Episode 198: The World of EMDR Therapy

No need to whine, it's Whiny Palooza! Have some wine and join us on the Whiny Palooza Podcast with Rebecca Green.

Welcome to the Whiny Palooza Podcast. I'm your host, Rebecca Green. I'm a wife, mother of 3, and licensed clinical social worker. I also have 3 fur babies at home too. My passion has always been to help children and their families. I always dreamed of being a wife and a mother. Parents are always learning through their struggles, failures, and successes and joys. I am no stranger to this wild ride of parenting, and I know behind every great parent lies a team of supportive friends and family. I want to be part of your support system. I want you to know that you are not alone. We are in this parenting world together. Join me every week for insightful discussions with experts on parenting and marriage, as well as other parents who have found the secret to successes in parenthood. You'll learn tips and tricks to make life with your family better than ever. I hope you will follow along with me while we dive into what it takes to achieve a happy family.

Hello everyone. This is Rebecca Green for the Whiny Palooza podcast. And I am very excited today because I have Erin Zieglemeier here with me today. Hi, Erin.

Hi, Rebecca. Thank you for having me.

Thank you for doing this. I'm going to tell you a little bit about fabulous Erin. Erin's passion for helping others understand emotions began at a young age and continued to flourish throughout college. A graduate of Bowling Green State University, Erin majored in psychology and minored in communications with a strong emphasis on research with eating disorders and body image. After completing her master's degree in clinical psychology at West Chester University, Erin has spent her career treating clients in a variety of settings, including residential, PHP, IOP, and outpatient settings for both adolescents and adults. Erin is trained in relational trauma repair, attachment-based family therapy, and is a certified therapist and consultant in training in Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing. That's a, that's a mouthful.

It is.

Erin utilizes EMDR as her primary therapy modality, treating individuals struggling with anxiety, depression, relational issues, PTSD, interpersonal trauma, and attachment issues. On a case-by-case basis, Erin utilizes AAT with her border collie poodle mix, Max, which we are also going to talk about because that is So cool.

Of course. Of course.

And my son is Max, so I already love you. So let's start with what inspired you to become a therapist. I would love to know.

Oh, that is, that's a big question. I feel like I've wanted to be in the therapy realm forever. I'm thinking back to like middle school. I think we, I started in this kind of mindset of, psychology. Obviously that's what my undergrad degree is in. But I think as I like got into the field and realized, you know, what an actual psychologist does, not sure that that was what I wanted to go towards. I really had a strong emphasis in data in undergrad. I did a capstone project on, um, the thin ideal and eating disorders and body image with social media. So I did this whole project and was fully prepared to go into grad school school, get my master's, which I did, but then I was fully intending on getting a PhD or a PsyD. And I think as soon as I get into my master's and saw just how, you know, tedious and how much time and energy that took and how it might not give me the clinical experience that I wanted, I decided to put that on the back burner. So I did get kind of a lot of that research experience from my master's, but I knew that I wanted to work with people. I knew that I wanted to have that problem-solving kind of piece. And it's, it's taken a little bit to kind of find the right modality, and EMDR has fit perfectly into that. But I think being able to hear, you know, those struggles, being able to hear that there's a problem or issue or something that I don't like what's going on, how can I make this better, or how can I make this work better for me, therapy kind of fit right into that. The research part obviously is a little bit longer term. You're not going to get those immediate or even short-term results from the research side, but I saw with, you know, some of the, the interventions I was using as an intern and even in like my first few jobs that you could get some relief. And I really liked that idea of building the relationship and then also being able to actually solve problems and maybe less of the traditional way of solving a problem, but I really liked that kind of like immediacy that you could see like, hey, I tried this skill and I, it worked. Like I felt that shift.

That's awesome. I love that. And you have so many, um, specialties. I mean, I know you're using EMDR. I mean, I told you before we started, I want to talk to you about so much, but we'll talk about it.

Yeah, absolutely.

But let's start with EMDR. Yeah, I think that a lot of people don't even know what that is. Can you tell everyone how you found it and what it actually is?

