First responders will say, I was just in the parking lot at Walmart and I needed to go in and I'm having this large physical reaction. That's because that amygdala talk about not being online, that amygdala has this kind of memory and this connection immediately with their body. And so EMDR does this great job and I say speaking amane, speaking to our amygdala through, through our physical body. You know, with emdr, you're doing a lot of check ins of notice what you notice in your body doing body scan, starting of the top of your head to the bottom of your toes. You know what do you notice? Do you notice tension? Do you notice relaxation? Do you notice numbness? Do you notice nothing? Like all those things are ways in which we're trying to get that to not let ourselves go offline. To use your. Hi, welcome back to the podcast. I'm Jennifer.

And I'm Ashlee. We hope everybody had a really great Thanksgiving.

Yes, we do. We do hope everyone has a good Thanksgiving and we appreciate you checking out our thankful episode. And it's just us again. We are doing things a little bit different here lately, but I like it when it's just you and I sometimes.

I know I kind of love it. I think people forget like everyone has lives and of course scheduling and things like that. But we are blessed. I mean we are super blessed. We have some really cool things lined up and honestly, like, it's really nice over the holidays not to have to worry about 1 million schedules. And just us too.

That is the truth. I was on a text message chain about people trying to meet and I'm like, we're really going to try to meet before January. No, like that's just not going to happen. So. And we have a specific thing we wanted to talk about today, which is emdr.

Yeah. And I think that I want to preference something that came to me when we were trying to brainstorm. Hey, what do we talk about today? Right? Like what do we give our audience? Something that I think we fall short on when we're talking about therapy in general is that a lot of people have one thought process and if there is something that I can say is that both of us are making waves and changing the stigma, especially with first responders coming to therapy. I still almost every day get the cliche of like, well, I thought therapy was, hey, tell me how this makes you feel over and over again. The whole come in my office, all my officers, my firefighters too. But I feel like my firefighters give me A little bit less grief. But hey, my police for sure will be like, oh, where's the big comfy couch that I get to lay on? And I'm like, okay, this, this is not, you know, But I've also been doing a heck of a lot of ride alongs, which is beautiful because one thing I always strive for in this, I guess, this career is that I never want to stop Lear from them too. So one way I do that is to ride along with them.

And in that ride along, I am doing nothing clinically. Of course, if we're stuck in a squad together for eight hours, I'm going to talk to you because I'm just a talker, but I'm there to learn from you. I'm there to just be excited about what's going on. I'm not there to diagnose or evaluate or what have you the person I'm riding with. And I get that every single time. They'll be like, doc G is coming with me. Oh, they must think I need an evaluation. They must think.

And I'm like, what? Like, that is not true. So that does often lead me to this discussion of what do you think therapy is? And while there's some truth to therapy being a lot about talking.

Right.

And a lot about processing, digging, connecting things, there's also different ways that we do therapy now. And I think we could spend six years, Jennifer, like, talking about all these things. But the one thing that I know both you and I kind of specialize in you more so than me. So I'm going to pass this mic a lot is emdr. And I think it's important to talk about. And I think this episode, we're just going to bring it to light and then probably expand upon it in like a follow up episode, only because there is so much. But why don't we break down what that is? I think it's important for people to know that there's different things out there that we can do. EMDR being one of them.

Yeah. Well, I think first is like, what is EMDR stand for? Yes. Which is eye movement desuscitation reprocessing. I always struggle.

Okay, I was just about to say I can never. I can never say that either again.

Yes. And the Francis Shapiro is the. I wouldn't call her the inventor, I guess the discoverer of EMDR and kind of move things forward with this therapeutic intervention. She said she wished to come up with a different name and I kind of wish that she had as well. But it really is just a Intervention that therapists can use that is a little bit different than talk therapy. I don't know, Ashlee. I feel like we started over. You made me reflect.

Like, gosh, what do people really do think that therapy is? But I. I'll be specific and talk about emdr. So how I explain EMDR to clients is that it is a way in which the brain naturally heals itself. So in the eye movement, it's replicating our REM sleep, our deepest cycle of sleep. REM sleep is when your eyes are rapidly moving back and forth. That is the rapid eye movement that happens in REM sleep, which is a deep sleep cycle. A lot of our first responders don't get into REM sleep because of. They do not, which makes it really difficult.

And you know something I think is great about the human body in a lot of ways, it's so healthy and can heal itself. So when I think like, oh, if I cut my finger, I'm not thinking, okay, I need to clot blood and grow a scab, grow new skin, that my body just automatically does that. And our brain has that ability too. When we rest, we sleep. We pre process our experience of the day. And unfortunately, sometimes there's experiences that we have that maybe we don't get a good night's sleep afterwards. Or there's experiences that we have, especially when we're first responders, that, you know, nobody should really have to go see or experience these things. There's no place in our brain.

Brain to put some of the horrors that people experience when they're first responders. And what EMDR is doing is just taking that information. Clients can do different things, like the eye movement, which is the replication of the REM sleep. There's also this fancy word called bilateral stimulation. It is just where both hemispheres of the brain are working. Okay, have I gotten too technical? Like, are you.

