EMDR: the weirdest therapy I've ever had

it is literally the weirdest therapy i have ever done in my life it's just so simple it's so simple and it feels like it's fake and it feels like it shouldn't work but it does [Music] hello everyone and welcome back to my channel for those of you who are new here i am sam and i make videos about autism and neurodiversity with a side of humor today i'm going to be talking about my experience with emdr therapy how it works what it was like the kind of side effects and long-term effects at the time of filming my entire family minus the baby has now had emdr therapy both all of us have had two sessions each so i feel like i have a good overview of how it works for at least our particular situation so emdr therapy stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing and it is a relatively new therapy aimed at treating trauma and ptsd although it is now being used to treat other conditions such as phobias and eating disorders that sort of thing so what exactly is it reprocessing sounds a little bit ominous doesn't it but basically it uses what's called bilateral stimulation which means stimulating either sides of your body and therefore your brain and the idea is that you have this stimulation on both sides while attempting to experience or relive in a way the trauma or the most traumatic or distressing point of a traumatic experience now interestingly enough they don't actually know exactly how it works it was kind of discovered by accident i think the story goes that the person was walking in the park and moving their eyes around and they were like hey my trauma feels better theories suggest that it's to do with the different types of memories psychology 101 you have various kinds of memory storage in your brain you have working memory which is like remembering things right now so working memory is if somebody tells your phone number you remember it enough to kind of like write it down and that's very much in the present and of course you've got long-term memory which is kind of a different type of memory so what they think is that by using this bilateral stimulation and simultaneously thinking about the trauma it forces the traumatic memory from working memory where it's kind of stimulating you constantly into long-term storage as it were because after all trauma is firstly we know that it's stored in the body and secondly it's what is trauma if not experiencing past events as though they are happening right now and having that fear and that reaction to what's happening right now when you're not going through that event now doing this technique shunts the memory into long-term storage where you can look at it as if it happened in the past and it doesn't it doesn't necessarily solve it or make it go away but it takes away that kind of trigger the thing that affects people who've gone through trauma or people with ptsd so let me tell you about what led me and my whole family to emdr therapy as many of you will know i had a baby last year and things were good for about three weeks and then on the fourth week she started crying and crying and crying and crying and um we took her to the doctor and we were like i know babies cry but she's really crying a lot they were like don't worry crying peaks at nine weeks so we were like okay great we've just got five weeks to wait until it starts getting better but it really didn't and um you know there were some days where she would be screaming and i mean if you have had babies or been around babies you know what newborn screams are like screaming five hours a day plus um and people say well it's colic it's colic it's like okay what actually is colic eventually when she was four and a half months old she was diagnosed with silent reflux which is reflux except there's not a lot of vomiting although she did do a lot of spitting up yeah burning pain in your esophagus but you don't really see a lot of it so there's constantly there's pain here when you're trying to eat when you're trying to sleep pretty much everything that babies do the long story short that's not my forte by the time she was even diagnosed she got taken into hospital and that was more for us than for her um the dutch healthcare system has been amazing during this we have had a lot of support but yeah she got taken into hospital because my husband and i were not fit to take care of a baby anymore so she was taken into hospital to start her on this new thickener which is sort of going to help she started getting a lot better we got a week of sleep and from then on things started getting better but it seemed like the damage had been done and i know you're thinking like a baby crying everybody deals with baby crying but at the hospital they told us we can see if there's any treatment you need and i was a bit like treatment what treatment do i need while having a mental breakdown inside every day thinking that you know they're going to say hey do you want to go on some antidepressants or do you want cbt therapy and they were like no we use the mdr to treat your trauma because apparently when they get a lot of reflux babies coming in and the parents usually always need trauma therapy so that's a fun fact for you if parents say that their baby has reflux um treat it like that they're going through a trauma so yeah anyway she was four and a half months so what was that i don't even remember there's a big black hole in my memory around about october november i think it was november she went to hospital it was actually after things started getting better that both myself and my husband and my son noticed more symptoms of kind of ptsd so you can imagine if they have an awareness at the hospital where they see a lot of reflux babies that parents need to be treated for trauma from crying you can imagine the effect it had on neurodivergent parents um autistic mother and adhd father who both have reasonably sensitive hearing and obviously having just given birth and then having this kind of constant um it's it wasn't even just the constant crying it was the inconsolable crying at one stage it was so bad we actually lived next to i think we live next to a psychologist i think she is uh she came over and she was like have you heard about the five s's and we're like yes we've had about the five s's like the baby is literally swaddled and shushed and swung around whatever the other five s's are and she's just like have you tried shushing the baby and me and my husband obviously were making awful dark humor jokes about five different s's um which i'm sure with a bit of imagination you could guess what we were um thinking would be a more appropriate um five s's so that was that was what caused the trauma and then after it started getting better we were noticing more like panicky