning, if you're looking to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is the podcast for you. Enjoy. As you already know, I'm a very informal kind of gal, so I'm just going to start by welcoming you to my podcast. I'm so excited to have you here.

Oh, thank you so much for having me. I really am excited to talk to you about EMDR and therapy and whatever is helpful to your audience. You know, there's so many avenues that I want to go down, but I really want to highlight EMDR because it seems to be this version of therapy that is like standing out on its own. And you know, my brain, it's like I can't quite figure out why it's in every conversation that I'm in. So I definitely want to start there. But I also have to tell you that I just realized in talking to you in this setting, because we've talked so much, that your voice is like, it's like a therapeutic tool for me

onto itself. Do people tell you that? Like when they hear your voice, I'm like, oh, okay. Now I'm like cluing in and like listening because I always take your advice. So is that like a part of the repetition that happens when you listen to somebody over and over again? Their voice becomes therapy onto itself. Well, first of all, thank you. And second of all, I think this is just how our brains link, right? Because if your brain has an association with my voice, voice about certain feelings or experiences that we've had together, right? It would make sense that just my voice would trigger you into a space of a certain emotional state, right? And that really is what EMDR utilizes to help people process information. Wow. So is this why, like, when you get on a

call with your mom and she says, hello, and you don't even, you don't even know, you know the tone, you know, like, what kind of where this conversation's going, you know what kind of mood she's in and all she does say said hello. Is that the way our brain holds on to that and categorizes it? Our brain is so amazing. And what's amazing about the example you just gave is that when we hear a caregiver's voice from childhood, right? Our brain goes into this like time travel mode. So we stay in our adult body, but like all the parts of us from childhood and all the younger parts are kind of called into the conversation, which is why I think it can be so nourishing and also so complex when we talk to our parents as adults. And you have to bring all those parts with you. Can you only bring some certain parts

with you? Another great part about EMDR is that you get to kind of learn what's there. We kind of do like a time travel inventory almost to see what parts are there. Sometimes we can choose what parts to bring in and sometimes we can't. And I like to believe that all the parts of us that are coming in have a good positive intention to help us. Yeah, that you do always take the high road. like that. Well, well done, right? Well done. Okay, well, let me start the beginning of this conversation just now that we've gotten that

out of the way, your voice out of the way for my brain. So for people listening, we just did that for my entertainment. Sorry. But, you know, as I was diving into understanding the brain as I went through menopause and just trying to understand my thoughts and really decide, did I like my thoughts? Did I not like them? Where were some new thoughts coming from? I kept searching for tools to be able to help the new brain patterns that I was having.

And as you know, one of the major tools that I found or kept hearing about was EMDR. And here's the way it was marketed to me. Let's just put it this way. We're going to hear how you would market it. But it was marketed to me as it's a quicker version of therapy. You only have to go six, seven times because it really, re-patterned your brain and you get through things a lot, a lot faster. And again, as you know, I like to move fast. So talk a little bit about why EMDR is coming to the surface. Is it really a

quicker version of therapy? And if so, why? I love these questions. And I will join you in in kind of the urgency to understand something, the urgency to understand ourselves, right? I think is something that is a positive thing about you. And it's the reason why I only do EMDR is because I'm a very impatient person. I'm a very impatient therapist. And I want people to feel better as fast as possible. And when I heard about EMDR, I heard it was, you know, for trauma, that took all this research behind it.

I got the whole rundown of how the brain works around it. And the way that I understand it now, having done like, you know, 10,000 EMDR sessions, and the way that I like to describe it is that it's really based around how the brain and, like, your nervous system learns things, right? And so I think that what EMDR has done is it's kind of taken all of these wonderful therapies and found a way for them to all work together. So it's taken CBT, right, around positive and negative beliefs and incorporated it. it's taken somatic experiencing around how, you know, things are stored in the body, how the body learns

things, right? And it's taken just things about emotions and psychology, has put all these things together to kind of create this very efficient, effective modality. And when I think about how we learn, when we learn as kids, right, we're learning something typically for the first time. And so that learning really informs a lot of how we see ourselves, how we see the world. right and what's interesting is that we keep learning as we become adults I mean keep getting different curriculums right and I think what you are oh too many there's a few curriculums I'd like to drop out of do I get to yes you do and that's what's so cool about when people come to EMDR they realize I was given these different curriculums I don't agree with that curriculum right that curriculum's

bullshit and I want to now reconfigure the curriculum and I'm going to write it myself and So I think what's amazing is that, you know, talk therapy is so wonderful. It does so much for so many people, but it leaves out the body, right? And I think we feel a lot of incongruence between what we're supposed to think or what we're trying to think, like mindset stuff, right? And like our body has a completely different response and feeling. So I think EMDR has done a beautiful job of combining all these things together. And by doing bilateral simulation, by taxing the work.

memory. We really can desensitize a lot of disturbing things. And it's just, it's amazing. And I will also share, I'm a client of EMDR. I do my own EMDR work. And it's great for trauma work. It's great for just realizing I have some incongruencies in different curriculums. I'm going to tweak this. I'm going tweak this. It's incredible. It's really incredible. It's such a, it's, that's such a refreshing way to look at thoughts as I need to refine that curriculum. That's not how I normally think about thoughts. It's more like the way I would say the old version of before I started working with you, like the way my brain would think would be like, where did that thought come from? And, you know, is there a different version of that thought that I can think?

As opposed to like, let me just take that thought and put it, I don't want to think it anymore. and how can I choose a new curriculum that I'm going to enroll in and not enroll in that one that keeps beating myself up? Like, it's almost like I analyzed the thought so much that the thought started to gain more power. That was it. And what I've learned in doing EMDR is the thought seemed to soften. And then the thoughts that were important before an EMDR session

all of a sudden seemed to strangely not be important anymore. Yeah. Can you explain to me why that happens? Because that is the trippiest thing. And I've done a lot of mindset work in my life. And that trips me out how I could come in with one thought that's agitating the heck out of me. And then like after a session with you, it's like, I don't know, the next couple of days,

like the thought's just gone. It's like not even there. It has no charge. This is the coolest part I think about E&R is getting to hear people say afterwards what you describe, which is that. That doesn't feel as powerful or as intense or as disturbing. It doesn't take up as much space. And it's because when we have a disturbance, whether it's in the current time, whether it's in the past, we even have disturbances about things that are maybe going to happen in the future, right?

So all across time, we have these things that are bothering us, right? Thoughts about self, thoughts about the world in terms of safety, control, am I enough? And what's so cool with EMDR is that with the bilateral simulation, we're creating, right, either with eye movements or with buzzers, we're creating kind of this very soothing sensation. It's just kind of neutralizing disturbances. And then what's happening, I believe, is that your brain is accelerated to link to every part of your brain, to gather information, almost kind of like a scientist to say, where did I learn that? And what else do I know?