Sure. So, um, how I got into EMDR is a really luck-based story, really coincidental. Um, I had heard about it not really in grad school. So I was in a clinical psych program, which is meant to help get you into like a PsyD or PhD. So it's half clinical, half research. You don't spend a whole lot time on a lot of different modalities. It was pretty much a CBT program. So I don't think I even knew what EMDR was at that point. Uh, it wasn't until I had gotten out and was working in the field and started to hear about all of these different modalities and interventions that, you know, you don't even touch on in school. And, um, at first I was like, yeah, that's interesting. Like, how does that work? And as I kind of saw more and read more, I really became interested in it. Talk therapy, I got really frustrated with pretty early on, just because I saw the limitations. Um, you know, like you said in my bio, I've worked in residential centers. I've worked in partial outpatient, IOP, like the whole spectrum of care. And in those more acute settings, just talking about how you feel isn't going to resolve the problem. And so I found that out pretty quickly. Residential is where I started out and it was really frustrating. Like, why is this? What we're just accepting as good treatment. And so I started digging into a little more. EMDR is very expensive to be trained in if you're paying for it yourself. And so that was a little bit of a barrier to start with. Um, I work primarily, so my, my day job is with a company called Newport Healthcare, and I've been with them for 5 years at this point doing various roles, but they started an EMDR program. Couple of years ago. They have someone who does training in-house, and so they rolled out this program, and I was in one of the, the first cohorts to be trained at Newport. And so I advocated, hey, like, I really want to do this. I wanted to do it for a while, and, you know, day one I was in love.

That's awesome.

Yeah, I, I think a lot of times, you know, clinicians especially go in, there's a lot of skepticism, you know, this is kind of weird, like magic, like how does this work? I can't, I can't believe that this would even work. And, you know, honestly, like I didn't, I didn't, I didn't have those thoughts. I went in and right off the bat I was like, this makes sense. This fits. I want to know anything and everything that I possibly can. And so I did my training. I came back. I did have a little, a small caseload at that point through Newport. So I was using it the day that I got back. And they also have a certification cohort. So as soon as I I finished my basic training, I applied so I could go through and get my certification, EMDR, which takes— took about a year, um, extra classes or extra like consultations. You have to do like some more work and stuff like that. But I, I was all in. And so that led me to becoming a consultant in training. So next year I will be a full consultant. So right now I'm just being supervised around being able to give feedback to other therapists. Consultation on cases and, and that kind of thing. But that's part of my role at Newport now is I work as doing consultations for clinicians, practicum facilitation during the actual training. So I'm very immersed in the world as well as, you know, using that primarily in my own private practice. So EMDR everything over here.

That's wonderful. So you're really like an EMDR expert that we're talking to right now.

Yeah. I got trained. So I got trained in 2020, middle of the pandemic. That summer. And ever since then, I mean, that's pretty much exclusively what I use, you know, and as we talk a little bit more about it, you know, EMDR works very well with other modalities, so you can kind of pull in other stuff, which at times you do need to, but that's pretty much all I've been doing since 2020. So I think, uh, my experience, like actually being a clinician as well as consulting with tons of different people, I mean, At this point, it's probably been hundreds of different people. Um, that's a lot of experience. That's a lot of different things that you see. It's all pattern-based. So once you start to see something and you kind of see like, oh, we, we tried this before and it worked, let's try that again. Okay. That didn't quite work. Let's tweak it. It's not like talk therapy where we're going on very subjective case-by-case situations. Like there's a lot of science and there's a lot of research behind EMDR and how, you know, why we do what we do, when we do it. Uh, and that was very appealing to me, the pattern-based stuff of being able to help work through some of these issues. Of course, it's not perfect, but I think once you know what you're looking for and once you kind of understand the mechanisms, I, I don't know how you can use anything else. Wow.

I mean, everyone I have talked to who uses it in therapy says it's amazing. So I have heard no negative feedback about EMDR, but I know that a lot of the listeners don't even know what it is.

Sure. Sure.

Can you tell us what it is?

