Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is traditionally known as a method to treat trauma. 

However, many practitioners of this method have noticed that the therapeutic uses of EMDR therapy extend beyond treating trauma.

On this episode, we discuss the broader definition of trauma and how EMDR therapy can help address many psychological challenges, including but not limited to trauma.

Additionally, Dr. Katy Jackson provides a comprehensive guide on how EMDR therapy works.

About the Guest:

 Dr. Katy Jackson is a senior member of the British Psychological Society (BPS), (HCPC),(BACP) and EMDR Association of UK  with over 20 years’ clinical experience. She is a Chartered Health Psychologist and Psychotherapist.

She has extensive training and experience using a wide range of therapeutic approaches, including trauma-focused counselling, somatic therapy, psychodynamic, EMDR, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), hypnotherapy, holistic therapy and internal family systems. She draws on these approaches and adapts each session to suit the individual needs of the client. 

Her sessions are interactive and collaborative, aimed at facilitating a deeper understanding of the client’s experiences and behavior, and exploring practical and achievable strategies for change. Katy’s specialties include work-related stress and burnout, anxiety disorders (including phobias and panic attacks), trauma (PTSD, childhood trauma and domestic violence), women’s health, acute and chronic illness, identity issues and neurodivergence.

Episode’s Transcript:

“Hi, and welcome to another episode of the Bright Shift podcast. I’m Leila, founder of Bright Shift and your host. Bright Shift is an online platform where you can find online therapy, meditation sessions, workshops and more.

You can find us at brightshift.com. Today I’m joined by Dr. Katy Jackson, one of our team members who is a chartered health psychologist and psychotherapist. She’s a senior member of the British Psychological Society, HCPC, BACP and EMDR Association of UK with over 20 years of clinical experience.

She has extensive training and experience using a wide range of therapeutic approaches. Katy’s specialties include work-related stress and burnt-out, anxiety disorders, including phobias and panic attacks, trauma, PTSD, childhood trauma and domestic violence, women’s health, acute and chronic illness, identity issues and neurodivergence. Dr. Katy, welcome to the Bright Shift podcast.

Thank you so much. Thank you for asking me here today.”

“It’s really great to have you here. I wanted to have this interview for a long time, so it’s great to have you here. Today we’re going to talk about EMDR therapy.

We want to talk about EMDR because it’s a very interesting and effective form of therapy, and many people are not that familiar with it. So I’d like to start with, you know, learning a little bit more about EMDR. Could you please briefly explain what EMDR therapy is?

Yes, EMDR is eye movement, desensitization and reprocessing, which is quite a mouthful. It’s a psychotherapy treatment that’s designed to alleviate the distress associated with trauma. So it encourages people, it is a relatively new treatment.

It was developed in 1989, but since then it has been extensively researched and it’s very much evidence-based. But it encourages patients, the patient to focus briefly on a trauma memory, while at the same time simultaneously experiencing, we call it bilateral stimulation, which means something that goes left, right, left, right. So traditionally that’s eye movement, which is in the name.”

“So you’d be looking, the therapist might be sitting in front of you with their hand going left, right, left, right, and you’ll be following it. And at the same time, thinking about memories. I mean, this has been adapted.

This bilateral stimulation can be eye movements. You can be holding buzzers. You can have different sounds.

It’s a movement. It’s adaptable. But the idea is that it reduces the vivid unpleasant experience of that memory associated with the trauma.

So talking about EMDR, I just want to talk a little bit about trauma and just define what I mean by that, because obviously trauma is those one-off big events, the car accident, the shooting, war, attack. That’s definitely trauma. Your body is overwhelmed.

But there’s other types of trauma. So it could be a single incident. It can be repeated, you know, domestic violence again and again.

But also it can be a bit complex when different types of trauma happen to someone across their lifespan. And developmental trauma is what happens in childhood. It’s detachment issues.”

