The Addicted Mind Podcast

Episode 314: Melting The Ice Cube - EMDR & Trauma with Kay Simmeth

Dec 30, 2024

Kay Simmeth, a Marriage and Family Therapist certified in EMDR, shares her expertise on trauma treatment, particularly its link to addiction. She dives into the powerful process of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, explaining how bilateral stimulation helps clients shift negative beliefs into positive ones. Using the ice cube metaphor, Kay illustrates how trauma can cloud rational thinking. She emphasizes the importance of addressing past experiences to empower healthier choices and highlights the hope for healing through community support.

32:31

Episode guests

Kay Simmeth

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Episode notes

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Quick takeaways

EMDR facilitates emotional processing by activating both sides of the brain, helping clients transform traumatic memories into manageable events.

This therapy approach addresses underlying trauma that can drive maladaptive behaviors, fostering healthier coping strategies for addiction and emotional regulation.

Deep dives

Understanding EMDR Therapy

EMDR, which stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is a therapeutic approach utilized to assist individuals in processing traumatic memories and experiences. This therapy employs bilateral stimulation, achieved through eye movements, tapping, or auditory cues, to activate both sides of the brain while the client recalls distressing memories. This dual attention process helps clients engage with their trauma in a manner that activates the amygdala, allowing for deeper emotional processing compared to traditional talk therapy. By facilitating access to traumatic experiences stored in the brain, EMDR enables clients to dismantle the emotional weight attached to these memories, assisting in their recovery from various mental health issues, including addiction, anxiety, and depression.

Intro

2min

Understanding EMDR Therapy

6min

Understanding Trauma Through the Ice Cube Metaphor

2min

Healing Trauma to Overcome Addiction

2min

Navigating EMDR Therapy: Duration and Process

17min

Exploring EMDR Therapy and Community Support

2min

On this episode of The Addicted Mind podcast, my guest is Kay Simmeth, a Marriage and Family Therapist certified in EMDR. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing is a type of bilateral stimulation that activates both sides of the body and both sides of the brain. This dual action process of tapping on the client’s knees back and forth, listening to music or sounds that alternate between headphones, or feeling vibrations in alternating hands, the frontal cortex and the amygdala are both activated, which allows the client to access the portion of the brain where the trauma is stored and then shift those negative beliefs or cognitions to positive beliefs.

Without being able to access both sides of the brain simultaneously, the client will just continue to feel the negative beliefs related to the trauma and not be able to go any further by consciously and logically thinking about the situation. Doing so through the 8-phase process of EMDR allows the client to “melt” the trauma so that they can still access the memory of the trauma, but the intensity of their emotions and reactions about the trauma become less immediate and significant. The trauma simply becomes an “event” in their lives rather than something that impacts everything they experience. Going through EMDR takes the emotional weight out of the memory in the present and frees the client up for a brighter future.

Kay uses EMDR with 98% of her patients and she has found that the changes her clients exhibit stick more than with other techniques. Through this type of adaptive information processing model, the length of time or number of sessions that the client needs to go through EMDR depends on the proximity, length, and depth of the trauma in their life, but all clients will see change along the way.

Kay’s advice to those experiencing trauma is to remember that they do not have to go through it alone and that there are plenty of resources for them to seek help.

Episode Credits

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Supporting Resources:

If you live in California and are looking for counseling or therapy please check out Novus Mindful Life Counseling and Recovery Center

NovusMindfulLife.com

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