Rewind: the fast alternative to EMDR

Paula Gardner — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 17:42:08 +0000

EMDR is the latest buzz word in therapy. It is a method of dealing with trauma that uses eye movements to densensitise yourself to the event. However, not everyone gets on with the technique. For start, it can be expensive, and you may need up to 12 sessions. Appointments are sometimes longer than traditional therapy sessions too, and not everyone gets on with the eye element of it. It can make some people feel sick, or have other effects. This isn’t to downplay EMDRs efficacy. However, there is another alternative that works extremely well.

Rewind, the fast alternative to EMDR

Rewind, for me, is a much more gentler, and yet still extremely effective process. It can take as little as two sessions to rewind the trauma, although more may be needed if there are multiple traumas, layers or you need to unpack the impact trauma has had on your life and behaviours.

What works so well for me is that you don’t have to go through the trauma again with Rewind. You don’t even have to tell me what the trauma was in so many words. This is so reassuring for many clients who are worried that healing traumas means explaining what happened and possibly reliving those moments or years over again.

How it works

We’ll relax you so that your brain is in a state of low arousal, and then I’ll guide you through a process. What we are doing during this is unhooking the emotion from those memories. They will still be there, but the distressing feelings will be reduced, or even gone.

Trauma can be at the root of so many problems, including OCD, PTSD, anxiety, depression, people pleasing behaviour, phobias and many more. We can work around these issues, but dealing with the trauma itself is going to be the most effective work.

It’s important to realise that trauma isn’t always the big things – car crashes and serious illnesses. It can be bullying at school, a badly managed redundancy, a relationship, or even neglect as a child. Traumas can be years old, or quite recent.

Most of my clients find a Rewind very relaxing, even pleasurable.

How to book your alternative to EMDR

You can contact me here, or have an introductory no-fee consultation with me by booking here. I offer online sessions or do a Rewind in person in my rooms in Folkestone and Hythe, South East Kent.

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Dealing With Guilt

Paula Gardner — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 06:37:13 +0000

A look at dealing with guilt

Guilt is an emotion and belongs with the other sad emotions like grief and loneliness. There are many types of guilt. There’s guilt for something you might have done, guilt for something you didn’t do, guilt for something you even just thought about. For the moment, let’s look at one type of guilt that I think has a strong pull when we can’t even take some time out. That is the guilt of not doing enough. Psychologists actually believe that this guilt is a sign of something called Compassion Fatigue which is a form of burn-out.

You can see compassion fatigue at work in black and white when you see someone caring for a dying relative. They may be doing everything in their power to ease the sick person’s distress, but it’s still not enough. Frankly, it’s never going to be enough. The fact that it is not enough induces a feeling of guilt that is hard to carry. This desire to help their sick relative is never going to be alleviated and there is dissonance, a gap, between what they want and what’s happening. Taken to an extreme, this is now the stress disorder of compassion fatigue.

On a more domestic, daily level our desires to help others, nurture our family and take care of loved ones mean that anything less than (unobtainable) perfection often create guilt that we are not doing enough. This feeling can be intensified when we do something for ourselves, instead of pouring ourselves into this never ending pit of wanting to help others.

Dealing with guilt around looking after ourselves

The question is, how do we deal with that feeling of guilt for taking time out for ourselves? We can attack it head on, using logic and reminding ourselves that it is the gap between what we can do and we would like to do, nothing more. It is an emotion created by this dissonance. However, that also means that we can push past it and just get on with our self-care anyway.

What could be a better approach is something of the two and try to look at the situation objectively, as if you were looking at a friend’s life. What would you sensibly expect her to do for her family and what boundaries would you suggest where she might draw the line? What combination of time and energy spent on others and on herself would you suggest?

This isn’t necessary a prescription for the actual feeling of guilt, but it may help to know that what you are feeling is the emotion created by a desire to do more. A desire that could never be completely fulfilled anyway.

Another thing to recognise about guilt is that it doesn’t have to be self-destructive. It can make us think about using our time with loved-one in a more quality way, for instance, getting out and doing a bike ride together rather than sitting on the sofa playing on your phones.

Use it as a marker that says you need to give what’s going on a little thought.

If you’d like to throw a light on your own feelings of guilt and what might soothe them, please book a no-cost call with me here, or contact me here.

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