No, you're doing a great job. I always giggle when I hear. Because when I explain, explain it. And I go. I don't know why I go to the run sleep par. And I talk about the eye shifting. I'm always waiting for someone to be like, wait, what? Or like, freak out about that. Or be like, our eyes shift.

But, yeah, no, I think you're doing great job.

I think that's always important. You know, when I tell people that about sleep, I'm quick to say, I'm not putting you to sleep. I'm not hypnotizing you. You're awake and conscious throughout this experience. And EMDR has been in practice for you know, over decades now. I want to say like 30.

I was going to say, I know.

It'S over 30 now, probably getting closer to 40. And technology has come a lot further. So as much as people do eye movement, there's what we call tappers, a real clinical word. But it's just this thing that will vibrate in your hand and go back and forth. I do a lot of virtual sessions, so I use eye movement a lot with virtual sessions. But I also have auditorial. So it will go into one headphone, then the next headphone, if people have headphones in. And then there's also tactical tapping, where I just have people, like, cross their arms and we'll tap.

And I get to tap with them, which is I get some free emdr sometimes when I'm doing that with clients, you know what, I work with clients in terms of, like a traumatic experience. And there can be one call that's a traumatic experience. And sometimes those are some experiences that as therapists will call little T's that are small traumatic experiences. And sometimes those little T's can be a little bit harder than the big T's. If we maybe had an experience with an adult that made us feel less than, or if we maybe had a thing at school that made, you know, school was hard and we felt left out in groups. Like, there's just these experiences that we have when we're little and we don't have all the information that are. If you think about our hemispheres, our left and our right, and our thinking and our feeling when we're little, we can get that really confused. And so EMDR can be a great resource sometimes for, you know, my smart brain knows that I'm loved and cared for, and yet sometimes in my heart, I don't feel that way.

And EMDR is a great tool that can kind of get those online together. It is a researched intervention. This is not just some therapists came together, like, hey, let's try this. There's lots of research that shows that, as an intervention can be really helpful. Yeah.

And I think it's important to kind of do a little throwback to one of our very first episodes that probably hasn't gotten the attention that it needs just because we were really brand new babies to this whole podcast thing. But when we had Dr. Kuei on here, she did a fabulous job, like, talking to us about how the brain works. Right. And what happens to the brain when we're in high stress situations. And I think that it's important when we're talking about EMDR to remember that prefrontal cortex gets kind of a little bit offline. It's not fully there when we are in a high stress situation, which makes it hard for us to actually reprocess things in a way that we typically would if it was a normal event. And so I always tell my guys and girls that come to me that in that moment, like your brain is still taking everything in, typically through your senses, but the piecing it together is kind of hard.

And it'll take that situation and it'll store it away in your long term memory in what I call the red file encampment. And it'll just keep doing that if we don't take it back out and reprocess it with our prefrontal cortex back online. Right. To have those facts of everything that happened around us with that emotional side and to work through it that way. But I think that's something really important to recognize is that literally the brain is doing this to us when we're in these careers. And it's something that we can't necessarily help. It's just how we respond.

Well, and I think to that whole point, you know, something I talk a lot about with clients is that EMDR is really working to speak to our amygdala to that, you know, survival part of our brain, which is not our frontal cortex. It's not that smart decision making self. It is just about survival. Which I think, you know, is kind of cool that like our brain is wired in a way that survival, I mean, that's gotta be the most important thing. Not always about our happiness or feeling good. It's about surviving and that connection with your amygdala and our physical body. You know, if I'm running from a saber tooth tiger, I can't digest my bologna sandwich.

Yes.

You know, I need to feel my heart racing. I'm gonna feel sweaty in case somebody grabs me. Like all these things. And we have these physical responses and that memory. Right. And so that's why I think sometimes first responders will say, I was just in the parking lot at Walmart and I needed to go in and I'm having this large physical reaction. That's because that amygdala talked about not being online. That amygdala has this kind of memory and this connection immediately with their body.

And so EMDR does this great job. I say speaking, Amy knees, speaking to our amygdala through our physical body. You know, with emdr, you're doing a lot of check ins of notice what you notice in your body doing body scan, starting of the top of your head to the bottom of your toes. You know, what do you notice? Do you notice tension? Do you notice relaxation? Do you notice numbness? Do you notice nothing? Like, all those things are ways in which we're trying to get that to not let ourselves go offline, to use your kind of metaphor, and allow that stuff to kind of be processed in a way that says, I don't have to have a physical response in the parking lot. Like, I can say, like, hey, I'm safe.

I'm okay.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

And why do you and I. I know I'm. I'm bouncing off of you here, but I do find that EMDR is, like, my first responders really take to emdr. I happen to think that baseline, like, not going anything significant here. I like that EMDR structured feel like my first responders appreciate that too, because they are more structured humans. It's more like, this is where you start. This is right. Like.

And so there's a protocol to it, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. So I think that that's why my first responders really take to it. But do you have any experiences like you and I utilize EMDR a lot? What would you say is your feedback to that? Do you feel like it's really beneficial for your first responders as well?

Yes, and a big reason why, I think. I mean, I didn't really think of it in terms of the structure. I think it's more of, like, they.

Don'T have to talk on that too, though.</