EMDR Therapy
Many clients I work with are fathers and parents who notice that becoming a parent brings up unresolved feelings from their own childhood. EMDR therapy allows clients to process those experiences and develop a stronger sense of calm, confidence, and connection with their families.
EMDR can help you resolve inner conflict by neutralizing painful history and making it safe for you to feel feelings.
Clients often come to me feeling anxious, confused, angry, overwhelmed, and feeling unprepared to parent, and we discover that the root of what they are feeling is in their childhood experiences.
You may feel like you had a pretty good childhood- your parents took care of your physical needs. However, they may not have taken care of your emotional needs.
Even if you didn’t experience severe neglect, abandonment or abuse, in a broad sense this lack of emotional attunement and connection is referred to as developmental trauma or disrupted attachment.
This is because every human being needs parental attunement (someone who cares how you feel, notices when you’re upset or hurting, and responds in a way that helps you develop skills to cope with those feelings). If your childhood was lacking that attunement, you may feel like something is missing, feel like something is wrong with you, or feel like you can’t connect to your own children the way they need you to.
As new parents transition into parenthood, old memories and core beliefs surface that were instilled during childhood, and with those come unresolved feelings about one's own upbringing that can manifest as role confusion and anxiety when confronted with the challenges of new parenthood.
EMDR desensitizes you to the force or strength of old memories so they are no longer in the way. It turns the volume down on the feelings. The things that happened in the past feel like distant memories instead of immediate threats.
How Can Childhood Trauma Affect Parenting?
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Childhood trauma often involves disrupted attachment with caregivers, which feeds into ambivalence about becoming someone else’s care giver.
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It’s hard to give what we didn’t receive.
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It can be challenging to connect to your child if you didn’t receive true connection.
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You may feel numb or detached.
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You may often feel angry and you don’t know why.
After EMDR Clients Report Feeling:
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Less confused
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More at peace
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Like things are more resolved
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Less easily angry
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Able to focus
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Able to connect with their kids
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Better equipped to handle stress
If I say I experienced childhood trauma, does that mean my parents failed?
You may be wondering if you say you experienced childhood trauma does that mean your parents were bad people or did a bad job parenting? You may feel conflicted about your personal identity, as if something inside is asking, “Am I someone’s child or someone’s parent?”
The short answer is that it’s ok to love your parents and believe they did their best, and also accept that they didn’t know what they didn’t know and something was missing from your childhood.
They were likely just raising you the way they were raised, or maybe they did even better than their parents did! Either way, you can create a legacy of even better parenting for your children. You can offer them a more attuned, connected, and peaceful childhood than you had.
The longer answer is that your personal process through these feelings may take some time and some work. EMDR can help smooth that process by allowing you to integrate your memories so they feel less painful and easier to compartmentalize.
What Causes Trauma?
Trauma can happen during childhood experiences that failed to meet our most core needs for love, emotional connection or safety. Trauma can also be caused by a one-time experience that overwhelmed your nervous system’s ability to reregulate in the moment, such as an accident, or a violent act against you or someone you know.
At Shapiro Psych, we help clients primarily with childhood trauma that affected their development
What is EMDR? How does it work?
EMDR uses the same process your brain uses during sleep to process experiences, but sometimes those experiences are too big and get stuck. EMDR helps your brain organize this natural processing in a guided, directed way, so your painful experiences become integrated into your life so they feel like distant memories not current threats.
EMDR uses bilateral stimulation (side to side) to activate multiple areas of your brain, because neurons that fire together wire together, and that’s how your traumatic experiences become integrated.
Trauma can happen during childhood experiences that failed to meet our most core needs for love, emotional connection or safety. Trauma can also be caused by a one-time experience that overwhelmed your nervous system’s ability to reregulate in the moment, such as an accident, or a violent act against you or someone you know.
At Shapiro Psych, we help clients primarily with childhood trauma that affected their development
What is EMDR? How does it work?
EMDR uses the same process your brain uses during sleep to process experiences, but sometimes those experiences are too big and get stuck. EMDR helps your brain organize this natural processing in a guided, directed way, so your painful experiences become integrated into your life so they feel like distant memories not current threats.
EMDR uses bilateral stimulation (side to side) to activate multiple areas of your brain, because neurons that fire together wire together, and that’s how your traumatic experiences become integrated.
Why is EMDR effective?
EMDR is a clinically tested protocol, backed by research that shows that it is an effective way to treat psychological problems, trauma, stuck memories, and unresolved feelings around things that happened that we may not even remember.
Can EMDR Be Done Virtually?
Studies have shown that EMDR is just as effective virtually as in person. Your therapist may ask you to tap alternately on each side of your body or use a visual tool that you can track with your eyes back and forth across the screen.
You don’t have to carry the weight of past experiences alone. EMDR therapy can help your brain process what happened so you can move forward feeling calmer, clearer, and more connected to your life and relationships.
If you're ready to take the next step, schedule a free consultation to see if EMDR therapy is the right fit for you.
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