Right. And then when that, when that curriculum integrates in our minds, it also takes our body with us. So we know EMDR is completed and that the desensitization is done because our body is calm. Yeah. Our body doesn't respond anymore. Okay. On that note, though, when you're dealing with a menopausal body, it's not like it always feels calm. Let's just highlight. that for a moment, without progesterone, calm body can be, you know, a thing of the past. So what I'm curious about is if you are going through life trying to fix your problems from your head and you're not bringing the body into the conversation, can you actually get over traumas in your life? Or is the new awareness around the brain, that we have to involve the body.

And did that come from the body keeps the score book? Like, is this new to us or just new to me? It's for good questions. Oh, man. I think that there has been so much conversation in the mental health field about how the body keeps the score and how the body stores trauma. And the body also stores positive experience. experiences too. This is true. We don't talk about that enough. We don't. And so when we have somebody

coming into therapy who has a different experience of their body because of hormones or because of, you know, different chemicals or wiring, we want to think about not just how we desensitize disturbances with EMDR, but also how do we expand positive resources and positive experiences in the body, right? Because just like I might have. a trigger around, you know, a certain color car because of an experience in that kind of a car and that feels negative. I also might have a really positive experience around thinking about going to the beach or thinking about picking out a Christmas tree, right? And so we really are mapping the positive and negative associations in our brain, dropping them into our body

and expanding those. I'm just laughing because we haven't talked yet about my Christmas tree. My Christmas tree. Is it positively or negatively? It's horrible. It's horribly negative. I just triggered you. I just triggered you on your podcast. I'm sorry.

And anybody that knows me is like, did she just say Christmas tree? Like my closest friends are going to be like, oh my God. And, you know, it's, but this is, let's use this as an example. We as a family can never decide on the right Christmas tree. And so we, the four of us argue. And then we finally, somebody has to give in. We get the Christmas tree. We bring it home.

And then we put it in the stand and it never stands up right. And it literally is like becomes a family fight. So like now we know this. Yes. Now we know it as it's become a joke. It's like, okay, it's going to take two hours to go get the Christmas tree. We're going to have to spend 30 minutes arguing over which one. And then we're going to all come home. And then, you know, everybody's going to try to get it to stand up right while, you know, we make dinner. It's just like part of the, part of the process. So. Yes. But you make a great point that there's traumatic associations with things that other people find to be positively linked in their brain, right? And so one of the one of the things that are really skilled EMDR clinician will do for you

or for people is that they will understand what has a positive link and what has a negative link, right, to help you understand how to desensitize the negative and expand the positive. So how would I take a situation like that and make it, I mean, it's Christmas for God's sake. Like, how would I make that positive? Because it is a little bit like we're going to. want to get the tree today. And there's like, is that where you, where EMDR would actually take you back through? Like, where else in your life have you felt totally out of control and, like, frustrated because nothing was working? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the circumstance you described is hard. It's stressful. And if we have kind of a disproportionate response to that, because it's linking to

other things like feeling out of control or associations with holidays that maybe came earlier, right? Then we could go back and process those with EMDR, decrease those disturbances. I kind of think about it like, since I know we're both parents, I kind of think about it like when you do EMDR, you need to have a time traveler with you that's going to go back and go to all the places in time. You need to have a scientist that's going to go like pick the data to see the different curriculum. And then you're going to have to have like a good enough parent to kind of go back and help these younger parts of us get reparented and kind of bring them into now, right?

So I think that, yeah, you know, if there's someone that has a trigger around Christmas, we would go back into the past prong, look at that, look at the current prong and say, what resources can we actually create around Christmas so that it feels positive? Maybe we skip the tree. I don't know, right? We skip the tree. Her mom stays home. Yeah.

Yeah. So then, and just so for people who haven't done EMDR, the way that would feel to me, just using the Christmas tree as an example, and this is the way it has felt to me, is that then I'm in that situation again, and I'm strangely not triggered. Like in that, like here, I can sort of laugh about the situation because it's July, and I've still got six months to prepare for the Christmas tree. But I, but I also. would say that there becomes sort of this like the situation shows up and you're like, well, that's interesting. Why is that not triggering me? And is that because we brought the body into it and we integrated the brain and the body together and then we tied it to past memories that were

beyond just that event that you may have been bringing into the Christmas tree moment? Is that how it works? So, yeah. So basically with EMGR, we'd pick a target to, process, right? So let's say the most disturbing part of the Christmas extravaganza is the image of the tree falling over, right? That represents the greatest disturbance. Now, that's the worst part. It is the worst part. Yeah. Yes. And then we would want to be curious about we have that image. Okay, now what's the negative belief that goes with it? And it could be something like, I mean, people come up with all sorts of negative beliefs. Like, I'm not good enough, right? Or I don't have control or I don't have choices or I feel trapped.

It can be around so many different things. And then we want to get curious around, okay, well, we have this negative belief. What's the positive belief you want to go towards? If you had a magic wand and you had this image of the tree, right, what would you want it to be instead? Typically, it's the opposite of the negative belief. Yeah, I'd like it to stand up straight on the first go. Yeah. And if it didn't, I would still have a positive belief of, I can figure things out, or I am good enough, or I have choices.

I can throw the damn tree outside, whatever, right? And then we want to be curious about the emotion and the body sensations that go with that target image and that negative belief. Because what we're doing is we're identifying four pieces, the four variables of memory, right? The picture, the belief, the body sensation, the emotion, right? This is the blend of all the therapies I was talking about in the beginning coming together. We kind of bundle them.

Okay, so you're bringing in other senses. all the senses hopefully interesting okay so that's what makes it different from like talk therapy that I used to do so when I was when I was a teenager I don't even know if you know this

I was struggling in school and I was taken to a therapist at 16 and I really like the guy like he was he like totally got me like it was really cool and it became this place that I would just sit and chat with him. And so I learned, hey, chatting with somebody like that feels really good. But I'm not sure I ever really made progress other than I had a really,

you know, an adult that was listening to me probably for the first time, which felt really good. So what I'm hearing is what you're saying is, is that we're doing that and we're bringing in other parts with EMDR so that we can have a deeper healing experience. Yes. Talk therapy has so much value because it creates a lot of the new curriculum, the narratives, the resources, the sense of self, how do I see myself? And so when people come in and they say to me, I've done talk therapy for 20 years, but I'm still disturbed by XYZ, I know that they have all those resources already in their brain, which is awesome because we can link to all those things when we process, right? Because the brain's always looking for adaptive material. Our brains want us to

feel better. They want us to heal. Right. And so when we identify in the target, those four variables of memory, like around the disturbance, around Christmas trees, right? We then have this cluster that we're going to, you know, process through with bilateral simulation, eye movements, or tactile buzzers, right? Okay. And so we're desensitizing that disturbance of the memory and we're actually rewriting it. So, okay, so talk about the buzzers, talk about the hand, the, the, the, the, when people do like whatever this thing is back and forth. You haven't done that to me. But and then I saw something that, I don't know, like six months ago where Prince Harry was,

was taught from an EMDR specialist to like do like tap on other sides of his shoulder. What is going on when we're doing this bilateral stimulation? Yes. Oh, you are asking a juicy question. This is kind of the hot topic right now in the EMDR community. Oh, great. So when Francine Shapiro discovered EMDR in the 80s, the story, kind of the fable is like she was on a walk. And she noticed that if she looked at the right and left side and thought about something disturbing, she'd noticed a decrease in disturbance.