reactions and more kind of like ptsd type reactions i don't know that either of us would really qualify for a diagnosis of ptsd i did have that earlier in my life which i talked about in another video on trauma which i urge you to check out because it was a very heavily researched video for that one but you know you don't have to have ptsd to benefit from emdr therapy you don't need a diagnosis ptsd you can have just been through a trauma my experience would would lead me to assume that it was more effective if there is kind of a really simple source of the trauma rather than a complex ptsd kind of issue but i don't know that's something i don't have experience in treating so let me tell you a little bit about how my sessions went and my experience with my own therapy so i went in to the psychologist and she works in the hospital and she is actually i don't think child psychologist is the right word but she is like a family psychologist so she does deal with children but she also treats parents of reflux babies and this kind of thing kind of one of the first things she said to me was something along the lines of you know do you really want to talk about this or should we just get into it you know and i was like i don't want to talk about my feelings i've talked about my feelings at various different therapists you know for a very long time uh in my life already and i'm just kind of done with it i didn't really want to talk about it and she's like good because let's just get started and do this so that's one of the things that i thought was actually really nice about this this emdr therapy is that you don't need to tell them about how you're feeling because it's kind of assumed you're feeling terrible that's why you're there right so what she did was pull out a bar a kind of light bar about oh you can't really see about this wide quite wide on a little tripod and the light bar had a light that you can program to do lots of different things flash or whatever but the one that she did was basically the light goes from here to here and back again so it was basically a light going across like this and the idea is that you follow it with your eyes what she also attached to it was two hand buzzers kind of like you know those joke handshake buzzer kind of things but they were just basically little vibratey things that you hold and they synchronize with the light so when the light is on this side your this hand buzzer buzzes and when the light is on this side this hand buzzer buzzes it is literally the weirdest therapy i have ever done in my life but once you kind of get into it you see sort of like how it works well i don't know you don't really see how it works you're just like what is going on i don't understand why this is helping me feel better what you do before before the actual eye movement stuff starts is you think of you make an image in your mind now i think there are ways of doing it if you're one of the people who can't make images in their mind i think you could probably write a story or write a sentence or something like that but you have to have a concrete idea of pretty much the most distressing period of your trauma when you think so she said to me when you think about the last however many months what is the what is the most distressing image to you and the important thing here is that it doesn't have to be something that actually happened and that for you know for parents who have had extreme sleep deprivation and don't know don't know what's happening all memory is unreliable or something like that it doesn't actually matter what happened what matters is what is torturing you inside i had this image which was kind of a composite of various different things that had happened over and over again when she's screaming and screaming screaming and i've got earplugs and headphones on and i'm trying to calm her down with the shushing and the thing and i'm just sort of screaming in frustration and she's screaming and you know it was something along those lines even though this never happened i was like the image had me like throwing her into her bed or something like that but she said it doesn't have to have happened it's just like what is the distressing feeling bringing up like so you you create this kind of core of distress and that's the image that you focus on then she starts with the eye movement and so you hold the buzzers and you watch the light and it goes on for 30 seconds now it feels a bit weird some people have problems following the light makes them feel sick there are other ways of doing it as i'll talk about later but for me it was okay it goes quite quickly so you're sort of like oh that was horrible you think of this core memory and you concentrate on that and she says how distressed does it make you feel and i think that when i started i was like seven or eight or something like that like pretty pretty distressed i was lump in my throat and tightness in my chest you know identifying where in the body it also makes you feel so you do that for 30 seconds and then she said to me um okay so how has the image changed has the image changed for you in any way and i was like oh yeah i guess it has it's and it's kind of weird because you think well i didn't do that i didn't think that the image was going to change but somehow it shifted a little bit uh so i said something along the lines of um yeah you know it's it's like the same image but instead of throwing her on the bed i'm i'm putting her on the bed something like that you know and so she goes okay concentrate on that and then we do the eye movement thing again for 30 seconds and basic and then she's like you know about halfway through she said sort of what number do you feel now how distressed does this image when you go back to the original image how distressed does that make you feel and i said oh i don't know before or something like that and i was like it was very strange how you you go in there i mean i went in extremely triggered because that morning had been really really bad with the baby and so i was like i'm already triggered is this good for therapy and she's like yeah that's fine so i was really really kind of quite shaken up and distressed and i went in and you know we did the things and i was like oh this is making me feel better why is this making me feel better doesn't make any sense um it seems like a pseudo-therapy or a pseudoscience but it works weird the first session was basically going through this process you start out with the image you do the eye movement um you know 30 seconds of that you say okay how is the imaging how is the image changed and then you go again until i was brought down in terms of distress i think by the end of it i was on a two at the end of my first session i was you know i was like