Changing Your Brain With Brain-Based Therapies
The following is an edited excerpt from the book Live Empowered!: Rewire Your Brain’s Implicit Memory to Thrive in Business, Love, and Life by Dr. Julie Lopez.
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“Neuroplasticity research showed that the brain changes its very structure with each different activity it performs, perfecting its circuits so it is better suited to the task at hand.” — NAVEEN JAIN
There are many brain- and body-based therapies, and many more are emerging in this rapidly growing field. Of those, the ones discussed in this book — Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Brainspotting (BSP), and Neurofeedback (NFB) — are extremely effective. Each offers an opportunity to change the brain in a fundamental way, though the specific type of change is dependent on the technique.
Of these three brain-based therapies, I have practiced EMDR the longest, having first been trained in this therapeutic approach in the nineties. In recent years, research has validated EMDR as an effective form of therapy, and it is acknowledged by numerous healthcare organizations, including insurance companies and veterans’ hospitals, for its efficacy in treating issues such as PTSD. As a matter of fact, EMDR therapy is recommended as an effective treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder in the practice guidelines of a wide range of organizations, like the American Psychiatric Association (in 2004), the Department of Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense (in 2010), the International Society of Traumatic Stress Studies (in 2009), and other organizations worldwide.
While research has found that EMDR is effective in reducing symptoms and changing clients’ level of functioning, much debate still exists as to how it is able to accomplish this. Many theories point to the restorative properties of bilateral stimulation, the effects of which are similar to those experienced during REM sleep. Bilateral stimulation allows the conscious mind to take itself offline, bring the unconscious mind forward, and begin cleaning house. In so doing, clients are able to tap into neural pathways that often lead to a larger network and, if there’s nothing in the way, allow the brain to move naturally toward a more optimal and desirable space. Other theories speculate that the limited exposure and warm empathic relationship can contribute to EMDR’s effectiveness.
During EMDR, a client can choose between a classic eye-movement, auditory, or tactile bilateral stimulation. They might look at a light bar and move their eyes back and forth with the moving light, they might listen to sounds that repeatedly shift from the left to the right headset speaker, or they might place vibrating sensors in their hands to feel the bilateral stimulation provided by the vibrations. The process of targeting the problematic thought or sensation and then having clarity on what was desired to be encoded instead allows the client to begin to shift from the conscious to the unconscious mind. As networks are opened, the brain and body begin to process the material.
Often in these moments, a client might realize that their conscious attention has lapsed and might try to reengage as an active participant by analyzing what they’re experiencing. Unfortunately, this only pulls them off the path toward reprocessing their target material, undermining the brain’s restorative efforts in the process. Again, the language of implicit memory is not verbal, analytical, or intellectual, so the target material of implicit memories is never going to present itself in that linear style that clients initially expect and crave.
How EMDR Works
From a clinical perspective, EMDR is continually evolving, and much is still unknown about exactly how and why it works. Current research shows that through its eight-phased treatment approach, including bilateral stimulation, EMDR is able to rapidly reduce a person’s symptoms even in long-term randomized studies.
While bilateral stimulation plays a key role in EMDR’s success, dedicated practitioners stress that its efficacy can’t be attributed solely to this aspect of the practice. Equally important to EMDR’s success are its overall theoretical orientation and prephase practices. Taking on the role of facilitator, practitioners work with the client’s whole system to map out key entry points into the client’s neural pathways and networks. EMDR, then, is best thought of as a complete therapeutic process — of which bilateral stimulation is only one component.
What makes EMDR and other brain-based therapies so unique is their ability to pinpoint the saboteurs in our lives, desensitize and reprocess our response to them, and help us bridge the gap between mind and body. These saboteurs are not vague or random, and during their prephase work, clinicians work with clients to specifically identify and name those that resonate most. Sometimes, this is easier said than done. In fact, I’ve found that 90 percent of clients need help learning how to listen to their body, think about the possible entry points into their neural networks, and then to describe the resistances they can identify.
The goals of EMDR mirror those of more traditional psychological approaches. But where traditional psychoanalysis might take a long time to identify the client’s now less useful coping adaptations getting in the way of their goals as well as process data stored in the unconscious, EMDR can often accomplish the same thing in only a few sessions. This is because, while psychoanalysis has to go through the conscious mind to identify this relevant material housed in implicit memory, EMDR and other brain-based therapies can get to the saboteur directly by targeting the hidden panels in our minds.
