[00:00:00] Tamera Broughton: People are coming in believing that trauma means that I was like physically abused in some way, or I’ve had some kind of hectic sexual assault experience. And of course that’s part of the picture, but it’s often not the whole picture. So trauma isn’t just about that stuff. There’s this whole other piece.

[00:00:25] Tamera Broughton: And often I say with my clients, it’s about making the invisible visible. How can we make the things that we weren’t even sure didn’t even know about or was like totally lacking in some way? How do we make that stuff visible to us? The brain has this innate capacity to heal. It wants to, it wants to move towards processing and processing through difficult or adverse experience, and it wants to come back to a place of like homeostasis, I guess.

[00:00:53] Tamera Broughton: So when we have adverse experiences, so things that are stressful or overwhelming or indeed [00:01:00] traumatic, that can cause a disruption to that natural adaptive information processing system. 

[00:01:07] Marie Vakakis: Hello and welcome to this complex life. We know that our childhood can impact us as adults. Well, I think we all know that.

[00:01:16] Marie Vakakis: Our life experiences. What happens to us when we are younger can show up in the most unexpected ways when we’re grownups. And today I wanna talk a little bit about how the things that are, I guess, painful or have wounded us as kids, can show up as pain points or triggers trigger for us as grownups and in relationships.

[00:01:38] Marie Vakakis: And I’ve got with me, Tamera. Hello. Welcome to the podcast. 

[00:01:41] Tamera Broughton: Hello. Thanks so much for having me. I’m delighted to be here. 

[00:01:45] Marie Vakakis: We were having a bit of a talk about EMDR therapy, but let’s rewind back and when we talk about unhealed parts of ourselves, what are we talking about? 

[00:01:55] Tamera Broughton: So when I hear that unhealed parts of ourselves, [00:02:00] I’m thinking about the ways in which things that we’ve kind of like coping strategies or the way that we’ve learned to kind of navigate our world.

[00:02:08] Tamera Broughton: And manage day to day start to become not that helpful. So when I think about the clients that I work with that are maybe showing up and wanting to work on some stuff, I’m thinking about the ways in which maybe they’re struggling to manage their emotions. So emotional regulation can be really, really tricky.

[00:02:28] Tamera Broughton: They can kind of go from zero to a hundred really fast, and they have difficulty managing that and difficulty working through it. So that’s a bit of a sign that there’s some unhealed stuff going on. I think it can sometimes show up in a bit of avoidance or withdrawing from situations, people, places, or even some avoidance of your own emotions.

[00:02:49] Tamera Broughton: So feeling like our emotions are the enemy. Yeah. Being quite disconnected from our body. Can also be a little sign that there’s some stuff going on that we need to work through. Lots and [00:03:00] lots and lots of stuff. I mean, sometimes people show up just feeling like quite anxious or socially anxious. They don’t really know why.

[00:03:07] Tamera Broughton: There’s no reason or they can’t really think about a particular incident that caused them to be that way. They just sort of are. So I’m kind of tuning into those little things and I’m getting curious about that and wondering, okay, that’s curious. That’s interesting. What’s happening there? Where did that come from?

[00:03:23] Marie Vakakis: When you say sort of the big emotions, the thing that comes up for me is I don’t think a lot of people recognise that, and so until we, I guess, put a, a microscope and kind of look at it a little bit, they think that that is proportionate to the current thing. So my partner forgot this thing that I said, it makes.

[00:03:46] Marie Vakakis: Total sense that I’m worthless and the jump is so big and feels so true that they might not even recognise. It’s something from the past. 

[00:03:58] Tamera Broughton: Yeah. 

[00:03:58] Marie Vakakis: How do you help [00:04:00] someone? I mean, well, how do we even kind of get people thinking about that, that it doesn’t mean that wasn’t hurtful, but when the reaction is so big, and I heard this saying that if it’s hysterical, it’s historical.

[00:04:10] Marie Vakakis: That if our feelings are big and seem disproportionate, that it’s a pain from the past. So hysterical, historical, and I was like, I love that. It captures it so well. How do you encourage people to start looking at those things? 

[00:04:23] Tamera Broughton: Yeah. So I think when people are coming into therapy, they’ve got some pain point that they wanna work on.