Sure. So EMDR, eye movement desensitization reprocessing, a very, you know, fancy elaborate way of saying we are going to use bilateral movements. So we're going to be stimulating left and right parts of your brain to help process through things that are traumatic, that are overwhelming, that feel stuck. So I think a lot of people who have known about EMDR typically think of trauma, which is kind of how this came about, right? PTSD, very, very well known for that. There's also a ton of research showing its effectiveness for anxiety disorders, depressive disorders. There's literature on OCD, substance use, all kinds of things. And so when we really boil it down, at the end of the day, we're looking for things that you might not like about yourself. We're looking for things that might be hard to get through, that I might feel a little bit stuck on. So it doesn't have to be trauma per se. And I think that's the biggest thing that, um, as a clinician, we would want people to know. Um, so it, it's experiential, right? So it's not talk therapy. So people think of therapy as like, I go in, I say what my, my struggles are, what I'm struggling with. Um, and then the therapist responds and it's this dialogue. With EMDR, you don't have to tell all the details. You don't have to relive, um, out loud at least, you don't have to explain that situation to a therapist and tell them every little detail because I don't need to know everything in order to be helpful. And I think that's one of the biggest advantages is that, you know, people come in and some of these targets that they're working on, I don't know what they are specifically. I have an idea or I have some, um, some details, but I don't need to know every little bit of it to understand and help out, which is pretty cool when you think about it.

That's amazing. It's mostly parents who are listening. So can we talk to the parents and explain to them how EMDR can help them, their kids, like them as a family? Can we touch on that?

Certainly. So a lot of my background specifically, specifically with Newport is in attachment-based modalities. So I'm trained in attachment-based family therapy. Um, I don't do family therapy in my private work, but when I was working as a clinician, that was part of the deal, right? Is that you're doing family therapy, you're also doing individual. And so a lot of my experience, and this even happens in the private sector as well, parents come in, their kid is in treatment. And, you know, keeping in mind this is higher-level care, right? These are kids that are really struggling, that really need a lot of extra support. They're coming in for hours a day. The parents are also struggling. They don't know how to cope with really severe mental health issues. They've never been through it before. They may have been through it several times and are feeling, you know, kind of hopeless and like, what do I do? Where do we go next? And so a lot of the work that I did was with the attachment-based modality, and that's a whole separate thing, but with EMDR, right? Like there's different parts of it. So I think people who know about EMDR tend to think of it as, um, the eye movement. Just because we're not to the part where you're actually doing the reprocessing doesn't mean that you're not doing EMDR. Before you ever get to that point, regardless of who you're working with, there's a part of the modality called resource, and that's just a fancy word of saying grounding skills, coping skills. How are we going to help you get back into that window of tolerance if you do become escalated or if something is really triggering, which absolutely can happen when you're doing this kind of work. So a lot of the work with parents is teaching them those grounding skills, making sure that they're aware how to bring themselves back, especially if the, the children or the child is a main trigger, right? And a lot of times what I would see is parents coming in feeling very triggered by their, their kid for numerous reasons, but a lot of the times it was because it was bringing up stuff from their childhood that was never resolved. And so if we're doing EMDR with the kid individually and we're working with the parents on that grounding, they're both getting the same kind of resourcing skills. And then, you know, making sure that the parent is aware, like, you know, hey, this is maybe connected to this. Like, have you ever thought about it in this way? And if that's the case, right, if that barrier of the relationship with the child is it's bringing stuff up from my own childhood, or it's making me think about my own relationship with my parents, then absolutely EMDR would be a fantastic fit because we know, right, trauma is stored in the body. These experiences, these negative emotions they all get stored. So we might not be able to consciously know it in the moment of like, oh, this is what's happening, but your body remembers. And when your body feels like it's back in that same situation, it doesn't matter if your child's right in front of you and you can clearly see, hey, this is not my parent, your body doesn't know the difference. It feels that same sort of sensation or experience and it's gonna take you right back. So you're playing these old tapes over and over. And that's, that's where it differs with EMDR and talk therapy is that when we're using this neocortex, right, we can only access so much, but once we get into like the limbic system and we're able to really get into the body, then we can start to tackle some of those patterns and those experiences that oftentimes do come up when we're dealing with parents and families in a therapeutic setting.

I mean, this is interesting because I think the misconception is that only people who have trauma in their lives can benefit from EMDR, and it sounds like listening to you that almost anyone can benefit from it.

