18 [Healing Series] EMDR Therapy
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/18
Haley Radke: You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm your host, Haley Radke, and this is a special episode in our Healing Series where I interview therapists who are also adoptees themselves, so they know from personal experience what it feels like to be an adoptee.
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Great. Thank you. It's time to get started. Today we tackle EMDR therapy and why it's incredibly helpful for adoptees. Let's listen in.
This is Lesli Johnson, a fellow adoptee and licensed therapist who works to help other adoptees connect the dots of their story and live authentically. Welcome, Lesli.
Lesli A. Johnson: Thank you. Thank you very much for having me.
Haley Radke: Okay, today's question I have for you is about EMDR. So I had an adoptee email me and she was so sweet.
She was unpacking her story a little bit for me and was very candid and said that she struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder and that EMDR has helped her tremendously. I've also had a couple of sessions of EMDR, and that was a number of years ago. I. I can't remember exactly what we did, but I remember feeling like it was quite beneficial.
But I would love it if you would explain to us what EMDR is and how it can benefit adoptees, in particular.
Lesli A. Johnson: So EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, which is quite a mouthful, and it was originally developed by Francine Shapiro to alleviate the distress associated with traumatic memories.
An easier way to understand EMDR is to think of it as an integrative therapy. It helps the brain, the left and right hemispheres of the brain, to communicate. And if we think about trauma, when something traumatic happens or when something happens that is perceived by an individual as traumatic, that memory gets stored in the brain in a maladaptive way, an unhealthy way, and the person develops certain beliefs about themselves that continue to grow.
So I'll give an example in terms of an adoption experience. If a person is repeatedly in different foster cares, that's considered traumatic, but they may start to believe about themselves, “I'm not worthy,” “I'll never be loved.”
And so then they go through the world gathering “evidence” to support that idea. And what EMDR allows a person to do through the method of bilateral stimulation, which is, again, stimulating the left and the right hemispheres of the brain either using tapping or eye movements or bilateral tones with headphones, is it allows a person to reprocess the memories and they get stored in the brain in a more adaptive way as actual memories.
So a person who's experienced trauma, a lot of the times when they get triggered, they feel like they're being re-traumatized. That the memory is happening in the present. So EMDR allows the memory to be reprocessed, stored back in the brain. They can look on it and say, “Yes, that happened,” but they no longer have a somatic representation of that memory. Meaning their nervous system doesn't get activated when they think about that memory.
The way that I work with EMDR with clients who are adopted and why I think EMDR is so useful and so phenomenal is that you can work with memories that are implicit.
So if a child or baby is separated from their first mother at birth, they don't have an explicit way to describe what happened because the language receptors of the brain weren't even developed. So that memory is only encoded in their nervous system.
But our bodies remember everything. Bessel van der Kolk has a great book. He's a trauma therapist and talking about how our bodies and nervous systems store everything.
EMDR can work with just body sensations and beliefs around, around maybe what? What does “body sensation” mean? So often adoptees come in and they talk about how they don't feel grounded, they don't feel lovable, they feel lost, and they're not able to track that back to a specific memory that they can describe.
But we just work with the body sensations and the belief “I'm lost” or “I'm ungrounded.” Or “I can't be grounded” or “I am not lovable.” It's incredible. And there's a specific EMDR therapy called Attachment-Focused EMDR, which Laurel Parnell developed. And I primarily use that with my clients who were adopted.
And that involves not only the standard EMDR protocol, but a lot of imagery and tapping in resources. It's really incredible to see the results of the EMDR work.
Haley Radke: I remember now one of the sessions of EMDR that I did with my therapist at the time. She had me write down some phrases that I need to start believing about myself.
Like, “I am worthy,” “I am loved,” things that are true but aren't, deep down, true inside. And she just had me read them while she had the two paddles that I held in my hands. Yeah. What would that do, do you think? I don't know.
Lesli A. Johnson: That might have been some of the resource tapping which, when I work with my clients, before we even start the EMDR, we do something called resource tapping.
So we tap in, I also use the little hand pulsers, which are just little pulsers that the person holds in their hand and they buzz alternately. The tapping in of the resources is we tap in a peaceful place, a wise figure, a protective figure, and a nurturing figure. And the idea is that the brain responds when we bring it to mind just like trauma.