[00:04:32] Tamera Broughton: They’re already like, okay, something’s up here and I’m not showing up the best that I can. And when it comes to reactions for what’s going on in their life, so a good example that you’ve just provided there. So in relationship, your partner’s doing something and you’re having this huge. Reaction. That’s something that we start to talk about.

[00:04:51] Tamera Broughton: So I wanna know, and I wanna get curious about, so what is the emotion? Is it anger? Is it frustration? Is it [00:05:00] shame? Is it anxiety? What’s the emotion? Let’s start to tease that out and unpack it. And you’re right, a lot of people not sure actually what the emotion is, they’re just sort of reacting in this kind of autonomic way.

[00:05:11] Tamera Broughton: So. Wanna get curious about that? What is the emotion? And then once I, we kind of understand what’s the emotion driving that, like where is that showing up in your body? Where do you feel that, tell me about that sensation. What does that feel like to you? And this might be a odd question, but you know, stay with me.

[00:05:30] Tamera Broughton: If that feeling had a voice, what might it say? And that can be like the body, there’s a lot of wisdom in the body and when helping people to make sense of why they’re reacting in certain ways in the here and now, their body’s holding that story. So that’s a really good way to kind of start to bring that awareness around emotions.

[00:05:49] Tamera Broughton: Body sensations, what the body is telling them, what the body is driving them to do. Often when we do that, there’s a belief underneath there, so it’s like, okay, well I [00:06:00] don’t feel safe, or I feel worthless, or I don’t feel good enough, or something like that. So that’s where we start. We start to unpack all of those little elements.

[00:06:10] Tamera Broughton: There’s a lot in there, and you’re right, a lot of people aren’t familiar with that. They don’t know, they don’t have the language. And they don’t have the skills. So that’s often where we start just unpacking all of that stuff, making sense of it from that level. 

[00:06:24] Marie Vakakis: So those things that you’re talking about aren’t necessarily big T traumas.

[00:06:29] Marie Vakakis: These are learned ways to adapt to certain maybe experiences or kind of, I guess, early childhood interactions. There seems to be a lot of confusion of what trauma is, and I hear it talked about. So many ways that are so incorrect and the idea of triggers, but I’m not gonna get into that. What are some of the biggest myths you’ve heard about childhood trauma that have shown up in your work?

[00:06:54] Marie Vakakis: And maybe I can talk about, we can see if I’ve had any different ones come across my desk or my couch. [00:07:00] 

[00:07:00] Tamera Broughton: Yeah. I mean, when I hear that, I think I’m thinking about the people that I work with, and when we start to unpack their experiences, people are coming in believing that trauma means that I was like.

[00:07:12] Tamera Broughton: Physically abused in some way or have had some kind of hectic sexual assault experience. And of course that’s part of the picture. But it’s often like with the work that I do and the people that I see, it’s often not the whole picture. So trauma isn’t just about that stuff. There’s this whole other piece.

[00:07:33] Tamera Broughton: And often I say with my clients, it’s about making the invisible. Visible. How can we make the things that we weren’t even sure didn’t even know about or was like totally lacking in some way? How do we make that stuff visible to us? And what I’m talking about there is stuff like emotional needs. So there’s a lady that I follow and that I’ve learned from.

[00:07:52] Tamera Broughton: Her name’s Shirley Jean Schmidt. She’s an American woman. She developed the developmental needs meeting strategy. I dunno if you’re familiar with her [00:08:00] work. So this was, I, I found her work through my clinical supervisor who suggested it to me, Caroline Burrows. So she talks about this in a such an, a digestible way, and I love the way that she puts some language around all of this stuff.

[00:08:13] Tamera Broughton: And I often, you know, use her words specifically to talk to my clients. So trauma, we think about like the landscape of the things that you can experience. She talks about trauma as like when your physical needs. Uh, met. So you are physically unsafe, you are physically hurt in some way. Then she talks about this idea of like attachment trauma or attachment wounding.

[00:08:34] Tamera Broughton: So that’s not necessarily about the things that happened to you. It was the good things that should have happened but didn’t. So. Presenting that to clients where, you know, they may have come from a background where you didn’t even talk about emotions. You know, you didn’t even like the, the concept of emotional needs is like completely foreign, but that’s a huge part and piece of the [00:09:00] work.

[00:09:00] Tamera Broughton: And when we don’t get our emotional needs met, well. That has a huge impact on our development, our sense of self, how we show up in the world, how we can show up in relationships. Often the way that I describe it to my clients is thinking about this idea of our emotional needs is like scaffolding. So if we have.