Yeah, I, I mean, specifically my, my background in private work is I do a lot of attachment work, which is always like family of origin. It's always relational. And that could be relational trauma. It could be just relational struggles. I think typically there— everyone has relational trauma. There is some sort of rupture or breakdown in some relationship in our life that is hurtful, is upsetting, could be traumatic. But yeah, EMDR does not have to just be for, you know, what we would think of as those big Ts, like an event happened to me. There's also a lot of room to do some of that attachment work with EMDR. I should have had this happen, but I didn't. And so that would be our difference between like an attachment wound, right? I should have had this love and care, but I didn't, versus the trauma, which is this thing happened to me that shouldn't have. And so there's a lot of crossover with, um, some of the attachment stuff, those relational wounds. It doesn't always have to be an event. When we think of relational trauma, relational wounds, um, that could be an incident of bullying that just really kind of sticks out. It could be repeated comments. So the spectrum is pretty wide with that. And as long as you know, you know what you're looking for, and as long as you know how to use the basic protocol, I would argue that EMDR is appropriate for a large spectrum of clients.

That makes sense. And you're teaching me so much about it because I don't know much and I love learning about it. Sure. And I love that you segued into attachment issues because I don't think people realize what attachment issues are. Can you give us some examples of what it looks like in our life?

Sure. So attachment, very simply put, is how do we attach to others in our life? What do my relationships look like with coworkers, friends, family, significant others? Um, all of this, you know, stems from childhood. We learn how to attach to our caregivers, whoever that might be, and that's kind of our, our only frame of reference for the first usually 18 years of life, right? Whoever we're living with, that's kind of how we learn to attach. We pick up on those relational patterns. We see, you know, how do, how do we fight? How do we love? How do we repair? And if some of those things aren't happening or if some of them are happening too much, that's always going to carry over into adulthood, into your relationships as an adult, you know, whether you want it to or not, unless we do something different. And so when we talk about, you know, attachment, attachment ruptures or wounds, what that might look like, it could mean, you know, shutting down in a relationship when I, when I feel like we're getting into confrontation. So really wanting to avoid confrontation. It could be the opposite, feeling really triggered by confrontation and getting really aggressive or kind of activated around those behaviors. It could mean feeling really anxious around others, and you know, usually this is coming up in sort of like a partnership way, but absolutely can play out with, with friends or colleagues as well. Your anxious attachment where I don't hear from you for an hour and I'm nonstop texting and calling because I don't know what's happening. And I'm, I'm having this whole narrative in my head. Oftentimes this is coming from experiences that we've had before or experiences we didn't have. And so our brain has to fill in those blanks somehow. And usually that's going to be an assumption.

Very interesting. I think that it tends to come up in our relationships and you probably get people coming in and saying, this is my issue in a relation— in my relationship. And you're like, oh yes, this is, in your mind, you're like, this is definitely an attachment issue. So then how do you help someone have a better attachment as an adult?