And so EMDR was born around eye movements, right? What we now understand is that the right side, left side, the bilateral simulation can be done by tapping, right? they call the butterfly hug. It can be done with the tactile buzzers that buzz back and forth in your hand, right? Okay. And then some therapists still do eye movements back and forth and they have a light bar and other things like that. And then what's really, really cool is that there's a new research coming out around this theory of taxing the working memory. And so some clinicians are noticing, and there's research behind this, that you don't actually need eye movements.

You don't even need bilateral stimulation. if you give your working memory a task like walking around and counting numbers or coloring, like if you give yourself multiple working memory tasks, doing those neutral tasks actually decrease the disturbance as well. Okay, wait, talk about this because I'm a walker and talker. Like I can't sit and like chat with somebody. I have to get up and move around. Yeah.

And maybe your, maybe our bodies aren't meant to sit and talker. think, right? If we know that, I mean, think about it. People say, if you're upset, go for a walk around the block and come back. Yeah, right? There is something or exercising when we're pushing on a bike, right, right, side, left side. When we're giving our body a task, it does decrease disturbance typically or and or expands a positive resource. So when you get up and you move around, the brain has something else to think about. It has to actually, even though walking feels very like natural, the brain still has to coordinate that movement. And so it has another task, which calms it from obsessing on the thing that either the problem or calms it from being what I would

call like hypervigilant. Would that be a way to look at it? It takes away the intensity of what is disturbing you. Absolutely. Absolutely. And so I think that, and it makes sense, right? I mean, that's kind of a more neutral thing to do. On top of the activity itself of walking, you're also allowing your brain to have like a fulfillment of movement. So typically when we have a disturbance, our bodies have an urge. Our bodies might have an urge to fight or flee or freeze, right? And so if we're sitting still with disturbance, that can kind of reignite a freeze response that we might have had as a kid. If we're moving, like I actually will sometimes go in my parking lot with buzzers with a client and we will walk around the parking lot because they're able to move in a way they

couldn't move before, which is part of, I think, the healing process. So you'd be a good hiking partner is what I just heard. Oh, I love to move. I can't sit still. I struggle to believe me. That's why like my hands start moving when I sit. Yes. Yeah, because it's like something's got to move. So, okay, explain this part. So the other interesting thing that I found with EMDR is the availability of my brain to sort of reveal what may not be working for it anymore. And about two years ago, I had Bruce Lipton on my podcast. And we were talking about subconscious patterning. And he got into like when you go to sleep, you have to remember your brain goes into this.

Theta wave state as you're going to sleep and it's a great time to listen to affirmations because you can reprogram your brain when you go to sleep and when you come out of sleep and I really took that to heart and I I protect that time of the like the going to sleep and the coming out of sleep is like I'm really careful about what I think and how I want to what thoughts I want to ruminate on With with EMDR with the tappers you and I have done where I stick them under my legs and like then just shit comes out of my brain. And I'm like, where do that come from? How did that? And I've even said to you, I'm like, I don't know why I'm telling you this. It's like, true serum.

Like all of a sudden, it's like, I'm just, we're going to go down this path. Okay, explain to me what that is and why that happens. So from watching my EMDR clients, from doing my own EMDR, there's something about the bilateral simulation with the tapers. I feel like it accelerates linkages in the brain. feel like it is the fuel for the time traveler, for the scientists, right, for the parent. Like it gives the fuel to the linkages, right? And so I think that people will often say, like, I don't know why my brain is linking to this right now. This isn't, this isn't connected

to this. But how do we know? How do we know in this moment, right, that I've landed on, that it's unrelated? Because maybe the body sensation is linked. Maybe the, negative belief or positive belief is linked. Maybe the smell is the same. It doesn't matter, right? I mean, it really, it's interesting. I finish my own EMDR targets and I'm like, what the hell just happened? Like, where did we just go? And like, you know, I want to make sense of it. I want to understand it. And, you know, sometimes there'll even be things we land on that don't have, that they're pre-verbal. They don't have a clear narrative or a clear memory. It could just be a body. sensation, right? But we can always trust our bodies to link. It's amazing. So is that how memories are

always linked to other memories? Like, like, you can't, you can't just have a memory in isolation. It has to be linked to something else. Like, your brain has to make sense of it. Like, even, you know, we can use this moment for me. Like, I'm here in Sausalito, looking out at a beautiful view. Is my brain linking to other times I've been in situations like this and, like, form a network of memories together? Yeah, it is. It is, and I will just say a caveat, which is that sometimes our brain chooses

to not cluster memories together and chooses to take something and put it somewhere else so that we are protected from it. Right? So oftentimes people will do E&DR and they'll link to something that they've forgotten about on purpose.

Like a part of them decided this is going to go over here, right? And we'll kind of get this part, like, reintegrated with us in different ways that feels safe to us. So if everything's integrated, we have a sense of self, our brain's linking, linking, linking, where people can sometimes get stuck with EMDR is when something has been intentionally subconsciously protected from them. Where does it, where does the brain put?

So now I have a question for my book right now because I'm deep in studying all the different parts of the brain. Where does the brain put that? Where does the most traumatic things go? What part of the brain do you know? I don't know where the brain puts parts of self that are not integrated. I don't know that we've found a way, like where that is mapped because that's really a spectrum, right?

I mean, there's people that have DID, multiple personalities, and they really have fragmented sense of self. And then there's people who just kind of like forget things because it's too hard to integrate, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. So let's put it in. context of the menopausal brain because I'm mildly fascinated with the metapausal brain, not just because I have one, but because I watch so many women suffer through this.