“When a child is in neglect or abuse, when they’re not given the physical and emotional or even educational, their needs aren’t met. That’s trauma. And what could be a nothing?

It’s not about the size of the trauma, but obviously the more experiences you’ve got will affect you. It’s about what it does to you, what that experience, how it leaves you. So for one child, it could be an experience.

It could be at school, someone doesn’t want to sit next to them. And for one child, it’d be like, okay, I’ll sit here instead. But for another child, that could be a moment.

You know, and at school, there’s so many humiliating moments, but they stay, and then they can be reinforced later on. With EMDR, the point is that we want to help people move past the trauma, so the brain’s not still reacting as if the traumas go happening now. And by doing that, we want our brain to recover.

There’s communication in our brain between the amygdala, which is like the smoke detector of stress, and the amygdala, I mean, ideally, we need it. It tells us when there’s danger. It alerts us. 

“But sometimes it can’t tell the difference between, if it’s like a burning fire and toast that’s burning. And sometimes even more, it might just go off, but when something was just lit, and it can be over sensitive. So we want to get the amygdala in line.

But it communicates with another part of the brain, which is the hippocampus, which is associated with learning and memories, that safety and danger. And our prefrontal cortex, which is the rational part of our brain, which is our language and all our higher processing skills. We want them to be working efficiently.

But what happens in trauma is when the amygdala is activated, prefrontal cortex is deactivated, really, and memories get stored in the wrong place. So with trauma, many times, trauma can get resolved and managed spontaneously. You know, it’s normal.”

“You see something upsetting and scary. It’s normal to have a trauma response. But then after the days go past, you know, things can calm down.

But for some people, it doesn’t. And that’s when we get PTSD. Because the stress response is, you know, it’s our natural fight, flight and freeze response.

We need it. What happens is sometimes that feeling could be frozen in time, a memory, and that’s where the problem happens. So EMDR therapy helps the brain process these memories.

So normal thinking can resume. So that experience is in the past. It’s in the past.

You know, you can remember it, but you’re not reliving it. And that’s the difference. When you’re reliving it, it feels like it’s happening again.

So a repeated experience can then reinforce that. And your body is in overdrive all the time. One other thing is that all this is a natural response.”

“Trauma, it’s not a psychological thing. It’s not a sign of weakness that this might happen to you. It’s a brain thing.

Events occur and it gets, it interrupts the brain’s neurological processes, and information just gets stuck. It’s all in the nervous system. So we can’t be ashamed of that.

It’s just something that happens. You know, if we break our arm, we’d fix our arm and we’d let it heal. The same with trauma.

So with EMDR, how we do it is this idea of the two types of memory. We’ve got implicit memory on one side of our brain, which is our non-verbal, somatic, emotional, effective states. And then we’ve got our explicit memory on the other side, which is the cognitive, autobiographical awareness.

It’s our learning. So when we learn to drive, we’re using our explicit memory at the beginning, remembering each detail, and then hopefully at a certain point, it will go into our implicit memory and it’s automatic. But there’s a problem when we have trauma, because the implicit memory is associated with the hippocampus.”

“That’s where the memories are stored. So normally memory should be stored in the past. A bad memory is a bad memory.

It’s in the past. But a traumatic memory is not processed there. It’s processed in the amygdala.

And so there’s no time element. So that’s what’s happening. When you’re experiencing it, you’re literally reliving it, as I said before.

So what we want to do in EMDR with the processing is shift it over. It’s like we want to strengthen the bridge between the two areas and shift it over. And then when it’s in the right place, stored in the hippocampus, we’re regulated again.

So trauma is like a wound that hasn’t been allowed to heal properly. And your brain just didn’t get that message. And so if you’ve experienced it, it’s a very unpleasant thing.

We don’t choose it. And sometimes we don’t even know why we’re being triggered. Sometimes our memories are before we’ve even had language.”

“Sometimes these traumatic memories could be while we were in the womb, or transgeneration, you know, handed down. They’ve now done experiments where they’ve actually measured babies born with higher cortisol levels. You know, you’re not going to ever remember that, but the body remembers this.