Oh, excellent question. So I mentioned earlier, EMDR works really, really well with other modalities. And so when we talk about, um, without getting too technical, like that resourcing phase, right? That's when we're bringing in anything or everything that we want in order to help stabilize, ground this client so that they can move into the reprocessing part. So I kind of think of EMDR as like one chunk, two chunks. We don't necessarily need to have both in order for it to be effective. Some clients may stay in the resourcing phase for a while because they need that stabilization. And that can mean we're doing some DBT skills. So I need to work on distress tolerance. I need to work on interpersonal relationships skills. It could mean CBT, right? I really need to work on some of those cognitions. It could mean art. It could mean movement. I mean, that is totally up to the clinician. It's up to what works or what the client really responds to. But this is where we can really work on some of that attachment stuff before we ever move into reprocessing. Because if we start to go too quickly into that reprocessing part and there's all this attachment, it's not gonna, it's not gonna work. You're gonna get stuck. And so that's where we talk about parts work, right? So Internal Family Systems is one way you can look at it. There's another model, the Developmental Needs-Meeting space. That's another one. Regardless of how you do it, or if it's a mix, you have to understand those parts, those parts of self. So we all have different parts of self. That could mean this is my professional self, this is my student self, this is my partner self. It could be emotional, right? Here is my angry self, here is my disappointed self. It could mean ages, right? Like, I feel really small, I feel like I'm 10 years old when my partner talks to me this way, or I feel 8 years old when my parent talks to me this way. However you want to look at it, and this is, you know, a whole separate conversation, but that is how we have to address those attachment pieces. Because if something happened to me or didn't happen to me in terms of attachment at, you know, 8, 9, 10, whatever that age is, I'm gonna be kind of stuck there because developmentally I didn't get what I needed. And so when you try to go in and do some of this deeper level trauma work or reprocessing work, those defenses are going to come up. That little 8-year-old is not ready to tackle these adult issues that you're currently dealing with, even though it stems back to childhood. And so that's where some of that really deep, really reparative work does have to take place. And sometimes that's enough. Sometimes I, you know, you'll do that work and you'll really repair, you know, you might hear it called inner child work as well. There's all kinds of like names and flavors and different modalities, but at the end of the day, like that child part of you or that younger part or that hurt part has to feel okay. It has to feel accepted and loved by the adult part of you before you can ever move on and start to heal some of these other issues. Sometimes that's enough. Sometimes that's enough to make things feel a little bit more stable and you don't have to do as much reprocessing. Sometimes you do. Sometimes the stabilization is really long and really hard. And then you still have to do that trauma work, which can also be really long and hard. So it kind of depends on a ton of factors, right? So like, how many resources do you have coming in the door? How much time do we have to spend doing resourcing? Have you been in therapy before? Someone who has some of those background skills versus someone who's never done therapy ever, very, very different presentations. It also depends what you're looking for, right? It's a lot different if, um, when we go back to attachment, right? If I have a secure attachment or fairly secure with one parent but not the other, that's going to be different work than if I had an insecure attachment with both of them. Having some sort of secure attachment figure as a child, whether that's a parent, caregiver, you know, sometimes it's even like fictional characters. We need something to attach to and build from, and the more you have, usually the better that it goes because we can draw on what you already have. If we have to create a lot of those and kind of build from scratch, that's going to take longer. And so it really kind of depends on what people have coming in the door, what their experiences have been, how much work have they done inside lots of different factors that are going to kind of determine, you know, how much time are we going to have to spend doing the prep work and, and will we be able to get over to the reprocessing.

I mean, it's also interesting, like I could spend all day talking to you about attachment, but you know I'm dying to talk about your dog.

Yes, we have to talk about Max.

We have to jump to Max. Um, can you tell everyone, I mean, this is so amazing to me, I'm a dog lover. So I was like, I have to talk to this lady. How do you use your dog in therapy? And can you tell us what is AAT?

Yes. So AAT is animal-assisted therapy, and that can mean a whole host of things. So like equine therapy, using horses for therapy falls in there. Some people use, you know, more traditionally it's dogs, but you could also use cats. You could use I've seen like lizards, small, smaller animals, anything. It's a pretty broad kind of area. So this isn't like, you know, you go and you get a certification or you have to go to school or anything like that. It's more just how are you using animals ethically, responsibly, appropriately in your treatment plan? And so with Max, Max is Max is awesome. He's been around basically his whole life, so he's 5. He grew up in the therapy setting. He was coming into the office from like the day I got him. He's very, very much attuned to kind of like emotions, the therapy world, what it is we're doing. He knows when he has like his harness on, like we're going to work. He always comes in and he'll, you know, greet and then he kind of settles down. You know, he has had a lot of training and practice with all of that. But the biggest thing is that, you know, utilizing him very specifically. So if someone's getting upset and this happens a lot more with like the teenage clients, adults love him, but I find that teenagers really kind of grasp onto him. And I would, you know, I would bet money that's all attachment stuff and they're noticing, hey, I have this need, trying to meet that, you know, bringing him in strategically when someone's upset. When someone is really struggling to get through a certain part of, of their therapy. When someone's talking about something or trying to go into a part of their treatment plan that, that's really difficult, maybe they've never done that before, and it's really tough to kind of like stay focused and present. I use him more of like a grounding resource in that sense. One, one case I'm thinking about particular where I used him was with a teenage girl who just really just really poor self-esteem, tons and tons of trauma. I mean, lots of stuff going on, but she really responded to animals. And what we would do with Max is it was almost kind of like this parallel kind of play. So kind of having her take the lead. And I was teaching her like some of his commands, like, okay, well, when you say sit, he'll sit like this. And then if you go like this and say step up, he'll come up and give you a hug. And so she would start to come into sessions and she would eventually learn to like give him the command. So it was really helping to teach her assertiveness and, you know, asking for what you need and being able to just have some sort of control, even if it's just over a dog. Um, and, and similar with other clients, you know, that struggle with boundaries, like it's kind of the opposite. I've used him as, you know, kind of this catalyst to teach again, usually teenagers, how to have boundaries with people. I had one client that really loved animals and in no way was malicious, but really struggled with boundaries with everyone and was just very kind of like suffocating in some ways, would be really, really close to you, just hard to know that space. And same with Max, and he would respond and he didn't like it, so he would wiggle away and It was this really good teaching moment because the client was like, well, I don't think he likes me. He leaves every time that I try to touch him. And so it was this really awesome opportunity to say, well, you know, he doesn't really like to be squeezed. Like, I think that's hurting him. Like, how can we do this a little bit differently? And let's see how he responds. And so it's a lot of that parallel play of like, you know, this isn't happening in the real world, or I'm noticing that this is happening in my relationship. And now it's happening with this dog. So what's wrong with me? And, and taking a step back, using Max as kind of the object to practice with because, you know, we can, right? He's, he's going to respond and he's going to do that, whereas in the real world it might not feel as safe to take some of those risks.