A person who's had a traumatic event, when they get triggered, they're catapulted back into the trauma. So the veteran who's returned from war, when he hears a car backfire, his reptilian brain comes online and he's not thinking, “Oh, that is a car backfire.” He's back engaged in war.
The tapping in of resources is using that idea but tapping in positive resources. So bringing to mind a peaceful place or a peaceful state, the person imagines themselves in a place where they feel safe and peaceful and we bring in as much sensory input as possible.
What does it sound like there? What's the air temperature like? What does it look like? What are the sounds you hear? And the areas of the brain, the pleasure centers of the brain, light up. Perhaps not as fiercely as they do when the person is in this place, but it's kind of front-loading the brain with this resource.
And we do that with a calm, safe or peaceful place, a nurturing figure, a protective figure, and a wise figure. And those are also resources that the person can take out the door with them and strengthen. We're wanting to strengthen neural pathways and neural nets.
So that's a tool that they can have outside of the therapy room. And then also we bring those in as interweaves during the EMDR process. So if a person's processing a painful or scary memory, I might say, who could we bring in to help you? Or what would bring in my protective figure?
And again, the brain responds to this very nicely. So, a very long answer to your question. It sounds like maybe your therapist was doing some of that tapping in of positive self-beliefs.
Haley Radke: Yes. And I think my other ones, now that we're talking and all my memories are coming back, I think one of the other sessions would've been dealing with the whole grief of relinquishment. And so I'm sure that those are some things that you would do as well if you had someone that was an adoptee.
Lesli A. Johnson: Absolutely. And the Attachment-Focused EMDR allows us to create. Even though it didn't or may not have happened, we can create. There's a protocol called a pre-birth protocol.
So having the client imagine, for adoptees some of us don't know our before-birth circumstances. So again, these things didn't happen, but I can have the client create in their mind, in their imagination and, again, bringing in the sensory elements.
What was that like? What was conception like? What was birth like? I realize it sounds out there, but it actually is very helpful and curative.
Haley Radke: The science behind it, connecting your two hemispheres and all of those things that you explained at the top. I mean, that's why it works?
Lesli A. Johnson:Yeah, it's very evidence-based now. So, as out there as it sounds, it really is evidence-based and really effective in working with trauma. And I think more and more people are finally realizing that the separation trauma that adoptees experience is PTSD.
It is PTSD. It is trauma. And that a baby does remember. People say, “Oh, but you were just a few weeks old, babies don't remember.” And we now know through all of the brain signs, we know babies do remember and their nervous systems remember. Their bodies remember.
Haley Radke: Thank you. That is a wonderful explanation and I think I get it. Tell us, where can we find therapists that do EMDR?
Lesli A. Johnson: I would recommend that if a person was looking to find an EMDR therapist, that they go to the EMDR International Association website, which is emdria.org. They can type in their state and find someone who's trained in and certified in EMDR.
Haley Radke: Excellent. And this is something that we need to do in person, right? We can't do this online.
Lesli A. Johnson: I think it's most effective when the person is in the room. However, I have worked with people who would just do their own tapping or they would have their own little hand buzzers.
But I think I feel best when it's done face to face.
Haley Radke: Yeah, that's what I thought. Okay. Thank you so much, Lesli. Where can we connect with you online?
Lesli A. Johnson: You can connect with me at either of my websites. The first one is yourmindfulbrain.com. The second is asktheadoptee.com. Or Twitter. My Twitter handle is @LesliAJohnson.
You can also connect with me on Facebook at Your Mindful Brain.
Haley Radke: Thank you so much.
Lesli A. Johnson: You're welcome. Thank you.
Haley Radke: I just love Lesli. She is so amazing. She also did the “Surviving the Holidays” episode with me a few months ago. And I recommend going back and listening to that one if you have any big events coming up where you might be around some people who aren't particularly sensitive to adoptees or adoption issues.
She gives some very helpful tips and I'm still using some of those strategies daily. She also just wrote an article about EMDR and adoption trauma, and that's on goodtherapy.org. And I'll also link to that in the show notes on adopteeson.com.
If you're a part of our secret Facebook group, come and let me know if you've had EMDR or have considered it. I'm going to share what I remember about all of my EMDR sessions and even what my current psychologist has shown me about EMDR with my four-year-old son.
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