And this is the work on trauma, is that it’s all stored in the body, so you might just get a sensation and a feeling and actually never really be able to understand it.

Absolutely, yes. In general, could you say that someone who receives EMDR therapy, they won’t be as… they will not be so much triggered by the trauma anymore after the EMDR therapy, or the trauma will not have such a deep impact on them anymore after the EMDR therapy?”

“It’s quite remarkable, because after the treatment… I mean, everyone’s experience is different, and everyone’s way of processing is different, but clients will… I mean, I think that I’ve had EMDR myself.

You feel a sense of calm. It’s like the same event could really get you, just doesn’t bother you. You know, it’s annoying.

It’s in the past, but it doesn’t activate you in the same way. And, you know, sometimes it’s nothing. They can’t work out why they were even bothered about it.

Or sometimes it’s like that… because sometimes that feeling that was associated with it isn’t there. So…

which is just really… because it’s exhausting. It’s exhausting being in this constant state of fight, flight and vigilance and, you know, just…

and to be in a state of calm.

Yes.

So much better.”

“Yes, yes. And apparently the founder of this method founded this treatment by accident.

I think she was thinking about something traumatic and at the same time, her eyes were moving from the left to the right. It was by accident. And suddenly she just realized she wasn’t as triggered.

And then came the protocols and the experiments. The protocols became… because of the way it was studied, because of the way it had to be researched, they were very, very…

they are very strict. There’s eight phases to it, and you go through each one. I mean, some people stick to that religiously.

People are a little bit more flexible. But I think it was really important to have that rigidity because in order to do the research and to get it the recognition that it’s got.”

“Yes, and you also mentioned about the impact of cortisol on babies when they are in the womb because there is this misconception that our mental health, it starts to form from childhood, but in reality, it starts from when we are in the womb. Could you please expand a little bit on that? What is the research?

What else could you share more with us?

Well, we’ve known, there’s been a lot of research on children of second generation of Holocaust survivors. We’ve known that there’s been mental health issues, but not really understood the why. And I think it was after 9-11 that they were actually able to do actual research.

And that’s when they were able to measure the cortisol levels on babies. Now, it’s a difficult one because that is the case. You know, a baby is affected by, you know, and a baby born into a stressful environment picks up on that.”

“But then it sometimes feels like it’s just another bit of guilt to give to the poor. You know, if a mother has a traumatic birth, that’s traumatic enough. You know, it’s hard to think that actually I’m now damaging my baby.

It can be stressful enough on its own, too.

Absolutely. So it’s not going to damage the child. It just might change the wiring.

And I think what’s important is to be aware, to know that. So then you can make sense of it. Because the most important thing is this term neuroplasticity.

Our brains are malleable. We might be set up one way, but we can learn a different way.

But we do know that there’s a link between childhood trauma and ADHD. And there’s a causality, but that doesn’t explain the why. The correlation doesn’t explain the causality.

But again, trauma affects the brain. And ADHD is in the brain. So things are interlinked, but we don’t really know why.”

“But we just know the importance of regulation. Because a child learns everything from the parents. They learn, you know, they’re helpless.

So they learn, they cry, and they get their needs met. And then they learn the social interaction. And if something’s off, if someone’s having a very difficult time or there’s mental health issues or whatever’s going on, that can be challenging and that can change something in the neurodevelopment.

Yes. And you know, when I was researching about EMDR to come up with the right questions for this episode, one of the things that really grabbed my attention was that apparently there is not much talking involved in EMDR therapy, right? So the client gives you a very brief summary of their issues.

Is that right? And then you start the work without much talking involved.

Well, now, this is interesting, because actually with these eight phases of treatment, there is a couple of, it could be a couple of sessions to really get to know the client. But I work differently, because I was working as a psychologist for 20 years. This is relatively newer for me.”