Many times, these codes of implicit memory that get in the way of thriving are actually discovered in repeated patterns of behavior. Avoidance of implementing an accountability plan for your sales force, for example, could manifest in bodily symptoms. Every time you decide to speak at the directors’ meetings, you notice your heart beating faster, your palms starting to sweat, and a sudden onset of moods like anxiety or depression with no seeming precipitant.
Although a traditionally trained practitioner can guide you through the process to hypothesize what might be stored in your implicit memory networks, brain-based therapies can do the same work, and often more quickly.
Practitioners of brain-based therapies also work with clients to identify where they wish they could be. This added layer makes the approach even more targeted, allowing us to not only desensitize the saboteur that’s no longer doing a client’s system any good, but also create a new context that makes sense with the present-day data and goals that are alive and well.
Once a saboteur is desensitized, we use bilateral stimulation to help clients reprocess a positive belief they understand intellectually in order to also internalize it at a deep unconscious level. Once we have opened the relevant neural pathway, we move to integrate it and the new belief with support from adaptive memory networks.
EMDR Isn’t For Everyone
I’ve had clients who want to do EMDR, but have reservations. Some, for instance, worry that the sessions might bring out something they’ve never told anyone. In truth, sometimes this does happen, especially if it’s intertwined with whatever material we were trying to unpack. However, whenever this occurs, it’s typically a relief for the client and weaves into the work of rewiring the present-day saboteur in their brain. Rather than letting it become another distressing experience, the client ultimately appreciates it as a conduit for powerful change.
Others have the mistaken concern that, once bilateral stimulation begins, they will fully reexperience something painful or difficult. Luckily, that’s not how it works. Even clients focusing on the most difficult neural networks in their system only experience flashes of memory or experience, which generally last between thirty seconds and two minutes. However, even those flashes tend not to be nearly as visceral or distressing as clients expect.
Whether their clients’ concerns are valid or misplaced, an experienced EMDR practitioner will not subject someone to processing who isn’t ready. Especially if they’re doing work in the darkest rabbit holes of their mind, the client has to trust both in the process and in their practitioner. If that confidence isn’t there, the practitioner will focus on building a trusting relationship with that client before they begin work.
Because of this, EMDR isn’t for everyone. Sometimes, that trust can’t be built. Sometimes, if people’s desires are beyond what is physically possible, they will be unable to see the results they hope for, even if they enter the process with the best of intentions. Examples are goals that involve changing the past, growing a foot taller, or birthing children when you are sixty-five years old. In other words, you can optimize what you have, but you can’t change what you are.
To use an analogy, you could have the best basketball moves ever. You could dedicate your life to building your strength, agility, and coordination. However, if you’re only five foot seven, all you can do is optimize what you have. You can’t change the fundamental facts about yourself. Similarly, certain parts of your own story and abilities have their limits as well. You can’t undo those limitations, but you can work to optimize and sharpen what you have to help you thrive to the best of your abilities.
In other words, our systems are adaptive, but neither EMDR nor any other brain-based therapy is a magic pill. It’s simply a process that facilitates change in a targeted way that helps us optimize our best traits and perform to the best of our abilities. Some client perspectives on their experiences with EMDR can be found in Chapter 7.
Improving Job Performance
As we’ve discussed throughout this book, EMDR and other brain- or body-based therapies are effective not only for alleviating trauma but also for achieving personal goals and improving job performance. To set this discussion in a real-world context, we’ll use the story of a female attorney on the verge of undermining her career before I took her on as a client.
When this attorney came to me for a series of traditional talk-therapy sessions, she was deeply upset and said she wanted to quit her job. Working at a prestigious law firm, she was an industry leader in her practice area and was recognized for her thought leadership and advocacy across the country. Despite this, she felt underappreciated and unfairly compensated. To make matters worse, she had recently received a bad performance review from her boss and was shocked. She had always given 110 percent, and she was appalled that they hadn’t noticed the many ways in which she believed she performed above and beyond the standard expected of her. She figured her bosses felt intimidated by her and were deliberately holding her back in her career.