this image is kind of like sad but it's not distressing that the first session i was just like wow i was exhausted by the end of it i mean it is really tiring if i would advise anyone else doing this i would be like don't drive home afterwards because i had to drive home and there was a storm outside and i was just like i was extremely tired it is a very intense therapy more so than i would say a talking therapy so i had the first session and i was like wow this is amazing and i came back home and uh the baby was making noise it wasn't screamy screamy screaming noise but it was just like noise that is quite unpleasant when you're actively being triggered and i was like this is weird because i'm just like oh this is just it's just a noise that happened rather than like so i came home and i was just like i'm cured i'm fixed this is amazing she said expect expect it to be you know for the next few days your brain is still processing your brain is still kind of shifting it and moving it all around and so i thought okay well you know take it easy so then it came to my second session and um i went in all like i don't have trauma um you don't need to fix me anymore i'm fixed and she went in she was like let's just poke around a little bit shall we so we went back to this initial image or whatever and she's just like see where it takes you and and so i was like fine and then we got about two or three um rounds in and then my brain just took me like to a different a different image entirely which was it was like a conflict between me and my husband that had happened or like this feeling of you know because we've both been really affected by this and like this obviously that's been a massive strain on our relationship so this was this really strong image of like conflict between me and my husband and that was kind of like where the second one went and she was just like a dig dig dig dig found your trauma there's the remaining trauma um i don't know what this is like a little hamster or something hamster psychologists there's an idea you could keep them in a cage in your room and then obviously we did the same process as we've done before so like how is the image changing and gradually as i'm doing this thing my levels of distress about the image come down to one i don't maybe they were zero i can't remember did i get them down to zero i can't remember but um that was it for two sessions and she was sort of like i think we're pretty much done and i agreed with her um and so that helped just that extra little bit so that was how the sessions themselves worked and then i noticed um some strange things happening with me in the next i would say two weeks after that second session clearly it does something in your brain because it has an immediate effect and shunts a huge thing that's just happened into a different area of your brain or it it does something to you and so it takes a couple of days you kind of get used to that and then i think my feeling from inside my brain is that your brain is kind of like processing this information kind of like a disc defragmenter or something like that it's like ah where are we putting this let's put this over here you know let's sort through this and for me what that translated into was um resurfacing of like old emotions during that time and so it was like i had a little kind of is renaissance the right word a renaissance of awfulness i don't know like a rebirth yeah renaissance a rebirth of a lot of emotions that i'd had in the you know early months postpartum and so that wasn't very nice um but the important thing was i was like oh that's probably what's happening you know i was very conscious that this is something that was probably happening because of the emdr and my brain was rearranging but i think people should be aware that you know you can have stuff like this come up again and you're like what do i do with these emotions because i feel like these emotions that are happening they're like emotions from the past or something and they kind of just bubbled up to the surface it didn't really take long for them to pass it was just like a couple of weeks of feeling a bit like wobbly basically i'm also quite experienced at dealing with bad emotions what did i get to in my story so i had these yeah two weeks afterwards the difference between me and other people who might be doing emdr for trauma is that i am being i don't want to say actively traumatized every day but i'm going back into a situation with a high needs baby who is better but certainly not an easy baby and so it's kind of like constantly pushing on these buttons again so i have to be very careful to kind of take care of myself whereas i think if somebody happened it was like a one-off trauma then it would probably be easier to kind of like deal with it afterwards but you know i'm doing all right so let me just briefly tell you about the rest of my family my husband had the exact same therapy as me with the exact same woman in the same place and from what we've talked about uh his experience was very much the same as mine he was pretty much like after the first one i think his was actually more effective than mine because he was just like the first one was done and he went back for a second one he had like a a few weeks gap because that was that when we got covered i can't remember and by the side he had a second session and i don't think he really did very much into it it didn't last very long i think his was only like 30 minutes or something so he had less trauma than me he had a very similar outcome to mine in that it was very effective it worked almost immediately and it kind of disconnected the trigger which is the noise of the baby crying or that sort of thing from the trauma that was in the past of the non-stop screaming inconsolable crying kind of thing so now onto my son he was kind of the last one of us to start displaying symptoms and he dealt with the babies crying admirably considering that he has noise he's got very sensitive hearing as well um i was surprised how well he coped with it what i also noticed is that for him once the main gist of the kind of like trauma had been over that was when he started getting the the symptoms i guess that's why they call it ptsd because it's post-traumatic isn't it it's not like you have these yeah okay that makes sense but it was it was after things were starting to get a little bit better that anytime that she was crying he would go up and hide under his thing and he would start shouting at her getting really angry at her and he he absolutely adores his sister and in the first few weeks he would be cuddling her when she was crying he had no issues and then it started he started getting really tense the noise sensitivity was worse at school he was getting really