“So I combine. I mean, sometimes people phone and they book an EMDR appointment, and that is what we get. We get the highlights and we go.

But other times, we’ve got the luxury of really getting to know someone before we try it out. There is talking, but throughout the sessions, there’s much less talking. We might leave that for the end, or sometimes we might do a couple of EMDR sessions and then have another week of just talking.

But that’s an individual therapy, the therapist’s preference. But actually in the session, the therapist is more a facilitator because it’s the client doing the work, they’re making the connections. I mean, so many of the traditional therapies, which I also do, it’s like this idea of the therapist is the one to interpret everything.

But the reason I love trauma work and the trauma model is that it’s not. It’s rather than all this is wrong with you, that what’s wrong with you, I’m going to tell you, it’s let’s work out what happened to you. And as a result, oh my goodness, if that happened to you when you were younger, no wonder you feel like this “now.

You’re piecing the puzzles together. And in EMDR, it’s the client that’s making often makes connections in a way that wouldn’t have happened. Like I said, I had the luxury of sometimes working with someone for a year or two years.

And when I was training up, I said, oh, I’m going to try this EMDR. Let’s have a go. And both of us, the client and myself were like, wow.

You’ve got to this place where wouldn’t have made that connection. There was no way I would have known that they hadn’t thought about it through the EMDR. And that’s the beauty of it.

I see. So do you think it’s a more suitable method for people who prefer not to engage in talk therapy so much?”

“It’s a really interesting question, and I’m not sure how to answer it. So I don’t know. I think if you’re with the right therapist, whatever the…

If you don’t want to be in therapy, it’s not going to work. It can be, but there’s also… It might not suit you.

So I wouldn’t do EMDR just because it’s a quick one. It has to suit you. But it’s definitely…

But I work, I spend… It would be lovely to have luxury of time with every single client and years to process things. But some of my job, I work in workplaces, and we just don’t have that.

We have eight sessions, which is quite a lot, eight sessions and that’s it. So we haven’t got the luxury of time. So actually we can get to a similar place, a similar place with much less time and much less speaking.

And what conditions can be treated with EMDR?”

“Well, it’s traditionally known as the trauma treatment, but absolutely, I would say, absolutely anything, because it’s, again, anything that causes anxiety, anything that leads to trauma is everything, but they’ve got different, they’ve developed different protocols. So you could have, you know, there’s the pain protocol, so you can deal with the physical conditions, phobias, anxiety, depression, dysphoria, obsessive compulsion, personality disorders, eating disorders. I think everything with the right, providing the therapist feels comfortable and knows what they’re doing, it could be anything.

Yes, you know, I’ve heard that from so many EMDR therapists that even though like traditionally EMDR is known for treatment of trauma, but they say it works with everything.”

“And also if you think about the wider definition of trauma, those things are trauma. I mean, having a lifelong chronic illness, that’s traumatic, you know, or diagnosis of something or an eating disorder or an undiagnosed condition or, you know, that’s a form or not being understood by those people around you.

Yes.

So really, we could translate that into trauma, but we don’t need to anymore.

Yes. Yeah. So that’s a really good way of looking at it, because I get an impression that you’re trying to say most of our psychological challenges are rooted in trauma anyways.

And even though we say EMDR is specifically designed for the treatment of trauma, but let’s say, for example, phobia may get treated with EMDR as well, because the roots of a phobia may be going back to trauma.”

“The root of the phobia is there’s some trauma, there’s some anxiety. It could be this young part that just feels scared for whatever reason. Again, that could go way back to the birth.

We don’t know, but that’s why anything can be treated. But again, it’s for the therapist to know, there’s some conditions that I don’t treat, because it’s not my area, and I’d much rather hand over to someone else. But that’s the same with everything.

That’s why we list our specialties. But that’s not about the EMDR. I think the EMDR can be…

I personally see EMDR, for me, as I’ve got a toolbox of techniques, and EMDR is one of them. I’ve got to say now, it’s up there. It’s up there with the screwdriver and the hammer.

