Dr Jamie Marich is the Founder/Director of "The Institute for Creative Mindfulness”. She is a (EMDR) Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing specialist. And familiar with all things “trauma” and the healing of such. I could go on and on but just take a listen. She gives actionable tools to move through life's rough stuff :).
Administrative: (See episode transcript below)
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Transcript:
[music]
0:00:05.8 Mischa Zvegintzov: Welcome back everybody, to the Tools For a Good Life summit. And right now, I would like to introduce to you, Dr. Jamie Marich. And hello, and I'll read your bio real quick, if that's okay?
0:00:20.6 Dr. Jamie Marich: Go for it.
0:00:23.1 MZ: Fantastic. So Dr. Jamie Marich travels internationally, speaking on topics related to EMDR, EMDR therapy, trauma, addiction, expressive arts, yoga and mindfulness, while maintaining a private practice and online education operations. I lost my place. [chuckle] The Institute for Creative Mindfulness in your home base of Warren, Ohio. You are the developer of the Dancing Mindfulness Approach to Expressive Arts Therapy and the developer of yoga for clinicians. You are the author of numerous books, including the popular EMDR Made Simple, Trauma Made Simple, and Process, Not Perfection. You are the co-author of EMDR Therapy and Mindfulness for Trauma-Focused Care, and Healing Addiction With EMDR Therapy: A Trauma-Focused Guide, out later this year from Springer publishing company. North Atlantic Books published a revised and expanded edition of Trauma and The 12 Steps, in the summer of 2020, and they are also publishing The Healing Power of Jujitsu: A Guide to Transforming Trauma and Facilitating Recovery, and Dissociation Made Simple, both due out in 2022. Jamie is a woman living unapologetically, with a dissociative, it's a tricky word, a dissociative disorder, and this forms the basis of your award-winning passion for advocacy in the mental health field. Welcome. So, I thought this would be fun. You're a PhD, yes?
0:02:19.3 DM: Yes.
0:02:21.0 MZ: So, how many hours do you have into that? Tell me, how many hours?
0:02:28.1 DM: That went into school? Well, I was in school all total from my bachelor's through my master's, for nine years. I finished my PhD in about three, three and a half years, so I don't know how many hours, I've spent a lot of time in school.
0:02:42.4 MZ: A lot of time in school. And then we've also got LPCC-S.
0:02:47.5 DM: Oh, those are just licenses that you see after my name. So LPCC-S is Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor. So those are my state licenses, and this is the whole big letter soup of the helping professionals, that in different states there are different licenses, and that's what that means.
0:03:04.1 MZ: Yeah, cool. And then the LICDC-CS, that's another...
0:03:08.8 DM: That's Licensed Independent Chemical Dependency Counselor. So, one is mental health, one is chemical dependency. I don't know why they're two separate licenses, but they are.
0:03:18.6 MZ: You know what? Lucky. You're lucky. And then we've got REAT.
0:03:26.0 DM: So that is Registered Expressive Arts Therapist.
0:03:28.4 MZ: Oh, okay, very cool. RYT 500, which I believe is...
0:03:32.6 DM: Registered Yoga Teacher.
0:03:33.9 MZ: Right, registered. And 500, that's like next level, I think entry level is 200 hours and then 500 hour's a whole another ballgame.
0:03:43.1 DM: Yeah, yeah. But I really feel any yoga teacher trainings about what you learn about yourself in the process. So it's nice to have the credential, but I wouldn't trade the experience for anything.
0:03:54.4 MZ: Absolutely. Did you jump into yoga teacher training more as a personal experience, and then you thought... Yeah, I think that happens a lot, doesn't it?
0:04:03.6 DM: Well, what's interesting is I had used it clinically, over the years, but having not taken a full teacher training, 'cause I've had a yoga practice most of my clinical life, it's been an essential part of my own self-nourishment and care. And so, I started taking just some trauma-informed yoga workshops and doing some reading and then implementing it into clinical life, and I actually didn't do the teacher training until not that long ago, just a few years ago, because I knew I wanted to take my personal study to the next level. And that was my main motivation, and I always feel that the best yoga teachers are people who simply share from their practice. And so yeah, I do some yoga teaching, but a lot of it is what I integrate into my clinical work and education courses that I offer for other therapists.
0:04:54.8 MZ: Yeah, I love it. And then my understanding as well is, once you get into the 500 hours of the yoga teacher training, you start heavily going into perhaps some eastern philosophy style stuff, perhaps Hindu teachings, all that fun stuff. Yeah?
0:05:15.6 DM: Yeah, and it depends on the program you do, and it depends on the lineage, but I was very fortunate to do a really strong lineage-based training, and I learned a lot with The Bhagavad Gita and Yoga Sutras and philosophy, and that's just so rich, and to me, more important than any pose you're gonna learn.
0:05:33.0 MZ: Absolutely, and I think that the Asana or the movement side of yoga is such a small piece of the bigger philosophy, and not to make this all about that, but it's fun to talk about. And then we've also got last one, RMT.
0:05:50.0 DM: Oh, Reiki Master Teacher.
0:05:53.5 MZ: Oh, Reiki Master Teacher? Awesome, and that's energy, right? Energy work.
0:05:57.0 DM: I love the energy.
0:05:58.4 MZ: Yeah, fantastic. And so, I just thought it'd be fun to read all that, because I think sometimes it gets lost, the expertise that somebody such as yourself has, in what we're gonna talk about. You have a lifetime of involvement in not only helping people, but literally learning. Yeah?
0:06:22.9 DM: Yeah.