And so here's the way that my understanding of this is right now. The amygdala and the prefrontal cortex are often working, I would call it against each other. I am sure you have a reframe for me on that one. But this is the way I would say is like the amygdala wants to keep me safe. And so the amygdala is constantly scanning my environment for safety. And when something comes into my environment that I don't feel safe with, it highlights that and makes it a priority. It's your alarm system.

It's my alarm system. Okay. So the prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that's like, hey, we should do this, this, this, and this. There's so many, I call it the place of hope and possibility. like, hey, we could go do this. I could be that. I could do that.

Like, life is very possible. But the two always feel like they're working. Like the amygdala is like, you know, like the parent that's like, hey, chill out. It's not that great. And the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex is like the part of the brain that's like, no, it could be great. It could be really, really good. And like the two of them are constantly going at each other.

And from a hormonal standpoint, there are estrogen and progester. receptors in both parts of those of the brain. And actually the amygdala has more receptors for GABA, which progestron is a precursor for GABA. And I think that's to calm the brain down. But then once we go into menopause, we don't have access to GABA. Do you see where I'm going with this? And the amygdala wins. And then we end up walking around looking at everything that we need to control. Everything could potentially go wrong. We are, you know, mothering teenage children, which will get your amygdala flying. There's so many things that allow that that whole limbic system just to come to the surface. Yeah. So my question to you is, A, am I right? Like, is that how it works?

And then B, like, what can you do to integrate those two parts of the brain? Because it's like a battle sometimes in my brain between for real estate of am I going to choose hope and possibility or am I going to be fearful of this moment and really think through and not go into action for fear that the amygdala is right and something bad could happen to me? This is such a good question. So what I'll say is that when we have gotten disturbing curriculum, we can call it traumatic, right, that's disturbing to us now. We have basically had our alarm system customized, probably not by choice, right?

Yeah. So we have a customized alarm system that's going to try to help us stay safe from whatever that thing or things were going forward, right? I think what's so confusing, especially for women, is that when our hormones are changing, right, our alarm system is going off, but there might not be a trauma history. There might not be old curriculum that needs to be modified and to be curious about. And so I think what's so important that and why I'm such a champion of what you're doing is that you are giving women a narrative about what's happening with their bodies now

that they can incorporate in real time to understand, right? I might be feeling like my alarm system's going off at 2 o'clock in the morning as I'm sweating. And I know I'm safe because I have. a way to understand my body sensations. Okay, so let's talk about that second thing. How, what gives you the safety then? Is that like at two in the morning, you're sweating, you're ruminating, you don't feel safe. Is that then understanding, okay, well, could you act, like let's give some people some,

if you don't have an EMDR specialist near you. Could you start doing the shoulder tapping? and could you ask yourself like, okay, it's clear I don't feel safe right now. I don't seem to have enough GABA. Well, that makes sense because I don't have, I don't have, this is literally me at two in the morning. I don't have enough progesterone to help me with GABA. So I don't have to believe this thought that I'm not safe. But it's two in the morning.

What the hell do I do with that thought? So I think what you just created in real time, is a resource for people. I mean, wouldn't it be amazing if they could listen to you, give them a calming narrative about what's happening with their body hormonally while they tapped it in in real time to understand, I am safe. This is what's happening to my body. I understand myself. My body doesn't feel good right now when it's hot and my heart is racing and I have a cadence. That doesn't feel good. But if I can have the understanding that I am safe now and I can hear Mindy's voice tapping that in, right, because I'm going through perimenopause or menopause, right?

Then that takes away the intensity of the alarm system. The tapping does. And the naming it. The narrative. The narrative. I mean, think about how many people, I mean, I'll just say this. I mean, just the ladies on my street, we all get together, you know, once a month. And it's like, I've heard them tell me so many times that I've lost joy in what I'm doing.

I'm having hot flashes. I'm anxious all the time. And they, you know, talk to me as the kind of the neighborhood therapist. Like, should I be, do I have trauma? Like, what the hell is going on with me? And sometimes that's, that's the case. And sometimes it's not. And just them being able to understand what's happening to their own body because no one taught them that. Like growing up, they didn't get a curriculum around this is what's going to happen to you later in life. So it feels like a shock. It does feel traumatizing because there's no framework to put it into. Yeah. So just by. labeling it, naming it,

understanding it, the healing has already happened in that moment. Yeah. Yes. That's not, that's what's not happening for menopausal women right now because we're being shamed, we're being medicated.

You know, you and I've talked about this. Like the debate is around HRT, BHRT, no, yes. Like there's so much to think about just to navigate your hormones dropping. It's gotten ridiculous now. And so, But what I have experienced, and I call it the neurochemical armor, that when we're younger, because all these receptor sites are being stimulated by these hormones, we actually have more neurochemical resources to handle the traumas or maybe even to hide the traumas.

And so, but once that goes away, and you run this past the ladies on the street, once that goes away, the next. once that goes away the next month it's like you're standing on the street totally naked yes and you're like i'm like i'm not well there's something's not well and and that if you're listening to this and that's you i again please know i'm i'm highlighting this i'm writing about this i'm educating people on this because i am you it is part of the menopausal experience that is not being highlighted enough. And as a trauma therapist, I thank you for that. Because what is traumatizing to anybody is that they're having a very real experience and no one is reflecting back to them what's happening to them.

Right. And so I think that, I mean, and I've seen this too with women like, I'm having this experience in my body and in my emotions, but I'm gaslighting myself that I'm not or that I should be. who I was or how I felt before this, like just the gaslighting around this is really toxic for people. And I do think that, I mean, that is toxic. That is abusive, I think. So I think for you to be able to clearly name for people what's happening to their bodies, right, is creating an experience for them where they can experience their own body in an natural state, you know, as we age, where it doesn't have to be so traumatic, right? We don't have to gaslight ourselves. We don't have to be shocked this is happening or confused about why.

it's happening. We can talk about it. And then we have a health care system that has this patriarchal approach to it. And so we give our power away to it when we step in there. And then we are gaslighted once again and there. And that that's another whole issue. So let's speak to that 48-year-old woman who is resonating with this. Is there, let's go back to some of the she can do to self-soothe herself. Like can she do the bilateral tapping or is that like is that dangerous you you always say when I love those tapers you're like just don't process anything big with that which I don't really know what that means. I should probably tell you that right now. Like huh. Hmm. Okay. I'll know it's too big what all of a sudden I'm a hot mess and I end up in

your office. But what how what tools can we give her if she's feeling emotionally nays? naked, very vulnerable, the traumas are coming to the surface. That's the woman I want to help, because that's the woman, as I've shared with you, that's the woman that's killing herself. That's the woman who's leaving her marriage because she doesn't understand what is happening to her in this neurochemical moment. How do we help her? Yes. So naming it, right? Just the fact that you're giving education to people about this is what it feels like, this is what's happening, you know, to you for you. And you're not alone. That in itself, right, is decreasing the traumatic experience because then they don't have the negative beliefs of something's wrong with me.