I use it quite a lot. But sometimes I don’t. And if it’s not appropriate, then I…

And not everyone knows what it is, so sometimes I have to introduce it. I mean, someone researches and they come for EMDR, they know exactly what they want and why. But other people, I have to say, try something different today, and I can’t even…

“so sometimes I have to introduce it. I mean, someone researches and they come for EMDR, they know exactly what they want and why. But other people, I have to say, try something different today, and I can’t even…

I don’t even explain it that much. It’s something you have to experience. And then after that session, even after the first session, at that point, we don’t really need to…

They just know it works, so we keep going.

Yes. And so do you believe EMDR works faster than other forms of therapy?

I think you can get to that place fast. And you get… And you’re tackling the root cause rather than just the symptoms.

So I think it is… It is. On the other hand, if you read the protocols of how long EMDR should be, it says something different.”

“But from my experience, we get to… Because with traditional psychotherapy, you have to spend time building up the relationship. They’re very rarely going to come in in the first session.

And often it’s after 10, 20 sessions, I go, well, there’s something I’ve never told anyone before. And out it comes. But with trauma, it’s an easier way to get there.

Yes, so this is really important. And I remember previously you shared with me how you noticed the physical health of your clients who are using EMDR is improving. So I’d like to know, based on your observation, how do you think EMDR can improve physical health?

So this is an interesting question, and there’s different answers to this. First of all, I’m very holistic in my approach. And actually, physical health and emotional health, it’s such a complex system, and it’s impossible to separate them.

I mean, if you look at Chinese medicine or Indian medicine, you are evading medicine, it’s one and the same. So if the, you know, there’s not one physical part of the body that’s not interrupted by stress. So what we want to be is regulated.”

“And the more regulated we are, our mind is calm and our body is working efficiently. So by doing EMDR, it will have a knock on effect on to our, you know, there’s the link between gut health and mental health and stress. And it’s such a complex system.

So on that level, it will definitely regulate the body. So the body can go on doing its business without being interrupted by stress. On another level, we can do EMDR for physical health conditions.

So we can do, we can treat pain, for example, which will have a knock on effect. But we can also, if we go to the level that trauma is stored in the body, and sometimes if it’s stuck there, we might not know what the trauma is, but it might come out as a physical condition. And this is where it gets interesting, because sometimes I often talk in terms of parts.

I’ve studied different therapies like IFS, which talks about parts. And sometimes, you know, there’s a difference between a physical symptom, which obviously needs medication and an understanding between that and a part that’s showing up.

“You know, I’m the part that’s giving you the headaches.

I’m part that’s giving you depression, so you don’t have to face the world because the world’s scary and something will happen. And sometimes physical conditions, there could be a trauma root there. Often, I mean, we’ve got the whole range of fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, but often there’s a…

And medicine doesn’t know what to do with these conditions. Often EMDR will be brilliant for that. But also something like a urinary tract infection.

A urinary tract infection, so it’s painful and it gets in the way and it’s traumatic and especially if it’s undiagnosed and you’re going around for a long time with this pain, that’s trauma. But also what’s the root cause of it? And often we know that there’s a big link between urinary tract infections and sexual abuse.”

“So actually, if the root of that is the sexual abuse and it’s coming out in a different way, that can be resolved. So looking at physical, I mean, people, I am a member of a group that’s for EMDR and endometriosis and pelvic pain. That’s what we meet once a month and we talk about it.

And so the other people in the group are all, they’re specialists working in a hospital in the endometriosis service. So that’s what they see every day. But I don’t.

I see people come with whatever, and again, it comes out by accident that they’ve got these physical conditions. Yeah, I think we need to be talking about it all the time. And then it’s a byproduct.

But often we sometimes stop and go, actually, that’s not okay, because we don’t talk about our bodies and we don’t talk about our bodies in therapy. But just being mindful that we should. And we should know when we’re out of balance and we, you know, women’s health and we should talk about menopause and we should talk about sexual health and something like endometriosis.”