Because of this, she felt she had only one choice: ditch the job at the prestigious law firm and look for a new opportunity elsewhere. She came to the Viva Center not so that I could talk her out of this plan, but rather so that I could reinforce her decision and begin to identify the next steps in finding a new job.
When I hear stories like this, I try to remember that I’m only hearing one person’s side of it. For all I knew, her managers could have been every bit as awful as she claimed they were, or they could have been saints. Regardless, she was ready to jump out of a plane without a parachute by leaving her job, and I had an opportunity to present her with a different path.
During our first intake session, we started to pull apart what was happening at work. She was outraged and listed out her managers’ many offenses and highlighted all the extra work she had done that she hadn’t even been asked to do. She wasn’t getting enough sleep, she was incredibly stressed, and her efforts were not being appreciated. After hearing this, I asked her why she was doing so much extra work.
“That’s just what you do,” she said. “That’s how I got through law school. I was always that team player, and I guess I thought that when I did that, people would be generous with me. It’s certainly not working out that way.”
From there, we started doing some exploratory research on her present-day life, working to identify potential saboteurs. Because she was a fairly high-level employee at her firm and hadn’t been actively leveraging her networks, finding a new job wasn’t going to happen overnight. As we wrapped up the session, I asked her to spend a week trying to not say yes to everyone at work — to not always be available to respond to every request.
The next week, she told me how difficult it had been to say no. In fact, she found it so hard that she couldn’t even do it. She knew it wasn’t in her best interest to be a yes person, but she couldn’t help herself, and she didn’t know why. At least, she didn’t know why at first.
Eventually, I learned that her struggle had much deeper origins, stretching all the way back to her relationship with her parents. My client said they were good people, good parents, and conscientious members of their community. However, they weren’t present for her or her sister. From a young age, she learned that she couldn’t have problems of her own. Any distress or disappointment she expressed fell on deaf ears, and it was painful. She realized she would be better rewarded if she could gauge what her parents needed and provide that. They didn’t have a lot of bandwidth for her if she wasn’t following a certain script, and that script looked a lot like her tendency to overachieve and overperform in adulthood.
It took a while for her to reflect on this. It was painful for her to realize, but her body was telling the story. Even as a successful attorney, she didn’t feel good setting boundaries or saying no. Beginning to do this was like moving a boulder.
Given her background, I believed this client was an ideal candidate for EMDR therapy. I gave her some information and told her how it worked. We agreed to try to reprocess the part of her that used overachievement to cope with the rough parts of her childhood. We would especially target the parts of her coding that were programmed in her unconscious. For her new goal to help her target and reprocess her implicit memory of childhood, this client said she wanted to feel valuable, which, somewhat paradoxically, meant becoming better at setting boundaries and displaying healthy behaviors so she could focus on her most pressing tasks at work. She had long known what those behaviors would look like, but implementing them had felt as difficult as flying to the moon.
For bilateral stimulation, she preferred to go with a tactile approach. She held what we call tappers, which are little plastic oval-shaped sensors that vibrate in one hand and then the other. I let clients decide which frequency and intensity is most comfortable for them, and if there’s audio, what volume they prefer. Following this protocol, we found a good access point. She began experiencing a series of images and physical sensations, each representing her negative beliefs and eliciting a strong reaction in her. Using our predetermined rating system, she described how distressing each thought was as it came up. After some minutes of this, she was fully desensitized, and we began to look at her adaptive memory networks.
She had trouble setting boundaries because the path that compelled her to say yes was well worn, familiar, and easy to follow. It was a path her system felt the most comfortable with. Our desensitization helped to reduce the attraction of that path until she was motivated to carve a new one. In this part of the process, sometimes I’m required to lead the charge. But more often than not, the client’s brain has already taken the first few steps and begun reinforcing new, healthier beliefs, which, in this client’s case, was feeling more valuable.
Creating this new path wasn’t easy. It required her to deal with her own relationship with herself. In order to start feeling more valuable, she first had to navigate her feelings of loneliness and not having people she could count on to support her.