I think it is amazing that you are using him for so many things. I mean, I had no idea. I just wrote down a list of like 5 things that you're using him for, which I mean, I was clueless about. That is amazing. I had a bunch of people over last night for Halloween and my dog was making his way to all the kids and just seeing how kids respond to your dog. I mean, yeah, that sounds so useful. I love that you're doing this.

Yeah.

Amazing.

It's, it's been life-changing for some of these clients.

Yeah. Um, I see how animals, even adopting an animal, I see how it changes people's lives. Just having one in their life. Right. Yeah. That's therapy in itself.

It is.

Oh yeah.

Well, some of them, I mean, my adult clients, you know, they're a little bit more developmentally progressed. So like they don't need that much attention, but I'll definitely see some of them like reach for him or Um, in some of like the more intense reprocessing sessions, I had this one client who would make eye contact with Max because he would kind of sit— he has like a little spot next to my chair— and he would make eye contact with Max whenever he would feel like really upset during some of these reprocessing sets. And he notices and has made comments when Max isn't there for the sessions. So people really do lean on him in different ways that I can't do, like I would not be helpful in those ways.

I love it. I would love to hear about you, like what is your own biggest challenge that you're dealing with right now?

I think the biggest thing now in, you know, kind of this, um, post-ish COVID world is just, there's so much, there's so much need. There's so much trauma. There's so much emotion, um, things that didn't happen that should have during COVID years, as well as things that happen that shouldn't have. And it's busy. Um, so I think, you know, one of the biggest struggles is really prioritizing self-care, prioritizing like what you can do and what you can't, because you want to be able to help as many clients as you can. And especially with EMDR, you know, like people come in and, um, I always do like a little consultation call just to kind of see like, what are you looking for? What's going on? This is what I do. You know, let me know if that sounds like something you'd want to try. And you hear these stories and it's like the typical, you know, therapist response of like, oh, I have to take you even though like I don't have time or room to be able to do it. And that's a really hard balance of like setting that boundary, knowing that like that's going to be a lot if I try to take on just one more, even though it's like You really need EMDR. Well, most of us really need EMDR.

So we all, we all need it.

We, I mean, I fully, I fully support that. I mean, I've done my own EMDR. It's life-changing, completely life-changing. Things that, you know, you can spend and have, I have spent years talking about in therapy, but like don't resolve because you can't, it's just a different part of your brain. It's stored differently. Talking does not translate. It's like you're trying to like talk to somebody in English that only speaks French. It just does not compute. And so, you know, EMDR almost opens up this whole other world that you didn't know existed in terms of healing and, and insight, right? Like, it's not— I don't think it's all just, hey, this awful thing happened, I want to kind of work through it. Sometimes it's opening up other I guess like avenues, right, of connections and starting to put pieces together so that you understand those patterns. And the hope is, is that you start to take those outside of the room. You're making these connections inside the therapy space, and then you go out and you're thinking about them and it starts to click. And it might just be like a little, a little bit at first, but with time, right? Like you're starting to put together new connections that maybe you never would've gotten to using traditional talk therapy.