“I think it takes about eight years to get a diagnosis. Meanwhile, you know, someone can be in gripping pain and they can feel gaslit and desperate and people are brushing it off, like you should be able to handle it. But that’s, I mean, if that’s not trauma, what is?

And then getting to understand the underlying cause. Sometimes it’s just what you’re born with and sometimes there’s other things there.

Of course, of course. And how long is each session in EMDR therapy?

It’s each session. I think ideally it would be 90 minutes. I’m restricted.

When I do it, I’m restricted to the 50 minutes hour. So basically you adapt it to make it work.

And typically how many weeks or months does the treatment take?

This again, how long have you got? I mean, there are protocols for this. I think 8 to 12 sessions for a single incident, and 12 to 18 months for something longer.

But not everyone’s got that. So what we do is, what I would do is break it down. What’s the most important thing?”

“We’re not going to address everything, but actually if you can address, often the traumas are linked, and then when you’ve got the awareness of what’s going on, then the person can then help regulate themselves, and it doesn’t feel so intense. So 12 to 18 months would be amazing. If you’ve got 10 sessions, we’ll do it in 10.

But sometimes it’s only like one or two sessions. But you wouldn’t know that until you started what, how it’s going to work.

So even in one or two sessions, some people can experience getting some results.

And I think the young, I mean, I don’t work with children, but with children, apparently, you know, it can be really quick. But I’ve had single sessions with clients where we just tried this thing, and that’s all they’ve needed. It’s all they’ve needed to feel ready to feel themselves again.”

“You know, I don’t know whether the whole trauma is being managed, but it can be, it can be amazing. And sometimes it takes much, much, much longer.

And some may not know this, but there are actually specific training programs to teach therapists how to do EMDR therapy online. So it does work online as well. And I like to ask your opinion, how effective do you think EMDR therapy is when conducted online?

Well, this is the question, because if you’d asked this five years ago, I think the answer would, there must have been one or two people doing it online, but it was like, no, you’ve got these strict protocols face to face. And then we had lockdown. And actually, lo and behold, it works really well online.

And in fact, I’ve trained. I did my whole, I did three quarters of my training online. I mean, most of my private practice is online anyway”

“And it works and it’s effective. And I sometimes do it face to face and then online with the same person. No difference, no difference.

But that’s what I’m, because I was trained in that area. That’s what I feel comfortable with.

Again, for this, it would depend on the therapist. But there were special trainings as a result of lockdown, how to do it online. I mean, you can get programs where you can actually get something that moves from left to right.

I don’t like technology in that way. I don’t trust it, and I don’t like messing around, especially if it’s out of sync. We do tapping.

We do tapping, and if someone wants to tap, that’s fine. They can tap there. They can have someone today lying on their stomach just doing it with one finger, because she’s very, she’s exhausted.

You can do tapping. You can do, you can do moving. I mean, you can be flexible with it.

I think it works just as well.”

“Yes, yes. And I think, you know, when you mentioned lockdown, I remember that, yeah, of course the lockdown, I think it proved to so many people that, you know, doing therapy online is actually really effective. And now we have a lot of research on it that it is very much effective, as effective as traditional psychotherapy.

Yes.

And you know, most of the therapists that are working online are telling me that even though the majority, almost all of their clients, they have access to face-to-face therapy, but the majority, they actually prefer online therapy, just because it’s more convenient for them.

I mean, if you’re in a difficult situation, you can’t get to therapy, it’s amazing. But also you’ve got the luxury of being able, as you know, you can choose people around the world and the time zone that you want, and you’re not limited to that small selection in the pool who happen to have availability on your days in your area. It’s incredible.

Yes. So are there any EMDR techniques or methods that clients can perform on themselves?”