I'm alone, right? They don't have this feeling of like permanence around like, you know, disorientation and shock. And then I would say that, yes, I mean, whether you're doing EMDR or talk therapy, I don't think anyone should be with traumatic material by themselves, ideally, right? And so I don't want people to do EMDR traumatic processing by themselves. There is a ton of research that shows that we can do resourcing on our own all day, every day. And I would encourage people to identify, kind of do an inventory of what does light me up, right? What are my positive triggers, right? What expands me.

And we always talk about triggers and like this, I'm negatively triggered and this is triggering me. But we're triggered into the positive, right? if you, maybe you walk into the house and someone's cooking lasagna and it's like, whoa, my whole body is. So noticing what your positive triggers are and then expanding those with butterfly hugs and taps, right, is a really quick way to regulate yourself. Okay, so let me just make sure. I don't want anybody to fall asleep to what you just said. So hopefully you're not falling to sleep. But so you could have, you can be in the middle of a positive memory and go, okay, this feels. so good, I want to integrate this into my system. Yes. And you can do the tapping. And those of you that can't see what we're doing, this interview will be on the Resetter podcast YouTube. You can go

watch it there. But you can just, you're just doing that bilateral tapping. The butterfly. The butterfly tap. To get it ingrained into your, into your brain in a positive one. You're basically doing the same target, the four variables of memory, but on the positive. So like, let's say that I am at the beach with my twins and we're having a total blast, right? And I literally do this. I might stop. Notice I'm having an absolute blast, right? I have this picture of them in the water and that's the target positive image.

What's the positive belief, right? You know, I am safe or all as well or I'm a good mom. whatever it is. What's my emotion? I'm elated. I can feel it in my chest is expansive, right? I have, like, strength in my arms. And I just notice those four things. And I tap that in. I tap it in real time because then I can pull it up later if I wake up in the middle of night and I'm full of anxiety. So if you wake up at two in the morning and you just, two weeks prior, maybe even two months, maybe even two years prior, you had this amazing moment at the beach with your kids, you can anchor yourself back to it.

The tapping is the physical way to stimulate the body to help the brain remember. Hey, remember when we had this going on? Yeah, you just need like a little piece of strain that you can pull into this, like, wellness portal, right? So maybe I pull up that image of my kids on the beach and maybe I say that belief, right? I'm a good mom. And then I just start tapping. And then my body, because everything's linking, my body's. starts to feel that expansive chest, those strong arms, that feeling of safety.

Amazing. Okay. So, let's, yeah. Yeah. Like, now I have 20 more questions on that. So let's say you're in the middle of what you could potentially be a traumatic moment. You're having a situation and you're like, okay, this is not where. And again, this is where for the menopausal woman, the neurochemical armor is not there.

So we're easy to agitate. And so when those, you see it being a potential further, you know, trauma that could stay in you for a while. Can you, is there like a pattern interrupt you can do in that moment? Could you walk out of that situation and then go do something different? Like how do you make sure that situation doesn't get integrated into the brain and now you're going to have to go do more EMDR? So I love this question because what you're asking is kind of like the pinnacle, kind of kind of. kind of more advanced levels of EMDR work, which is how do I actually get to choose in real time what curriculum I'm integrating?

Yes, yes. Like I am the master of my life. I am choosing the curriculum. When something's happening to me that feels negative, how can I, as close as I can as I can to that moment that it's happening, choose how to store this. Yes. Yes. That is what I'm asking.

I do this with my kids all the time if I can catch it. right because anything under five we're going to store as like I am bad I'm not enough right all these concepts of self and so we have multiple pairs of buzzers at our house they're all over the house right oh my God I love this yeah yeah and people can buy tappers I mean they're they're not expensive they can buy the buzzers right even just having them on kind of feels like a rocking sensation and regulates you but if you've noticed something upsetting is happening and let's say you want to kind of go back to the beach, right? Let's say I'm something bad's happening for me and I'm upset. Let's say I get a disturbing phone call or I get an offender bender on the way home.

I might stop and I might bring that resource in, right, just to kind of desensitize what's happening now. And then if I have the resources to be able to say to myself, that fender bender happened, it's okay, right? I'm safe now, that positive belief of I can figure things out because it's really that kind of the medicine for a lot of women's default, which is like, oh, I should have dot, dot, dot, right, taking on so much responsibility. We turn on ourselves. We turn on ourselves so much. I don't know if you's from your clinical experience, if you think women turn on themselves more than men. But we're trained to do that from the beginning. Yeah. Yeah. We're trained, we are given that curriculum from the beginning. Yeah. So, so true. So, okay, in that other example,

when I, if I had something negative happened to me and I want to tap it out, what do I need to think of when I'm actually doing the, the bilateral shoulder? What did you call it? Shoulder tap? The butterfly tap. Yeah.

Yeah. The butterfly tap. But do I have to think about anything or do I just, can I just be like, okay, close my eyes and just be like, okay, that was really hard. Like that was really, that was an issue. That was something like, let me think of something else. Like, or do you just kind of let the emotion of that moment process through you? Oh, so there's like a three-pronged answer to your question. So the first thing we can do when we're having a negative experience is to call in a positive resource, right? Maybe it's my kids at the beach with me. Okay. The other thing we can do, right, is just to tap because just doing this gives our body so much regulation and comfort. It also feels like a hug. It feels really good. It does. It feels really good. Yes. And so we can regulate with tapping.

right? We can call in a positive memory that we've already installed or we can call in like a figure, right? I mean, just the words you said like everything's okay. I mean, we might call that a nurturing parent figure coming in to talk you through the disturbance, right? And so a lot of my people that I work with, they'll identify figures that are real like, you know, grandmothers or teachers from elementary school that they kind of call in to comfort them when they need that nurturing and protection. Some people, because the brain doesn't care if something's real or imaginary, it has the same response, will call in imaginary TV characters, right? Or people from movies or people from books to come and sued them. Yeah. That's a really interesting. So just somebody that gives you that

sort of warm, fuzzy, you feel safe and then you tap it out. And it's, it takes, it neutralizes that traumatic situation that you may have just been under. And again, where my brain then goes, And then is it erased from your brain? Like, does that mean it's gone from your brain? Or is it just lessens its intensity? It's stored in your brain in a more ideal way than it could have been had you not resourced yourself. Got it. Okay.

