Trauma & EMDR

Trauma shows up in the ways you learned to respond to the stressful events in your life. The things that happened to you and the way you reacted to them over time have come together and created who you are today. Since nobody taught you how to react to stressful events in an adaptive and healthy manner, you learned to react in the best way you knew how: shutting down, lashing out, self-harming, substance use, etc. These reactions have helped you cope, but have made it difficult for you to have healthy relationships with yourself and those around you. Learning to recognize when you are feeling threatened and responding in a healthy way will be an important part of your healing process and our work together.

Talk therapy can be effective in helping you get through difficult times, but there can be events that just get “trapped” in your mind and body. This is where EMDR comes in. This therapy modality is effective in helping     you process traumatic or distressing events that just don’t seem to go away. Through the use of something called bilateral stimulation, EMDR helps you “digest” traumatic events or memories in a way that your brain is better able to handle. Those painful images that have haunted you in the past, begin to lose their hold on you and begin to feel easier to process.  

Codependency

Your ability to put others before you has long been deemed a strength by those around you. In fact, that’s what it means to be a good man right? Provide, be a problem solver, put your needs second for the benefit of the group, always be available to help, don’t show your emotions to others, but make sure you’re a good listener. You would think that after doing all the things you’re “supposed” to do to be a “good man” you’d feel fulfilled, loved, cared for, appreciated, and accepted right? Or is it more accurate to say that you’ve been starting to feel resentful, used, short-tempered, cynical, and skeptical of the people you care for?

This dynamic is called codependence. You’ve learned to base your worth on how much you can provide for others, but have never actually stopped to wonder what it is that you need. You expect others to do as much as you do for them, but you have a hard time accepting help from them in the first place. You have entered a cycle of resentful giving and skeptical receiving. This cycle can be interrupted in therapy through establishing and enforcing boundaries and clarifying values so that you can stop putting your energy where you feel drained and start giving to relationships where you feel valued. 

Anxiety & Depression

Impending doom, a chronic sense of urgency, feeling like you’re forgetting something (all the time), wondering if you’re even doing enough… sound familiar? If you didn’t know by now, that’s anxiety. The constant fear of a real or perceived threat that makes you feel like you need to do something right here right now… or else. This perpetual worry has taken over your life and keeps you from ever enjoying the present. Your list of things to deal with keeps growing and the weight of the world is becoming too much for you to bear.

On the other hand you’re finding yourself completely unmotivated to get things done, you’ve become irritable and angry, and the things that used to bring you joy no longer interest you. Your outlook on the world has become pretty negative and you feel sad… a lot. This is one of many ways that Depression can show up in your life. When you experience both anxiety and depression you can find yourself in a bit of a ‘chicken or the egg’ cycle where one makes the other worse and you don’t really know which is causing what. Getting to know your anxiety and depression and learning ways to slow down that cycle will be an important step for us to work on in order to get you feeling happier and at peace.