“Well, EMDR needs, I think it needs to be with a therapist just helping you along. But as part of this, there’s a lot of psychoeducation, and we’re teaching the client how to notice when they’re dysregulated, what that feels like. Because most of the time people are, you know, it should be taught at school.

We’ve got no idea when we’re out of balance and what the early signs are. So knowing that and then learning grounding techniques. So in terms of EMDR, any bilateral move is EMDR.

So going running, going punching, dancing, you know, so it could be anything like that that grounds you. I mean, if you think about it, in terms of trauma treatment, EMDR has been around since 1989. People have been having trauma for centuries in the beginning of time.

But some of the traditional, you think dancing around a fire, shouting, and that’s EMDR. And you’ve got the collective experience. And, you know, I mean, in terms of, and the voice and the vagus nerve, I mean, in terms of therapeutic value, that’s it.”

“In our isolated words. So I would say, any bilateral movement, do and do it mindfully. But then other things like, we do tapping in terms of the bilateral stimulation.

But sometimes that’s no different to the butterfly hug that you would do to help regulate someone. You do that, so you could do this, or you could just tap. Because sometimes that’s, you know, knowing how the brain works and the associations, that’s like anything that helps you regulate.

And then you can move into anything that helps you ground, which again, has similar movements in the breathing and the yoga and et cetera, et cetera. But it’s making it a daily habit, making it something not that you use when you’re when you’ve got trauma, but you use every day and you know how to use it and you trust it.

Yeah. So I like to emphasize on that. You mentioned any bilateral movement, you know, can do the trick and you explained exactly how it works in our brain.”

“And this can explain why exercising is so good for our, you know, psychological health, why dancing is so good. Really interesting.

And I think the idea is, I heard it explained, that what we want to do is get the memories across to the right side of the brain and processed away. But by doing these other things, and even just looking to see here, yeah, I’ve got a ball here, you know, even doing this, which people do when they fidget or that, that’s really good. But what I heard that what that does, the memories need to cross the bridge, but they’re wrong, but it strengthens the bridge.

So it reinforces it so it’s bigger and wider and can take more traffic. So that’s the benefit of doing these grounding exercises that are not necessarily in the EMDR session, but it would complement it.

Yes, yes, it would complement it. So that’s a good point to remember. My last question would be about trauma.”

“I would like you to explain a little bit more. How do you define trauma? Because most of us are familiar with the trauma when it’s in the form of wars and earthquakes and really big disastrous events.

But the definition of trauma is much broader than that. So I was wondering if you could just explain a little bit more how we can define trauma that can help us to start healing trauma.

I think with trauma, and again, we can have a list of all the different types, but I think anything that overwhelms the body, that overwhelms your ability to cope in that moment, because you can have, I mean, look, you can have a really dreadful experience, but say you’ve got your family around you and the group support and everything, it doesn’t have to leave you traumatized. So the trauma is something that happens, and it overwhelms the system. It gets the fight flight activated, which is normal.

And then when that happens, that it activates a whole cascade of events in your brain. It’s all in your brain. So the amygdala sends out the fight flight, the alerts, and it sends a message to “to another part of the brain, which then activates the adrenal gland, which sends out the adrenaline, and you have the fight flight.”

“When you have trauma, your body gets dysregulated. Some people go into fight flight, which is the sympathetic nervous system, and you either run away, and all those horrible feelings with anxiety and trauma, the rapid heart beat and the feeling sick, it’s all there to get you to safety. The message in your body when you’re in fight flight is, I’m not safe.

And so the body then gets you, even if it’s because of work pressure, the message is, I’m not safe. And all those changes, like your heart rate gets faster, so it can pump out more blood to your organs, so you can run away. Your breathing goes shallow, so you can get as much oxygen to your organs.

You know, there’s a reason for everything. So you can either go into fight flight, or you can go, which is sort of a hyper arousal, or you can go into shutdown, which is freeze. And the body just, it’s like it’s in overdrive, and it cuts out, the brain cuts out.”