And do you think that the brain is obsessed with fixing problems? Oh. I think the brain and the body want to heal itself all the time. and I think we can see that physically, right? I mean, when my kids get a boo-boo and I'm like, look at how your body wants to heal itself. Look at your body's healing. I want people to understand that your body wants that on the inside, too. And so when we do EMDR, what I've noticed is the brain doesn't typically go to negative material or kind of maladaptive material.

It goes towards adaptive material, right? So in EMDR, we have this adaptive information processing system that believes, and we can, can see this, your brain's always trying to link towards helping, healing, fixing, right? Right. It's always trying to help you. So one of the things that I find really interesting about my brain, and I'm thinking it's not unique to my brain, I'm thinking that it is, that's why I asked that question, is that it does like to obsess on challenges. I'm not going to call them problems. And sometimes it's like, it just wants to figure out like, I'm just going to really be transparent. Like last night, we're sitting here in Sausalito. There's like this beautiful

fog coming in. And all of a sudden this thought hits in my head. Do we control our own reality? Like do we, like, I was thinking about the waving fog. And I was like, do we control? Like, what if everything in life was like pre-determined? Like, do I believe? like the kind of destiny idea. And so now for like two hours, my brain's like, do I think about, what do I think of destiny? Do I think I have any control? Do I have any control? And it was like a dog on a bone.

I could not stop thinking about if I had control or not or if my life was the Truman show or not. Or if it was, and it was like, all it wanted to do was chew on that. And then, and I think in working with the patients that I've worked with, when they're in pain and when they're in a chronic health crisis, the brain becomes like a record that can start skipping or if we start playing the same song over and over and over and over again. Is that a natural state of the brain? And is it healthy? Like I gave you a positive example of my brain, but as you know, there's plenty of negative ones that

have shown up for me as well. And I think I'm not, I call myself out because I don't think I'm unique in this. I think that a lot of people grab on to one thing and they just, a thought and they just keep playing it and playing it and playing it and playing it and playing it. And they can't put it down. Yes, I think our brains are designed to be curious. And something that I appreciate about you is that you have a passion for understanding yourself and understanding others.

and you have a, and you have a fire to help people see themselves, right? And so it makes sense to me that your brain would want to play with that. Now, I think, I think to answer your question, is this healthy, is this normal, whatever? I ask is, like, what's the, what's the fuel? What's the emotion of it? Because if it's like, oh, this is interesting and I'm curious and this is like, I'm playing with Plato and this is creative, right? Then you might say that's healthy and interesting to you, right? But there are some people who can kind of ruminate and get stuck on something and that they kind of have this observer part that's like, oh, this feels bad. I can't unstick myself from this. This feels, you know, like a darker kind of emotion or like an anxiety feeling, right?

Okay. So we're back at hormones again. So when you, when... How could we leave everything related to hormones? How could we leave hormones? They're so powerful. They are. They are. They could control. Like they control this whole thing in our head, which is why I'm like, okay, hello, is anybody pointing out what do we do when they're gone? Those of us that are left around to like deal with this control center totally changing. And now our brain is like wide open. But here's here's one of the things that I think the amygdala does because this is my theory on this is that it wants to keep you safe. And when it doesn't have GABA because it doesn't have progesterone, it gets OCD. And it is constantly, constantly, it's like, okay, yeah, I know you,

you think you're safe over there, but let me tell you, you're not safe here, and you're not safe there, and you're not safe there. And it constantly is yacking at me, trying to tell me what I need to fix. And that, I think, I don't think I'm unusual to that. So, I mean, maybe, but, But you correct me if I'm wrong, but I think a lot of women were fixers. We worry about our kids. We worry about our jobs. We're constantly worrying, worrying, worrying, which is why you always hear the put your own oxygen mask on first. But then we go into menopause and now we're OCD about our worries. And we don't have the neurochemical armor to be able to help ourselves. So how do we stop those looping thoughts?

That's what I'm getting at. I just gave you a positive example of it. Yeah. I think if we want to unstick ourselves from a thought, right? The first thing to do is move your body. Right? Get up and move. Do any working memory task, right?

Whether it's tapping or moving, change the temperature of where you are. Go outside and get air, right? Like change, change what your brain is linking to to see if you can kind of shake up the linkages. In therapy, we talk about OCD kind of like a sprinkler brain, like a sprinkler and it kind of get stuck in the same place and it can't get unstuck, right? Now, some people have created an adaptation in a younger age where if something's wrong and are not safe, I will fix it, right? And so sometimes we will reach for these adaptations or these strategies if we don't feel good, right?

It could be, I'm going to drink. I mean, we saw this during COVID. Like, I'm going to drink a lot. I'm going to eat a lot. I'm going to shop a lot. I'm going to, you know, what is the adaptation to soothe myself, right? And so when you're describing women going to this hormonal change and they don't have these resources available to them in terms of the hormonal chemistry they had before, I would say change up the environment and change up your body.

in terms of movement as soon as possible. And it breaks, it's like, it breaks the looping thought. It's like a pattern interrupt. It's going to link to something different. Yeah. I mean, it has to, right? The thought will go find a different thing to, to, yeah, different pattern. Your brain's like always looking to link to something.

I mean, that's what it's doing for you, right? So change what's available for it to link to. Even just going in water, I think, can be a complete reset for people in terms of linking. and soothing and resourcing. That's the, I feel like we're in therapy now. You just gave me. I just got asking some, I just got a huge aha.

That was good. Okay, go ahead. What are you saying? Well, you're asking some really important questions. And I'm not going to pretend I have all the answers, you know, in terms of like, what do we tell someone that is, you know, stuck on something because they're home. I mean, this is why as a therapist, I say to people,

we will work on things happening in your nervous system and in your mind. And also you need to go work with your medical team to get your blood work and get all the, because we need to see what the sources are, right, on kind of our differential diagnosis list here. Yeah. Right. Yeah. We need a, I mean, that team approach in general, like the fact that we do health in a silo is part of the suffering for menopausal women. Like, you know, I always think that whenever I give a big speech, I always tell the audience, like, I'm, you see one person up here, but if you could see the lens in which I have been able to see millions of women cry out through, you would realize, A, you're not alone. And, and B, that you're stronger if we come together and talk about these things. Because I just think we're not, it's not,

it's not being highlighted enough. So, again, why I hope that people listening to this are connecting dots for themselves. One thought I want to make sure I don't walk away from because this is a thought you taught me. You actually, you've taught me a lot. I think, hopefully you know that. But that concept of adaptation. So I'm going to use myself as an example. I have adapted in many ways because of how my sister showed up in my life and the relationship with her. And it created for me some really positive traits and maybe some not so positive traits. So how do we know what might be a personality trait that was actually formulated because of an away to from a loved one or a situation? because what I didn't even realize in all the work I've done on my own self,

I never realized that I am showing up today at 53 with adaptations that my 16-year-old self-decided needed to be different and may no longer actually serve me until you actually brought that word, oh, that's an adaptation to my brain. Can you talk a little bit about that? This is, I think, one of the more powerful pieces of how we have kind of mapped the brain with EMDR. And, you know, I get concerned when therapists talk and focus a lot about trauma therapy because it's not so much of like the event of what happened. It's what did I decide from this experience about myself and others. What are the rules?

