How does EMDR work? Can it help people recover from trauma, PTSD, addiction and other kinds of emotional health challenges?
The audio in the first segment of this podcast is from a video conversation between Russell Brand and actor Jameela Jamil (‘The Good Place’ series).
Psychologist Cheryl Arutt finds EMDR is a “psychotherapy method proven to help people recover from distressing life experiences, including PTSD, anxiety, depression, and panic disorders.” The second segment is an excerpt from her TED Talk “That Good Feeling of Control”.
See more episodes (some with transcripts) and links to Spotifyl, Apple Podcasts and more: The Creative Mind Audio Podcast.
Here is the video source for the podcast episode:
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Transcript of audio podcast :
Narrator (synthetic voice) 0:00
Actor Jameela Jamil known for The Good Place:
Jameela Jamil 0:05
So I did EMDR therapy, which is Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy, I believe – Have you heard about this? Yeah, I found that very effective.
Because what that did is that… I found with traditional therapies or even with CBT, it required me to do a lot of homework and work all the time and having to conduct which I am quite a work shy person, I didn’t appreciate having to constantly have to check myself in challenging and triggering situations.
And what EMDR did is it it truly removed the emotion that was linked to the traumatic memory or thought process, it just sort of cut it off for me. So it took out a lot of the homework for me, where I would walk into a situation that normally would trigger me and my emotion associated to the memory that that situation is triggered is now gone.
And so it makes it it makes it mundane – things that I used to find terrifying, boring to me. Brilliant. That was helpful.
Like I I had some terrible, abusive experiences in the dark as a child. And I became afraid of the dark until I was 28 years old, couldn’t sleep in the dark, couldn’t be alone in a house, had to check in every cupboard, under every bed, in every single room again, and again. And again. I had terrible OCD around like my safety.
And I couldn’t really sleep. So sleep deprived for like, basically 28 years, which made me incredibly depressed and suicidal.
So I went to this EMDR therapy just for that, because I decided to move to America. And I was like, I can’t go there, this afraid. I can’t spend my 30s as afraid as I’ve spent the last three decades of my life.
And so I did EMDR therapy and within two sessions… and it’s so uneventful, EMDR, it’s so boring and uneventful that you feel like you’re being robbed of your money.
Because you’re just watching a light, just go back and forth across the wall as if you’re a fucking dog, and you just sit there for an hour doing that with a therapist sitting next to you. And so into about stuff.
Yeah, they’re sort of saying, you know, like, what’s a traumatic memory, and I would recount the heinous things that happened to me as a child. And then they’d be like, think about that thing, which is a very painful thing to do.
And you start to feel sick in your stomach. Sometimes you start to feel almost physical pain, you feel very, very stressed.
And you’re looking at this light. And as you are looking at it somehow the longer you keep looking at it, it just the feeling pain starts to dissipate, and it never comes back.
And so after I’ve done two sessions of it, I really just thought it was bollocks. And I didn’t really like it had changed anything. It felt very uneventful. And I went to sleep that night and I woke up in the morning realizing that for the first time in my life, I turned the lights off, and I hadn’t triple locked my door and checked under anything.
I hadn’t checked anything without realizing I had just gone home turn the light off and gone to sleep. It takes your trauma for me like a thief in the night. As the only way I could describe in a less creepy way than a thief in the night. Nice. Yeah. Like the Tooth Fairy taking…giving some money and taking some Ramadan didn’t Yes.
Russell Brand 3:14
It seemed automatic. You didn’t even clock it as it were was happening. Oh my God, look, I’m just lying peacefully down in bed. No, not at all. This tells us I suppose that our consciousness and what we consider to be ourselves is more diverse and expansive than we consider Yeah, through a kind of a form of hypnosis. I suppose that could commonly be understood as you can.
Jameela Jamil 3:35
But you are very much so like awake and like in the moment so you’re not you’re not in an another tries in your mind. Yeah.
Russell Brand 3:42
But somehow bypassing whatever that behavioral matrix is that makes you afraid because, like, in a way, it’s obvious that afraid of the dark is a belief. Yeah Jameela is afraid of the dark is a belief and then you can somehow bypass whatever that is… because I’ve had like neuro linguistic programming, which is a sort of like, it sounds like
Jameela Jamil 4:00
they can teach you that a cigarette is a poo. That’s the whole list of cigarettes. Delicious. Well, my man, it’s a poo. So when you’re walking around, you can I mean, I’ve no idea. I’ve been told this by an LLP therapist that Yeah.
Russell Brand 4:19
What do you do for a living streams? I teach people cigarettes. Yeah, let’s come to the dinner party.
Jameela Jamil 4:27
But again, like with EMDR another way in which I helped me is that I used to weaponize food. So because of my, like, my childhood dynamic, my family dynamic and the complicated relationships that that people in many parts of my family had with food.
I felt like food was rebellion. Food was love, food was self hatred. It was everything other than just fuel. It was very, very much so like emotionally like that.