“It’s really to give you a painless death. But we don’t choose either of that. And I think the earlier you’ve had traumatic experiences, I mean, when you’re a baby, you haven’t got a nervous system to go into fight flight.

So a baby would go into freeze, which might be numbness or dissociation. I mean, we’ve seen videos of children who’ve been neglected. They don’t cry.

They’ve learned not to cry. They’ve gone into shutdown, and that will stay with them for the rest of their life. They’ll naturally dissociate more than anything else.

So trauma isn’t what’s happened to you. It’s what’s happened to your body as a result of what’s happened. And if you’ve got that, then afterwards, you’ve got a neural network, and you know that it’s not stored properly in the brain.”

“And then as a result, you can be triggered. So 50 years after the war, a veteran can hear a bang, be flat on their face. We don’t choose any.

That happens instantaneously. And in the same way that a smell might trigger you, it could be an emotion, it could just be the darkness. You don’t know what it is, so it could be a feeling.

It’s all there in the body. Sometimes we don’t remember things because we’re too young. Sometimes we don’t remember it because the brain has made that decision not to remember.

It doesn’t go away. It’s stored there and it will come out. And so sometimes we resist.

Some people resist treatment because it’s too painful. They don’t want to go there and churn it up. The interesting thing, though, about trauma treatment is that you don’t have to, unlike other treatments, in terms of being EMDR is definitely quicker, but it’s also kinder because you don’t have to literally go through and list all the traumas.”

“You just might have an emotion. I feel this lump here, or I feel overwhelmed. And I’ll sometimes go, go with that.

When they do the processing, the idea is that it links from here to here to here to the end of the trauma. So all the different traumas, you might have had thousands, and you go through one, and then you go to the other, and then you link back together, and then you try again, and it’s like, oh, so it doesn’t really matter where you start, and you don’t have to cover them all. But normally they’ll get, because they’re often part of the same memory.

And I think if you’ve had a lot of trauma in the past, then you’re just going to be more susceptible because you’re hardwired for it. Like your brain’s like, right, I know what to do, I’ve got to be on the high alert. Whereas if you haven’t, it doesn’t mean it’s less, it can disrupt the nervous system in a different way.”

“But that’s why it’s such a personal experience.

That’s how it is always with healing and therapy, isn’t it? It’s such a personal experience and unique for every individual.

And people feel so, often can feel so ashamed, you know, why does it happen to me or there’s something wrong with me? I’m being so stupid. And actually, that’s when we go back and we look.

And often with the trauma work, when we go with the idea of what happened to you, we can piece together some of the behaviours that can be really shameful, people don’t want. Well, actually we see them as adaptive measures because that’s all that was available at that time. You know, it could be an addiction.

Well, yes, if you’re hyper aroused, then great, drugs, that will calm you down. You know, that was the reason for it, and it made sense. Now let’s replace it with something more, you know, something a little bit healthier.”

“But we’re not saying get rid of that. That’s why, you know, by saying stop the behaviour, it’s like it served a purpose. We’ve got to address the root cause.

And then at the same time, look for alternative ways of managing it. It’s a much, it’s just a much, I think it makes sense, but it gives them, it’s more empowering for the client because they can work out why they did it. And it’s like, that’s why I did it.

That’s why I finished with all my relationships. You know, there’s a part that’s scared because they don’t trust people or whatever it is, but then it often it’s like, oh, I get it. That’s why.

And then you can address it.

That’s right. Would you like to add something more as we are approaching the end of this episode?”

“No, I think I’d just like to say that, you know, try it. I think we should try everything. I mean, as a therapist, it’s wonderful that there’s all these different, you know, just learning new things and integrating into your work.

Some things work, some things don’t. But I definitely think it’s something that you should, you know, anyone listening to, you know, just try it.

Yes, yes, I agree, I agree. Well, thank you so much, Katy, for joining me today. It’s been really wonderful having this conversation and hearing your insights.

Yes, thank you. Really lovely talking to you.