After three sessions, she began seeing a big difference at work. Whereas saying no had previously been too difficult to bear, soon it became second nature. When someone asked her to do something she didn’t have the bandwidth for, she would now kindly reply with her healthy boundary, “I’m sorry, but I’m completely swamped.” As a result, her coworkers began to realize she wasn’t just an expendable, always-available commodity. Instead, they began to see her for what she was: smart, connected, and a consummate professional.
As of this writing, this client is still at her job, which has transformed from a private hell to a dream job where she is appreciated, recognized for her efforts, and praised by the same managers who’d previously given her poor reviews. By setting boundaries, she was able to accomplish more and to focus on more important work.
EMDR didn’t change anything that happened in her life. Her past with her parents was still the same past it always had been. However, it no longer mattered. Through EMDR, she learned to let go of all those heavy, painful feelings in her system, and she says she’s never felt better.
The More You Give, The More You Gain
In this chapter, we’ve taken an up-close look at EMDR, its history, and how it can optimize your brain by changing your neural networks and brain function. Brain-based therapies like EMDR can help you in many — often unexpected — ways. During an EMDR session, we often find ourselves at a loss to describe what we’re experiencing or how it relates to the specific roadblock we’re targeting. While it can be difficult sometimes to allow yourself to surrender control, the more you allow the therapy to run its course, the more you stand to benefit.
Ultimately, EMDR and other brain-based therapies are effective not only for relieving and reprocessing distressing events in your past, but also in improving your performance and quality of life in the present day. The greatest advantage of EMDR, however, is that it works even if you have no memory of the triggering event. By opening up the hidden control panel in your brain and targeting the proper neural networks, you can reprogram your responses to everyday encounters without ever fully understanding what caused that roadblock in the first place.
Why This Matters
When I first began working with EMDR in my own therapy, I was thrilled to have found an approach that could more directly tackle my own therapeutic goals. Because I understood the origins of many of my current-day struggles to be tied in to some early mapping in my infant/childhood system, traditional approaches often missed the mark on the root causes of my distress.
One time it was particularly helpful was when I was a relatively new clinician. I was six years out of school and had been offered a dream job to start up a social services program for the underserved Spanish-speaking population. This position offered a perfect opportunity to tap into both my program-management experience along with my passion for this population as a Hispanic woman. I was thrilled.
It was a logical progression in my career and an unbelievable opportunity. However, my body was having very negative reactions. Usually a solid sleeper, I began having trouble both falling and staying asleep at night. Compounding this challenge were horrible nightmares that made no sense to me. Even while awake, every time I considered giving my notice at the rape crisis center where I worked at the time, my throat would tighten up, and I would have difficulty speaking. To say I was having anxiety in navigating this transition was an understatement.
I turned to EMDR for help. Because the image was causing me so much stress — none of which I understood — I pictured the moment of giving my notice to the rape crisis center. I had been a very loyal, very hardworking employee. I had put my all into that job and the mission of the center, and I knew logically that it was okay for me to move on so I could thrive in my career. Despite all this, I could not logically explain why I was having such a negative reaction.
During a particularly long, ninety-minute EMDR session, the images that flashed before me really took me on a journey through some incredibly deep feelings about loyalty and what it meant to abandon something you felt so passionately about. Some of my images were about church and the concept of sacrifice, as well as the deep pain I felt about being given away as a baby by my mother and other family members. Without EMDR, I would never have made the connection between those feelings and experiences and the prospect of quitting my job so I could take on another great opportunity. In hindsight, I can see how they would have played a part in the host of anxiety symptoms I’d been experiencing, but even then, I never would have expected them to have such an impact.
By the time I emerged from that ninety-minute session, all of my symptoms had subsided. I was able to accept that I have limits and that I don’t need to sacrifice myself in the service of a cause I was loyal to. Now, these are both logical ideas I already knew, but after the EMDR, the rest of my body had caught up. No more trouble sleeping. No more body reactions. I could actually practice my resignation speech without my throat closing up on me. It was so freeing. In this way, EMDR opened a door in my life and gave me access to implicit memories that had previously been impossible to find and understand.
To keep reading, pick up your copy of Live Empowered!: Rewire Your Brain’s Implicit Memory to Thrive in Business, Love, and Life by Dr. Julie Lopez on Amazon.