It was sort of…Yeah, I think it was very attached to my emotion. Some very, very strong emotions. So anything bad would happen, I would go and comfort eat, anything good would happen, I would go and eat until the point of discomfort where I could really only breathe if I was on all fours.
Because my windpipe and my esophagus are no longer like making friends with each other.
And again, within two sessions, maybe, of EMDR, about that I was able to just separate those emotions attached to food. And now food is just food. For the first time in my life, I had no idea how exhausting it is.
That’s the thing about EMDR for me is that, I know that that’s not what we need to talk about. But it is something that I think is very important, which is that it felt like… and you’ve had therapy, I don’t know if you can relate to this.
But it felt like walking out of a club at 4am in Camden, and stepping out into the quiet street. And it’s only when you’re in the quiet street that you realize Fucking hell, it was so loud in there. That’s how I feel about stepping out of shame and stepping out of trauma is realizing how horrific it’s been inside my mind all of this time. And now I feel peaceful.
Narrator (synthetic voice) 6:01
Psychologist Cheryl Arutt specializes in trauma recovery and creative artist issues.
Cheryl Arutt 6:08
You know how a memory from a long time ago feels very far away? Well, when we think about a trauma, it can still pack the same punch as when it originally happened.
It’s like something undigestible… trauma causes dysregulation, and it fragments those pieces in the mind. And those fragments can hold all of the upsetting feelings and sensations from the original event, but not in a way that’s useful to us.
It can even feel as if the trauma were happening right now, instead of in the past. People recover from trauma when they’re taught ways to make those puzzle pieces fit together and make sense.
And one of the most powerful ways to reprocess trauma is an evidence based therapy called EMDR – which I was very skeptical about at first, but EMDR has been demonstrated to change the way traumatized people’s brains process information.
And those fMRI machines [Functional magnetic resonance imaging] can show that after treatment, people’s brains look a lot like non-traumatized brains.
Narrator (synthetic voice) 7:18
Self-guided program Virtual EMDR:
Virtual EMDR 7:23
First, let’s explain what happens during episodes of trauma or stress. Whenever humans perceive danger, we automatically go into a fight or flight mode. All our attention is drawn towards what is needed to ensure our immediate survival, while non essential brain functions are temporarily shut down.
During fight or flight mode, the part of our brain known as the reptilian brain, which controls the body’s vital functions goes into overdrive.
Meanwhile, the part of our brain known as the neocortex, or rational brain, which controls reasoning and intuition locks itself up. Because the rational brain stops working, normal processing of our memories is interrupted.
Instead, the traumatic memory gets stuck in the reptilian brain, it stays trapped there, along with any distorted thoughts or beliefs that were created at the time.
Our brains incompletely store these memories in unhelpful ways that later can be triggered in your daily life.
This is why whenever we get a flashback, we also re-experience in full force all the original emotions.
Fortunately, the brain has an amazing ability to change and heal itself known as neuroplasticity. Similar to how our body can heal after an injury, the brain can also rewire to heal itself, we just have to show it how.
This is where EMDR comes in. In simple terms, EMDR replicates the brain’s natural memory processing function, which was interrupted during the trauma.
Normally, memory processing takes place while we sleep, during a stage known as rapid eye movement or REM sleep. The key element of REM sleep is bilateral or two way stimulation.
In EMDR. We replicate this bilateral stimulation through moving the eyes from side to side repeatedly or through listening to audio tones, which move from ear to ear.
Why is bilateral stimulation important? This actually has to do with the two sides of our brain, the left brain, which is our logical brain, and the right brain, which is our creative brain.
Bilateral stimulation helps to engage both sides of the brain at the same time, which triggers the brain’s natural ability to heal itself.
Scientists have found that bilateral stimulation generates four powerful effects, each of which support the healing process feeling more relaxed, feeling less worried, making problems seem smaller and further away, and helping traumatic thoughts that were stuck get processed in a healthy and natural way.
Bilateral stimulation is the secret behind the science of EMDR. And while there are many theories about why it is so effective, all we need to know is that it has worked for the millions of people who have used it and that it can help you to heal once and for all.
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NOTE –
Dr. Arutt explains “EMDR Therapy is an 8 Phase treatment modality that takes such considerable training and skill, it can only be taught to therapists who are already licensed.
“Some Phase 2 resources, such as Laurel Parnell’s book Tapping In to self-regulate, can be done on your own, but Phase 4 is where you reprocess trauma to alleviate depression, anxiety and other issues, and that is most safely done with a therapist who is licensed, either in-person or virtually via telehealth.
“Claims that you can “DIY” actual EMDR Therapy are false.”
Dr. Arutt comments more about the value of EMDR in her TEDx video “That Good Feeling of Control” – see article Psychologist Cheryl Arutt on Emotional Health and Creative People.
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Also see videos and more in article:
Can EMDR Therapy Relieve Depression, Anxiety, PTSD, Addiction and more?
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Douglas Eby (M.A./Psychology) is author of the The Creative Mind series of sites which provide “Information and inspiration to help creative people thrive.”
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