And then the adaptation that we create from that, right? So let's say that I grew up with a dad who's always always yelling at me, right? And I decide I am bad. And then I create an adaptation to be perfect, right, so that I stay safe and I stay connected to my caregiver. Right. So that adaptation serves me at that time. And also I created that adaptation when I was four. Right.

And I'm taking it through every decade of my life. into every relationship and probably getting overdeveloped, right? It's a damn good adaptation. I've mastered many of those. Yes. And so what's so powerful, I think, for us is to understand that once we understand what our adaptations are, and by the way, everyone has that. Like, no one is immune from having them. Once we understand that we can create our adaptations and that we can modify the ones we created at age four and seven and 12 and 16, then we start to feel the real power, I think, of how our mind links and maps to things, right? Yeah.

Then we really feel like the master of our own curriculum. Yeah. I know. I love this word curriculum. I actually am like, okay, I'm going to write my own curriculum. How do I write my own mental curriculum? Has anybody ever, there's a tool. You need to write that.

How do you create? I'm writing enough. You need to write that one. How do we create? How do we create our own curriculum? So, and I will say I use this language because I have an education background. And so I actually appreciate about you that you can take the different silos of your experience, right, medically and combine them and use them together. And so I use a lot of educational terminology when it comes to therapy because that's how I understand how people learn, right?

We're just learning all the time. We kind of assign like positive, negative, neutral. But I think, you know, just as an EMDR client myself, I notice that when my brain starts to link things together, right, from the younger experiences and my adult self as the observer, collecting this data, reparenting these parts, that's the integration. That's the new curriculum forming, right, where we land on that positive belief. And that's what I think is so disorienting for people after they finish their EMDR targets. Because there's this kind of like, okay, that that feels neutral now. And now this feels true. And there is this snow globe analogy I use where it's like, we took a snow globe,

we shake it up when we do EMDR. We're rewiring associations and narratives. And then it takes some time for it to settle in as real, as the new curriculum, as the new narrative that we're in. It's just so cool to be able to see. Yeah, I mean, I would say disorienting is a little bit of some of the experiences I've just had as I've dove into all the, what we're talking about and a little bit of like, whoa, what's going on? But then as things settle more, I love the Snow Globe analogy, because as things settle more, you start to see, it's like, I mean, the word I use is it's like you're in a different reality. You are. You are. You are in a different reality, which is weird because then you go, if I ever get stuck again, I just need to change that. I just need to go back through and change that reality because all like pain and suffering can stem from just an altered reality.

And having choices too, right? I mean, because I think that our mind is powerful. We can rewrite what has happened to us. We can, in terms of who we are, our goodness or our badness. sadness, right? And what I think is cool with EMDR is that people are in really toxic, abusive work situations or relationships and they get clarity and congruence about what's actually happening, right? And then they're like, I'm out of here. I have choices, right? So there's actual, so there's actual changes and then there's internal changes as well. And those things, you know, go together. But I want women listening to this to feel like they are powerful. I want them to be able to understand themselves and their bodies. That's really important. And I want them to know that EMDR is not just for trauma therapy. It's just like for anything you've learned that's incongruent.

Right. Right. You can create that congruency and clarity for yourself. And if hormones are kind of coming in and creating different body sensations, right, that they know that they can turn your podcast. on and listen to you, explain to them what's happening and have a narrative so that they don't have to create all these crazy adaptations or they don't have to go back to adaptations from childhood, right? Yeah. I mean, that's exactly. That's where our hearts unite. I absolutely agree with that.

It's like helping just bring what hasn't been talked about enough to the surface. So I think is really important. So thank you for that. Last couple of thoughts. You've mentioned a couple of times when I feel. finished my targets. Are you ever finished with EMDR? Oh, so this is, this is what trips me up. So, so I've worked with EMDR on, you know, more kind of complex trauma, single incident trauma, relational trauma. I've worked on it to just get congruent about the gaslighting that society gives

me around who I can be as a mom, as a woman, my relationship with my power. my enoughness, right? I mean, EMDR has helped me with all of those things. Are you ever done with a target? Yes. You can complete a target memory, a target image. Absolutely. Are you ever done with EMDR? I think what happens is that people try it and they're like, oh my God, more please of this. And then they want to do more targets and more integration. Oh, yeah. Because it's just like so amazing. Talk about relabeling. You know what happens? to me now is like if I get stuck on a negative thought, I'm like, ooh, I don't want to think that anymore. You know, and I mean, and then I, you know, I'm blessed to have you to come to.

But it also allows me, it's empowering to go, I don't have to own that thought anymore. I may not be able to unstick it on this particular day, but I'm aware that it's a thought that no longer serves me. and there's a strategy that I can use, whether it's the butterfly tapping or coming to see you or going to see, you know, for people listening, going to an EMDR specialist. Just the hope of knowing that there's something I can do so I can just stop thinking that damn thought. Yep. That alone is incredible. and I honestly feel like that alone will save lives.

Because when we go into, and you've talked about this with suicide, like when we go into these thoughts, like I can't live in my brain anymore, which is a thought that a lot of women in menopause go through because we don't have the neurochemical armor, myself included, have gone into this place of I can't live in this brain anymore. She has to stop talking to me the way she's talking to me. Yes. To know that I have a resource to unwind that thinking that's pretty damn quick, that alone could save so many lives, don't you think? Absolutely. Absolutely. Because there's nothing worse than feeling like I can't tolerate this darkness anymore. And then to think, and there's nothing I can do about it.

I can do. So I'm out. Just the permanence of that, right? And when I have people, say to me, I don't want to live anymore. What they usually mean is, I don't want to live like this anymore. Right. Because this is unbearable. And talking about alarm systems, there is actually a value that we have in our body to not just go off with anxiety as an alarm, with safety, but there's also an alarm system within us to say, uh-uh, this is misery. That's a different kind of an alarm, right? And so I think that, you know, it is comforting. For me, too, as a client of EMDR to know that if I have a crazy nightmare or I kind of feel like I'm in a dark place, I know that I can figure that out. Like this belief of I can figure things out.