Absolutely. Well, and you're so busy and you have so much going on. So how are you coping? How are you taking care of yourself?

Lots of outside time. Love to hike. Max loves to hike. We've done a lot of kind of local hikes. We're here in Philadelphia, outside of Philadelphia, so very accessible to hikes, walking trails, stuff like that. Being active. I mean, I think that's really the biggest part, especially when we think about, you know, trauma being stored in the body and, you know, emotions, energy just being stored. It's really, really helpful to just take a walk at the end of the day. And, you know, we have plenty of little loops we can do around here, or I'll go to the gym, love, you know, love to work out and just physically kind of get rid of all the stuff that builds up every day or several days. That's been most helpful for me, especially, you know, kind of getting back into the swing of, of regular sessions, because for so long everything was hybrid or exclusively virtual, or you're still wearing masks. Like, there's a lot, there's a lot to kind of recover with some of that.

Absolutely. And I totally agree. I feel like physically doing something gets, gets us gets it out of us.

Right. Yeah. It gives it, it gives it a space. And you know, the other thing I guess to mention is that walking, right? Like taking a walk that is bilateral stimulation, your brain. So I guess the best way to kind of think about it, right. Is when, you know, I'm kind of walking and before, you know, I'm like half a mile down the street because I'm just thinking. Yeah. That's what it's like when you're in that dual stimulation is you kind of have this background stuff going on. You're walking along, but your brain's able to kind of to the forefront and really start to think about what you need to think about.

That's amazing because I walk my dog Tanner every day and, um, I'm laughing because I have the best ideas when I'm walking him.

That's why. Because you have your brain, you have both parts of your brain working. It's activated. I mean, you know, you're not like processing trauma, but at the same time, your brain is like I think of it as like digestion, right? Like I have all this stuff kind of built up in my brain from the day. Maybe I don't have the time or space to think about it. I go on that walk and it's like, it just starts churning and it's going through and it's working through and you feel lighter. You feel like, oh, I have so many things to think about. It's so many things to work on. That is why.

So interesting.

Yeah.

Well, I know this is hard, but what do you think the best advice is that you've ever gotten?

Tricky one. Um, best advice I ever got— I'm going to butcher the— I don't remember the exact quote, but my, my EMDR supervisor, um, brought in this quote and it was something along the lines of like, it doesn't— you don't have to show up perfectly, you just have to show up. And kind of the gist of that is that, you know, you don't have to know all the answers, you You don't have to like be the expert or have the perfect response or know exactly what to do at any given time. You just have to show up and you have to be present. And I can't think of a truer statement for not only EMDR sessions, but consultation, their own EMDR, parenting, like so many different relational aspects can kind of relate to that quote. And it's so simple.

That is, I hope that everybody is really listening to you because I tell parents that all the time. They think they need to show up. Perfectly for their kids, and their kids don't need them to be perfect. They just need them to show up, right? It's such good advice.

Yeah.

Well, is there anything else that you want to share with us that I didn't think to ask you?

Just to, just to show up. I mean, I think if, if we have to, if we have to end on any note, that's the best one. And, you know, your, your kids are watching. Um, your relationships, right? Like people are noticing what you do, what you say, how you show up. They're not going to remember every little word you said, but they're going to remember how you made them feel and how it felt at the end of that interaction. And so really just taking that to heart and keeping that in mind.

Such good advice. Well, can you tell everyone where to go find you?

Yes. So our website, you can find us at, um, willowspacefortraumatreatment.com. Com, probably the best way to get us, and that'll have all of our information about what we do, who we are, um, and any contact information.

Well, I can't thank you enough. I absolutely loved talking to you and learning about all the things that you do. You are a brilliant lady, and I have no doubt that you're helping tons of people. So thank you so much.

Thank you, Rebecca. It was a pleasure.

This is Rebecca Greene reminding everyone to spend every day laughing, learning, and loving.

Thank you for tuning in to the Winey Palooza podcast. If you like what you heard, please be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. While you are there, leave a review. I love to hear your feedback. Thank you so much for listening.

Until next time.

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