My bestie says same

OK Roxie here's another one of my marathon posts!

I first heard about EMDR on the news, it was touted as the best new thing to treat PTSD. I watched and thought OMG they are waving at their patients now! I had never been the type of practitioner that leaned anyway near the more 'gimmicky' treatments of the day. I dismissed it.
Many years later a colleague of mine who I greatly respect and is respected greatly in the profession told me she had recently attended the EMDR practitioner training and that it was " the most learning I have done in the past 40 years".
I had lots of CEU's to catch up on so I thought I'd do the EMDR training, still skeptical and thinking OMG they are waving at their patients.
In the course of the training, we all separated into groups of 3 where we practiced being either the patient, practitioner or observer. We were told to pick really small issues with fairly common faulty self-statements like"I have to be perfect" so, that was what I did. I focused on that statement' I have to be perfect", thought about/pictured the last time I felt that (I tripped and spilled coffee all over myself in front of a client and was so embarrassed) While doing this the practicing practitioner waved her hands in front of my eyes and I all of a sudden had this very strange sense of calmness.
I went home that night and backed into a piece of furniture in my garage. Normally I would be all worried that my then husband would be mad at me. I wasn't. It was amazing, I just thought and felt"I don't have t be perfect" i went in the house and simply announced what happened. Pretty cool. This feeling of not having to be perfect started to spread to other areas of my life, most notably that I had stopped blushing. I used to blush frequently and embarrassingly and it just stopped

OK so back for the next day o f EMDR training.Now we are in groups of 3 to work on more complex phobia type things. I had a life-long phobia of spiders. I t was really bad. I would see one and freeze in panic whereever I was. I was stuck in my bedroom once as a spider was in the doorway and missed work. I couldn.t kill them, nothing just freeze and cry. I had tried implosion therapy, talk therapy medication the whole 9 yards and nothing worked.So, again they told us not to work on weighty stuff but I figured that if EMDR could fix my phobia of spiders then I would know for sure it works. I had always suspected that it had something to do with when I was 5 years old and my dad had found a spider in our yard that he thought was a bleck widow. He pput it in a jar and left it in the back yard until he brought it to a friens at college to identify. He gave us kiuds a strong lecture not togo near the spider as it could kill us. I always figured I had taken that lesson a bit too seriously.

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It took some thought but what came up was that I could not take care of myself because I had to depend on others to kill spiders. So I focused on that statement and pictured the worst spider phobia experience I had ever had and the practicing practitioner did the waving and I got that same sense of calm. Another set of waving and I was back being that little girl of 5 only this time I was alone in the back yard. At that time in my life, my dad went back to school to get his degree and my mom went to work after having been a stay at home mom. All this in response to my father loosing a job he had just transferred states for, very stressful for the whole family. I was sent to the lady down the street to watch me. There I was looking at that spider in the jar, not being able to go in my house cuz no one was home and having an overwhelming feeling of having been abandoned to a world that I was not prepared to face alone yet. Somehow that fear and abandonment got transferred to that spider and to all spiders.
then I focused on the correct statement/self belief which is 'I am a big girl now and can take care of myself while she waved her hands. That 20 minutes with a person who was just learning how to do EMDR cured me. I smash em with my bare hands!

So, yes I started waving at my clients. Some responded as I did, with rapid improvement that would spread throughout my life, not just to the issue I focused on. Others found it too overwhelming and others it just didn't do a thing. But, it is definitely worth trying. Make sure that you are seeing a therapist that has gone through the EMDRIA certified training. There are folks out there who use this technique without having been properly trained in it.

LizKat