0:06:23.5 MZ: Yeah, that's... Oh, go ahead.
0:06:25.3 DM: Yeah, on one hand, it is, as you present it that way, yeah, I do. And on the other hand, it's, "How could I not pursue the path of learning?" 'cause I've needed it for my own healing and tool for a better life, right?
0:06:41.8 MZ: Yeah, absolutely.
0:06:42.4 DM: That's why we're here.
0:06:44.1 MZ: Yeah. And then you have The Trauma and The 12 Steps. Do you have history in recovery, sobriety yourself?
0:06:53.7 DM: I do. Yeah, I've been clean and sober almost 19 years, and that was really what was the impetus for my healing journey. And I initially came in through a very 12-step path. I still have a lot of respect for the 12 steps, but I've needed to bring in a lot of other healing modalities too, which is how EMDR came into my life, which is, I think, the main thing we're gonna be talking about today.
0:07:16.9 MZ: Yeah, absolutely. And then I wanted to just quick... Two things. One, I think trauma. So when we say Trauma and The 12 Steps, we perhaps are gonna throw the word trauma around. As a white male, six foot two, I'm speaking for me, pull myself up by my bootstraps. Somebody tells me trauma, I tend to, not so much anymore, but get a little bit of contemptuous, like, "I've never been through any trauma." But I think it's a lot broader spectrum than we would care to admit, perhaps someone like me. So go ahead, I'll let you speak to that for a sec.
0:07:58.7 DM: So here is my working definition. Trauma is any unhealed human wound. The English word, trauma, is a direct translation from the Greek word that means wound. It is a simple direct translation, trauma is a wound, so it's any unhealed human wound. And just like with physical wounds, that can come in all shapes and sizes. If the wound is not given a chance to heal, it can cause complications. And so, we could think of physical wounding as this process of, "Oh, somebody has it bad." But if they're given a chance to heal it and they get treatment, it may go on not being such a big issue in their life, but it could be something that on the surface, seems just like a scrape or a rash, but if the person is immuno-compromised or they're not getting the nutrition they need, if they're not getting the care they need, if they keep picking at it, it's going to continue to be an issue. So we can look at a lot of these parallels with physical wounding, and what we know about physical wounding and translate it to the mental, emotional, spiritual. That wounds are wounds, and yes, some are big, some are small, but individuals can experience them subjectively, and if wounds are not given a chance to heal, if they're not given the treatment or care that they need, regardless of how big or small they are, they could go on to create problems.
0:09:20.7 DM: So yeah, I think you're bringing up a good point, that a lot of cultural association with trauma is still things that are at the level of what we might call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or having gone to war, or having survived a natural disaster. And even in diagnostic codes, we've expanded our definition of that a little bit, that there's a lot of different ways people can go through life or injury-threatening experiences, and even witnessing someone else go through it, eventually qualify you for PTSD. But there's a lot of these kind of human wounds we're talking about, of all kinds, that won't necessarily give you a diagnosis, but that doesn't mean they are any less of an issue.
0:10:02.3 MZ: Absolutely, and I love that or don't love it, whichever way you wanna look at it. But it could be going through parental divorce as a child, or perhaps the way we were brought up, which was acceptable 50 years ago, now might be like, "Yeah, that actually might have encouraged some trauma in your life, for example. Yeah? Yeah. Perfect. Alright, so we are here to talk about EMDR. Thank you for indulging me with...
0:10:31.8 DM: It's a great set up question, to be talking about EMDR.
0:10:35.0 MZ: Yeah, perfect. So I'm gonna give you a scenario, and then I'm gonna ask you a question. Okay?
0:10:41.6 DM: Perfect.
0:10:42.2 MZ: Fantastic, so if we think of life as a three-legged stool of relationships, finance and health, and then we think of someone who is or was successful and has two of those legs fall out from under them, and I'm basically just talking about me 10 years ago, honestly. But anyway, this could be a combination of divorce. So I went through a divorce 10 years ago, it was heavy, a couple of kids, career upheaval. So my career was on track, all I'd really known for a good 15 years was success, and then all of a sudden that blew up. One of my children was not acting like I wanted, and then I went through another failed relationship, and it was pretty heavy. And I was lucky, at the time, I didn't have any physical health challenges, but for some people, it can be physical health challenges. That coupled with some divorce or something, that can be very heavy, or for me, both my parents died really quick at that time too, so I was shellacked, I've been in recovery for a long time as well.
0:11:55.0 MZ: But up until that point, it was like, "Pick yourself up from your bootstraps, Mischa. You can fix it, you can work your way through it, you can success yourself through it." And then at that point, I don't know if chaos is the right word, but it was so heavy for me, that it was like, "Man, I need new tools, I need new tools, I need to be open-minded because push-ups are not gonna do it," [chuckle] whatever. So my question to you, thinking of EMDR, what are the exact next steps you would offer this person, or me, so I knew I would be headed in the new right direction, that I'll have positive momentum towards getting my life back on track?
0:12:43.4 DM: Well, 'cause I feel, to properly answer that question, I need to explain a little bit of what EMDR is, because a lot of people may not have a frame of reference. So EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. So it's a mouthful, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. And it's been around now, for over 30 years. A psychologist had formally tapped into the process of it, when she was in recovery from her own journey with cancer and she was very interested in mind-body medicine. And when she was taking a walk in a park one day, she noticed that her eyes began to move rapidly as she was engaging with some disturbing thoughts. And so, she sat down and she tested out the eye movement process deliberately, of moving the eyes back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, to see if it would have any impact on her mental wellness. And yeah, she noticed that some of the disturbing
