Overview
Work 1:1 and/or with supports to address emotional injuries/memories that continue to disrupt present situations
How I can help you
When you become overly aroused, your common sense becomes hijacked because you are flooded with hormones. Flooding happens in people who become angry, threatened, or terrorized quickly. Hormones flood in to prepare the person to take care of themselves in
threatening situations. Adrenalin, cortisol and noradrenalin course through the bloodstream to prepare you for action. Physical signs of flooding are feeling energized, hot, shallow breathing, pounding heart and muscle tension (Namka, Lynn).
If you find yourself “losing it” when you feel threatened and go off the track of what is being discussed or say things you regret when you are in an argument, you are probably flooded. The over-the-top emotions that run away with your clear, centered mind are anger, fear, shame and terror. These strong feelings may have been learned in childhood or other times in your life when you felt a loss of control.
One necessary skill of emotional intelligence is handling high arousal. Learning to manage your arousal and calm yourself down when you are upset is one of the most important things you can do to create a happy life. Modulating your high arousal is necessary for being in a loving relationship because you can’t accomplish fair fighting and negotiating conflict if your mind is going off the track! Keeping your cool under stressful disagreements is absolutely necessary (Namke, Lynn).
A trauma experience is one where something happened that was so overwhelming that the person did not have the resources to understand, process it, metabolize it, and then release it. Trauma gets stuck in the mind and body in fragments of sensory information—terrifying visual images, auditory words, sounds are jumbled that never have gotten digested by the person. Past trauma fragments can lay down as a belief system deeply felt internally in your present life. Such as “I’m bad,” “I am not enough,” “I’m unlovable or unworthy,” “I feel powerless.”
These fragments and many other deeply felt beliefs can show up years after an experience/trauma even if you have no conscious recollection. They disrupt your personal sense of control/responsibility, power, and safety.
Life is not always predictable. Traumas happen - Small and big. Loss and suffering is a part of living and learning how to move though it instead or ignoring it or pushing it away is critical for managing our stress, emotions, and relationships. Our body and brain naturally want to move those experiences from the negative to the positive. In fact, our body does that automatically but sometimes we need assistance to help the brain manually to metabolize where it got stuck. We use EMDR – Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing to guide your brain through a present trigger or issue that is concerning you. We look at your present situation closely and with lots of curiosity. EMDR helps to identify past traumas/experiences that could be connected to your present emotional trigger. Our goal together is NOT to find scary or old memories. In fact, EMDR is not about re-living the details of those hard events but instead we strategically help your BRAIN NOT YOUR MIND to repair old injuries and metabolize them so your present trigger/issue is resolved. Our goal in using EMDR is to work on and resolve a present concerning issue while NOT re-traumatizing or re-living past pain. Through processing, your brain can make valuable meaning out of your life events and bring you closer to your
personal present day goals.