EMDR Trauma Therapy in Castle Rock, CO
Your tired of struggling with intrusive thoughts and fears that pop-up out of the blue.
One minute your fine and the next your consumed with figuring out all the “what-if’s” your mind can muster. It’s debilitating, because you can’t focus on anything else or enjoy life’s good moments. At this point, you may be avoiding people or situations, or even having panic attacks. The result has become isolation and depression. You’ve tried managing your worry and anxiety, but it’s only getting worse. EMDR therapy can help!
EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing. As a counseling tool, EMDR therapy calms your brain’s way of over-worrying. It can target areas of your thought-life. It works to get you out of an anxiety-ridden state. Instead of living in the worry cycle and avoiding situations, you can be present for today. You need to enjoy your life and your relationships now.
Everyone that comes into our counseling clinic is somewhat different. Symptoms vary per individual.
Here are common reasons a people have sought out EMDR therapy including:
- Uncomfortable intrusive thoughts
- Avoidance behaviors
- Isolation
- Uncontrolled Worry
- Sleeplessness
- Depression
- Anxiety
- Inability to be happy
- Hyper alertness
We understand you want to move on with your life, and not worry about things so much.
The truth is that what’s happening now relates to what’s happened before. Abuse of some sort, a medical or relational crisis, war or even a catastrophic event can change you. Your brain registers these events as problematic or dangerous. It then, manages the present through the lens of your past and categorizes it as trauma. Traumatic experiences are what result in PTSD symptoms. Over-time your trauma and PTSD take a toll on your mind and body. So, you’re here looking for help. We want to elp. We’re confident that we can guide you through the healing process. Helping you move into freedom from inner distress caused by trauma is what we do.
Lifetouch Counseling’s approach to EMDR Therapy
Once you’ve lived a few years, your life experiences become complex. Thus, so is the impact on your brain and body. Your brain and nervous has a primary goal of surviving. When an experience has been tough or painful, your neural system records it as dangerous. Your brain wants to protect you from going through anything like it again. It compartmentalizes these painful or scary situations as survival times. Even though, you’ve already survived everything, your nervous system persists in surviving. It hasn’t stopped being alert to what happened to you years or decades before. EMDR helps move your past from the present back into the past.
To activate both sides of your brain, EMDR uses bilateral stimulation. EMDR therapists have equipment that does this through music or vibration. The biliateral stimulation allows access to survival areas of the brain. With this access, you can process your past experiences in a way that removes your brain’s sense of danger. Processing these past experiences doesn’t change your memory of them. It changes how your nervous system responds. Instead of your brain marking situations life-threatening, it marks them as non-dangerous. This stops your mind from being on alert for similar dynamics. The symptoms we listed above are ways that alerting comes out in the mind and body. EMDR therapy moves things from ongoing survival to survived. Doing this treatment, you will find your symptoms decreasing in frequency and intensity.
What is holding you back from beginning EMDR or trauma therapy?
We know that you can feel apprehensive to dig up things from your past. Sometimes fear of what you’ll find is paralyzing and the need to avoid comes up. The problem is that your symptoms won’t improve without some help. To feel better, you need address how your brain is categorzing your experiences. Trying to be positive or get over it, doesn’t work. Your brain needs the opportunity to shift out of survival. We also know that when things happened, it was overwhelming. The same feelings can come up with remembering your past. Don’t worry, we’ll help. You won’t be alone, and there is nothing that is too much for us to be with you as you heal. Our therapists have walked this path many times with hundreds of people. The truth is you’ve already survived everything in your past. Processing it is about helping your nervous system to catch up with the present.
You don’t have to put this off any longer. Taking care of yourself and feeling better is worth the investment of time and money. It’s time to discover freedom from trauma symptoms.
With such busy lives, it may be tempting to put-off doing one more thing. We offer online sessions as well as in-person to make attending counseling easier.