I have choices. This generalizes as we do EMDR to lots of different areas. Could you even in that moment say, I'm just linking to some memories that are not working for me right now? I just need to unlink. My brain is linking to stuff that's no longer serving me. Would that be an accurate statement if you needed a quick statement to yourself? Sometimes that's true. Sometimes in the present, our brain goes back to the past prong of time and links things, right?

Into a dark place. Sometimes we're just in a dark place in life. I mean, sometimes that's just the experience we're having. And sometimes there is no linking to the past. Right? Maybe there is no adaptation from the past that feels like it's working anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So how do we help people find an EMDR specialist? I know that you train practitioners. What would we be looking for? Is there anything in particular that you need to look for if you're going to go find this type of therapy?

So most search directories allow you to search by EMDR for an EMDR therapist. And I would invite your listeners to ask the EMDR therapist some key questions because I would want them to interview this person, right, to make sure that it's a good fit. You know, most EMDR clinicians are basic trained. It's great if they're certified. I'm a consultant, which is the kind of higher, more advanced level of training. And just to get a sense, how many EMDR sessions have? you done. Right? Oh, when you asked them, like, find out house. Yeah. I didn't ask you that.

How many have you done? Over 10,000 is all I do. Nice. Okay. Yes. Winner, winner, chicken dinner. That was good. I'm obsessed. But no, asking somebody, how many have you done? Because some people get trained and never use it, right? Asking somebody, you know, when we choose what to process, right? Are we going to do, like, the first and worst memories, or can we kind of ease into this? I would want you to ask them about resourcing, making sure that they know how to resource you with kind of installing, again, the protective or nurturing figures, using those positive memories and expanding them before we start to go do really intense trauma work. Let's make sure. So kind of some safety questions just to get a sense of how that person works are important. Yeah. And is there a,

a directory of EMDR, like, because I know we have listeners all over the world. So, yeah. Yeah. So, Andrea is the kind of, you know, global association that, you know, Francine Shapiro was connected with. And, you know, there's other search directories for therapists. Again, you can search and see, you know, EMDR. And there's lots of different training programs that are teaching EMDR that are not

MDR. And so, and there's lots of kind of EMDR informed. modalities like brain spotting and art that, you know, have the same result. So I would say that if you can't find an EMDR therapist, things like, you know, brain spotting and art are great alternatives as well. Okay. Awesome. And we'll put links in there just so people for everything that you just said. So I, you know, I think you know this about me, but like I never want to present a problem without a solution. And I never want to give a solution that's untouchable to people.

This is probably why I love fasting so much, is because everybody can do it. So I will leave the links. And then maybe if you even have, I don't know, you have a podcast. And if you have any other information showing the different ways people can tap, I'd love to link that in here too. So people have resources.

Yeah, I'm happy to create those resources. And yeah, on my podcast, Zero Disturbance. we talk about EMDR all the time. And I had been speaking to clinicians, but now I'm trying to open up the conversation to other people as well so that the general public can understand what it is and utilize it. Yeah. Please do that because I, you know, as you and I have talked, I sit on the side of seeing so much suffering.

And how do we help? How do we help so many people? So, I mean, this is one of the reasons I extended outside my clinic as I felt like it doesn't makes sense that I had this knowledge and this ability to help people and I was staying within my clinic walls. Like something hit me. Like, why wouldn't I take this to the world? And I think fasting just became that that thing that I could amplify and I could really bring to the masses to be able to let them heal themselves. So I'm going to task you with the same thing. Like, you know, what is it that we can do to highlight EMDR? What can we do to help the person that might not have

the financial resources to do it? Like, you know, you know, what? You know, what is it? Like, you know, you know, How do we have to stop making health, both mental and physical, only for people who have financial resources. We have to find a way to be able to help people who don't have those financial resources. So absolutely. Create a way. Whatever you can create. I'll keep sharing it.

We'll figure it out together. And I appreciate how you are really just innovating and leading this charge to keep integrating what we know from different areas of health. because we talked about this before, these things aren't separate. They shouldn't be siloed. No. Right? I mean, these are all connected. We can't look at one part and not the rest. So I appreciate you having comprehensive conversations about this for people to listen to. It's the only way my brain likes to go. Okay, we have to finish on this question.

I ask everybody a couple of questions every season. So this is my fourth season of the Resetter podcast. And I really wanted to emphasize self-love because I felt. like we just weren't highlighting self-love enough. So do you have a daily self-love practice? And if so, what is it? And what do you think your superpower is that you bring to the world? Because to me, part of self-love is owning your superpower. And so what do you think your superpower is that you bring to the world?

I love his questions. I think my daily, I know my daily self-care self-care self- love practice is choosing to trust myself. Because we talked earlier, I think as women, there's so many invitations for us to not trust ourselves and to disconnect from ourselves. And so it's really important for me, for myself and to model to my kids and my clients to like, the default is I trust myself. Right. And so I to try to practice that. And then in terms of a superpower, I mean, I think it's, I think it's the last couple years during the pandemic, it was kind of developed more than ever, which was being able to notice that I can create positive, adaptive material if I can just

slow down and catch it, right? And so if I'm having an experience where my body feels safe and calm or happy or if I'm having a positive belief, I do this a lot at concerts because the music you can feel in your body. I will be the crazy person. and just installing with butterfly tabs. Oh, that's a great idea. Yeah. Yeah, because I know that's adaptive material for me to use later when things feel hard. Oh, my gosh.

I'm always learning from you. That was amazing. Your other superpower is you're a clear and certain communicator. Thank you. Like you come in, you don't mince words. And I don't, I mean, I get, like in your profession, you can't. but you're very clear in how you, you, and thoughtful in how you say your words. And it makes it easy to hook onto and understand.

And I think that's, yeah, I think that's a big thing that we struggle with in just the healthcare system is that we make things too evasive. And in order for people to jump on and be able to heal, there has to be clarity. There has to be a clear path. And then once we're on the path, we can bring in more pieces. And you're really good at that. So I appreciate that. Thank you.

I appreciate that. I was the kid that was excited to go teach the other kids long division. I bet. Because the feeling I got from getting it and learning it was the best feeling ever. And I want everyone to feel like they can access information to understand themselves. So I appreciate that. Yeah. Well, this was a joy.

And again, I have to remind myself we're not in therapy. But just, yeah, I just really appreciate you. I really, yeah, for so many reasons, you just, you're present, you're clear, you're loving, you're smart. And it really shows up. And I'm sure people are hearing this as well. And thank you for now joining me on trying to serve the masses because women need this. So appreciate you. Thank you.

Oh, thank you. I feel the same about you. I think what you're doing for women is so huge. It's so necessary. And I know it takes a lot of energy and a lot of thoughtfulness to do all of this. And so I just thank you for being new. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you.

If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it. So please leave us a review, share it with your friends. and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.