3 Types of Women Who Are a Perfect Fit for EMDR by a Manhattan Beach Trauma Therapist
As an Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapist in Los Angeles, I am often asked, how do I know if EMDR can help me? It’s a great question to ask of any treatment, including EMDR because certain treatments are better fits for some people than they are for others, and no treatment works 100% of the time with 100% of people.
What Problems Is EMDR Used For?
EMDR was initially developed as a treatment for post-traumatic stress and research shows it is very effective for addressing trauma (here is my comprehensive guide to how EMDR works). However, it has since been used and adapted for a wide variety of problems in both children and adults. Research shows that EMDR works well for all of the following problems: anxiety, panic, phobias, depression, eating disorders, dissociation, medical issues, grief and loss, pain, performance anxiety, sexual assault, poor sleep, and substance abuse. In my practice, I love using EMDR as a tool to help people cope with perinatal and postpartum challenges, body image, unhealthy relationship patterns, pregnancy loss, birth trauma, and other trauma like child abuse, sexual assault, medical trauma, and relationship abuse.
While EMDR is, in general, an effective intervention, there are a few scenarios I think it is particularly well suited for. These are the situations I think to myself, “I think EMDR would really help this client.”
Highly Intelligent Women Who Can’t Turn Their Brains Off
My caseload tends to be super smart, sensitive women who are tough and resilient. They tend to pour themselves into achievement oriented activities (work, academics, creative pursuits, being the best mom they can be, etc.) as a coping strategy- after all, if you’re busy all the time there’s not much time for unpleasant thoughts and feelings to surface.
Additionally, they tend to use their big ol’ brains to problem solve and deal with stressors, using lists, rational thinking, logic, planning, problem solving, and research to overcome the difficulties they face. Sound familiar? While these are fantastic and useful tools (nobody loves a list more than I do!), no one set of tools can solve all problems and logical tools tend to be a poor fit for emotional problems.
Lastly, staying in an intellectual state of mind makes it hard to connect with your body and emotions, which is vital both to health and quality of life, but also to healing from emotional wounds.
EMDR helps these smart, driven women turn off their brains so that they can connect with their bodies and emotions, essentially getting thinking out of the way of their brain’s innate, natural healing processes. The bilateral stimulation in EMDR processing (the left-right tapping or eye movement) is just distracting enough to occupy the thinking part of your brain and let the rest of it do its thing, and the therapy in general guides clients to connect with their bodies and feelings, building this skillset. This makes EMDR a more body-based, or somatic, approach, and is fantastic for helping women learn to connect with their bodies and emotions- a skill essential for mindfulness, sexual satisfaction, listening to your gut, maintaining health and self-care, the list goes on.
Women Who Say They Know Something is True, But It Doesn’t Feel True
Anytime I hear a client express an internal conflict between what they KNOW to be true and what FEELS true, that is a giant, glittery, sequinned, green flag for EMDR for me. Examples of this are:
After an abusive relationship, a client knows they are safe, but their body and brain still don’t feel safe.
A client knows she has worth and value, but when they make a mistake or get constructive criticism or someone is upset with them they don’t feel good enough and struggle with feeling worthless
A client knows intellectually not everything is in their control and understands the downsides of letting go of the need to control, yet their anxiety and physical reactions are screaming at them that they have to control everything!
EMDR is particularly well suited to help with these conflicts, as I will work with the client to identify their negative core belief, desensitize the emotions attached to it, and then override it with a more adaptive belief. A negative core belief is a belief that your vulnerable, and likely younger, self believes, not that adult-logical-you believes. The negative core belief tends to show up across the areas in your life in which you’re struggling. For example, a belief that you aren’t good enough that gets triggered when someone rejects you, is upset with you, or gives you feedback. EMDR would target this belief, reducing the physical and emotional reactions attached to it, so that there is more space to FEEL that the more helpful belief (in this example, it might be “I have worth and can get my needs met regardless”). In this way, EMDR eliminates the conflict between what you know to be true intellectually and what feels true, and helps a more adaptive belief feel true logically, physically, and emotionally.
Women Who Have Reached The Limit of What Top-Down Therapies Can Do
As discussed in greater detail in my guide to how EMDR works, EMDR is a bottom up therapy. This means that instead of starting with logical thinking and using that to try to change physical and emotional feelings as top-down therapies like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) do, EMDR works in the opposite direction: changing physical and emotional reactions and then changes in thinking and beliefs follow.
Don’t get me wrong- CBT and other interventions like skill building, mindfulness, thought challenging, exposure, etc. are super helpful and I use them all the time to help clients reach their goals. But if someone has done all these things with great effort and it’s stopped getting them anywhere, that is a sign to switch approaches. It means you’ve hit the limit on what those strategies can do for the time-being, at least until the emotional and physical response to painful experiences has been desensitized, which is exactly what EMDR does.
Start EMDR Therapy in Manhattan Beach or Online:
Do you see yourself in one of the types of women I discussed above? If so, or if you are curious if EMDR can help, meeting with an EMDR therapist can help you determine if you are a good candidate for EMDR. The good news is that EMDR is as effective online as it is in person. If you’d like to explore if EMDR can help you, follow these steps.
Schedule a consultation at Well Woman Psychology.
Meet with Dr. Baggett, a skilled EMDR therapist.
Get your questions answered and start the path to healing.
About the Author:
Dr. Linda Baggett is a Licensed Psychologist at Well Woman Psychology, a premium therapy practice serving clients online in California, Colorado, Illinois, New York, and Washington. She earned her PhD in Counseling Psychology from the University of Memphis in 2012. As a trauma and PTSD psychologist, she specializes in helping people get unstuck from past painful or traumatic experiences so that they can move forward in a satisfying, healthy way. She is trained in many evidence-based trauma treatments, including EMDR. She also loves to help with with relationship issues, sexuality, pregnancy loss and miscarriage, birth trauma and postpartum issues, infertility, and body image and size-based oppression.
Disclaimer:
Disclaimer: This blog is for educational and informational purposes only, is not a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice, and does not constitute a client-therapist relationship.