really agitated at school we had a lot of problems getting him in and you know he'd be crying every single morning even though he liked school it was just so much over stimulation coming from a noisy house into a noisy school and so uh we were like okay well let's try and get him some of this as well and this so this one was slightly different because obviously for children especially for my son i think they would have problems following this for 30 seconds whether it's because they're getting distracted or just because i don't know physically it's quite a difficult thing to do what they had me do was they had me write a story they're making a child friendly i guess a story of the trauma so i read a story something like once upon a time there was a mummy a daddy and a little boy and we were really looking forward to the baby blah blah blah so you start you basically do a positivity sandwich you start with something positive and then you talk about the bad bit and then you talk about the happy bit like things are getting better we're so excited she's starting to walk kind of thing essentially it was quite similar so the therapist asked they asked him to say okay which is the most distressing bit of the story and of course my son is hyperlexic so he's reading so he's reading this like long dense story trying to find the right line kind of thing and he's like oh yeah it's the bit where she cries he's so funny she said okay let's concentrate on that so together they drew a picture of uh him under the covers looking sad and there's a baby crying and so they drew a little picture and that was the st you had so you had the story and then you had the picture to kind of solidify this thing and um she said how does it make you feel not on a scale of one to ten but she had you know sad different facial expressions of sad and angry and stuff like that and i was quite surprised because he was like it makes me sad and then it makes me angry so he's quite he's quite able to identify his emotions which i'm quite proud of him for that actually so you might be wondering okay if they don't do the lights what do they do on the awesome spectrum so what the therapist did was hold out her hands like so she would have our hands like this and what he was doing was like this but really really fast and really really you know that is also bilateral stimulation you are stimulating each of the different sides in turn and he would do that for as long as he could really which is probably less than 30 seconds but he would do that and then she would go so how do you feel now how does the image feel or something and so it was a similar process you do it in rounds you think about the image you do the bilateral stimulation in whatever form and then you say how has it changed how do you feel now and you kind of go through that and luckily for my son he also saw a great improvement after one session he was just like i'm happy i'm fixed now woo kind of thing so that was well that went well we did go back for a second session and he probably would have started out with a five if there was a number he said he was a bit sad but it didn't take very long he was happy again and he didn't view all of this as kind of so distressing so basically he was done in two sessions although he's got a weird fixation that he really needs to have a third session and i don't exactly know why that is but i don't think it's because i think it's because he's fixated on something else possibly the number three but basically he was done in two sessions and um what we noticed was that he's getting much less angry at his sister he's giving her cuddles he doesn't mind when she makes sort of tolerable baby noises anymore um is there any such thing as a tolerable baby noise i don't know and so i was actually quite amazed at how kind of low tech of uh treatment that was because you know theoretically you could do that one at home couldn't you um if you if you knew how to do it i actually wonder i think you can do it online i think you can do online emdr therapy via zoom and i wouldn't be surprised if you could do it yourself although i probably wouldn't recommend it if you don't know what you're doing it kind of took a weight off me because i thought well in the future if i ever go through something traumatic again like i know that there's a way that i can help myself and i don't have to suffer like i did back when i was in my early 20s i had a head injury and i was suffering for it was like a year of suffering i was firstly just amazed at how effective and how quick and how simple it was you don't have to talk about your feelings and um and also you know consequently how much cheaper it is than any other kind of therapy that was my family's experience with with emdr therapy and uh i know disclaimer that it doesn't work for everyone i know there are some people that can't do the eye movements which is why there are hand buzzers and you can do tapping you can also do leg tapping i don't know how you would do it for people with different disabilities but there are as long as it's bilateral stimulation there is probably a way of of doing it and it's just so simple it's so simple and it feels like it's fake and it feels like it shouldn't work but it does you know i'm really sorry if it doesn't work for you but i think it really works for a lot of people and i you know if anyone's suffering from a touch of trauma i'm like have you tried amir i'm one of those people now i don't see any reason why it should work differently on autistic people than on neurotypical people uh i think the only barrier might be if you struggle with the eye movements i don't think that our brains are so fundamentally different in terms of memory storage and trauma maybe maybe a bit more sensitive to trauma but i don't think that being autistic is necessarily the barrier so i hope that you've enjoyed hearing about my experience my trauma so let me know if you've had this therapy and if it had a similar kind of effect for you because i'm really interested to hear about other experiences i don't know anyone else who's had emdr therapy actually no i do know one of my friends is hallett and she also had that two-week kind of weird period of adjustment so that's something to think about so if you've made it to the end of the video thank you so much that's pretty impressive attention spanning well done you don't forget to like and subscribe and all that jazz and i'll see you next time bye so now i'm giving myself [Applause]

Channel: Yo Samdy Sam

Views: 30,107

Keywords: eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, emdr therapy, what is emdr?, ptsd recovery, trauma therapy, mental health for kids

Id: J7KVJ8D0AM8

Length: 26min 27sec (1587 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 16 2022