Vicki Lopez, MA, LMHC

EMDR: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing

Trauma affects everyone, in every walk of life. Negative life events, large and small, can cause distress and distrust to be locked into the body’s nervous system. When a person feels “triggered” or like they are “over-reacting,” usually unprocessed trauma is at play. Most obvious traumas include car accidents, sexual assault, or natural disasters. Less obvious traumas include feeling criticized by parents, embarrassed at school, rejected in a relationship, or demoralized in a job.

Neuropsychology now can show through brain scans how these events, if insufficiently processed, are stored in the brain, only to re-emerge when a sound, smell, person or place triggers the memory. Over time, similar negative events can get stored in memory pathways, called neural networks. If a person has felt shamed by a parent, teacher, coach, supervisor, and partner, these events across their life may be linked in the nervous system. Hence the phrase “things that fire together, wire together."

EMDR is highly effective at rapid trauma processing. Clients often feel greater calm, resilience, clarity, and self-esteem after EMDR. Some events and conditions EMDR can treat include:

Single Trauma

• loss of a loved one
• car accident
• sexual assault
• natural disaster
• victims of violent crimes
• witness of violence
• robbery
• job loss
• surgery
• bicycle accident
• dog bite/attack
• home fire
• war experience

Chronic Issues

• depression
• general anxiety
• panic attacks
• phobias
• childhood trauma
• performance anxiety
• social anxiety
• physical abuse
• sexual abuse
• low self-esteem
• relationship problems
• insomnia/nightmares

EMDR is the leading treatment for PTSD, anxiety, phobias, panic, and many other conditions. EMDR is now endorsed by The World Health Organization, the American Psychiatric Association, and the U.S. Department of Defense. Since 1988, over 30 controlled studies have been done. Several studies concluded that 84-90% of clients with single event trauma no longer had PTSD after three 90-minute sessions. One key study, conducted by Kaiser Permanente, showed that 100% of single-trauma clients and 77% of multiple trauma clients no longer experienced PTSD after having six 50-minute sessions. In another study, 77% of veterans were free of PTSD in 12 sessions.

EMDR uses visual, tactile or auditory movement that mimics the brain activity in REM sleep. During REM, the brain prunes daily memories into manageable, coherent and well connected neural pathways. With trauma, the brain breaks up overwhelming memory and sequesters these fragments, essentially keeping them disconnected in bits and pieces. Smells, sounds, sights and sensations from a single event can each be stored separately, leaving people vulnerable to random triggers. For example, you might feel frozen when your partner’s voice triggers an auditory memory of being berated as a child. Even if you can recollect the childhood incident, you can’t seem to stop your reaction. This is how trauma from the past can hijack our present. EMDR helps people safely integrate these fragmented memories into your larger coherent, resilient sense of self.

Hypnotherapy

Hypnotherapy is a cross between talk-therapy and hypnosis. Hypnotherapy gently brings you into a state of calm relaxation from which deeper emotions, beliefs, and memories can be resolved. Hypnotherapy is interactive, using guided visualizations and positive hypnotic suggestions to create change at the subconscious level of your mind and body. Subconscious beliefs such as “I’m not loveable” or “I’m not good enough” can be illuminated and reworked through hypnotherapy. Most importantly, hypnotherapy promotes a sense of inner safety, connectedness, and resilience.

Hypnosis has been widely studied for the past 150 years. Most recently, scientific studies conclude that hypnosis is an effective treatment for many physical and psychological conditions. These include:

Physical

• Insomnia
• Chronic Pain
• Hypertension
• Fibromyalgia
• Addiction and Cravings
• Weight Loss

Psychological

• Anxiety and Panic
• Depression
• PTSD
• Stress Reduction
• Negative Self Perception
• Memory Retrieval

Hypnotherapy is a holistic, safe and scientifically supported way to heal physical and psychological conditions. You can choose how much or how little to utilize hypnotherapy in our work together. I can provide you with further information about hypnotherapy process, its benefits and scientific studies. Hypnotherapy may be a useful tool to help speed up your recovery process.

Mindfulness Training

It’s been said that depression is worry about the past, while anxiety is worry about the future. Mindfulness is the practice of the here and now, learning to disentangle yourself from your thoughts emotions, and bodily sensations to feel contentment in accepting yourself, in all of your dimensions, exactly as you are in the here and now. Mindfulness is about creating space between the real living presence that you are and all the stories, good and bad, that you tell yourself about you and your life. Examples of these stories are “My life is a failure,” or “I’m never going to feel better.” Mindfulness practice creates calm, centeredness, and openness, with greater acceptance of yourself, your circumstances, and those around you.

There is a large body of current scientific studies that show how mindfulness practice can improve both your physical and mental health. Studies show mindfulness can:

Physical

• Help relieve stress
• Reduce heart disease
• Lower blood pressure
• Reduce chronic pain
• Improve sleep
• Support clear couples communication

Emotional

• Reduce gastrointestinal issue
• Reduce depression
• Reduce substance abuse and cravings
• Treat eating disorders
• Reduce anxiety

Mindfulness helps you tolerate and accept difficult emotions, thoughts and sensations, leading to greater resilience and sense of self contentment. In our work together, we can utilize mindfulness in our sessions to promote clear thinking and feeling, and to support your daily practice.