[00:09:20] Tamera Broughton: You know, a good enough upbringing, our physical needs are met and our emotional needs are met. We kind of build this internal scaffolding that helps us kind of hang onto something through life storms. Like when things get shaky, we’ve got something to hang onto. Yeah, I believe that I’m capable. I believe that I can get through hard things.

[00:09:38] Tamera Broughton: I believe I belong somewhere. I believe that I can do good things. You know, these kinds of things that make me feel steady and who I am. Even though stress and adversity will come, that gives me something to hang onto to weather those storms. If those emotional needs aren’t met and or not met consistently, that scaffolding is a little shaky.

[00:09:57] Tamera Broughton: You know, that leads us to believe [00:10:00] other things about ourselves that isn’t so helpful. Like, I’m not worthy, I’m not okay. I’m not good enough, these sorts of things. So when somebody comes into work with me and they’re like, oh no, I didn’t have any trauma. My upbringing was great. You know, my parents stayed together.

[00:10:18] Tamera Broughton: I lived in a great neighborhood, and I went to school and had some hobbies and all the things. But then we kind of dig a little bit deeper and find that they’re like profoundly, not sure of themselves. They’re like profoundly hesitant to like show up in the world. They don’t trust people. That’s what we’re getting at in terms of like the emotional needs stuff and that’s how it can impact people.

[00:10:41] Tamera Broughton: So I talk about that in some way, like almost every day with my clients because they don’t recognise that stuff. We don’t talk about it. It’s not, you know, especially if it’s a culture in their family where if you show emotions you’re weak or something. So yeah, that’s a big one for me. 

[00:10:59] Marie Vakakis: [00:11:00] Yeah. I really like how you are differentiating that from trauma because it’s some of the things that I talk to folks about as well, that it’s not just what happened to you, it’s what was missing and being delighted in being attended to having parents that were attuned and present and available.

[00:11:17] Marie Vakakis: That has an impact. And I know some parents listening to it think, well, we can’t do that. We have to work. It’s like all of those things might still be. True. And it doesn’t change that. That’s what a developing brain body needs that, and that doesn’t always have to be met from parents. And so there’s this collective community that some people are really missing where someone might’ve gotten that, you know, delight from their grandma and someone else might’ve gotten the attunement from their grandpa and they might’ve had the cool, fun auntie or uncle who did something else and parents were providing.

[00:11:50] Marie Vakakis: And as a community, they had all of those needs met. I think that is a really big thing for people is they think trauma is something really bad, and I [00:12:00] think it is when we look at a capital T trauma that’s quite objective and then there’s some subjective experiences of, this was painful and I’m not quite sure why, or this was missing, and they might not recognise that.

[00:12:13] Tamera Broughton: Yeah, 

[00:12:14] Marie Vakakis: absolutely. And there is so much value in healing that part, because then you can move through to other relationships in a different way. So what if someone’s finally come to therapy and we are kind of digging through their brain? We don’t actually dig through their brain. Kind of. I had one person say, I do the Jedi mind tricks on them.

[00:12:34] Marie Vakakis: This is really funny ’cause for EMDR, what are the outcomes like when people start to recognise these patterns and process them, whether it’s through EMDR therapy or another therapy? How does it change them? What do you see? Mm, 

[00:12:50] Tamera Broughton: that’s a really good question. I mean to speak from my experience, so I often do, I’m working more with people who have, what I would call that attachment trauma [00:13:00] stuff going on.

[00:13:00] Tamera Broughton: So the little t as you say. So it’s not necessarily that they’ve been through these big adverse experiences, they were just kind of ticking along and maybe things were like kind of bad every day. You know, they weren’t, didn’t have anyone there to check in with them. You know, weren’t getting their emotional needs met, that sort of stuff.

[00:13:19] Tamera Broughton: So when I’m working with somebody like that, the work does look a little bit differently. So really the first thing that I want to try to understand and get them on board with is this idea of the like internal scaffolding and how strong is that, you know, how steady does that feel? And. Through kind of strengthening that internal scaffolding.

[00:13:45] Tamera Broughton: We’re working with what we call resourcing in EMDR. So I wanna be able, and I want to be curious and exploring what are the resources this person. Kind of has available to them already. They’ve lived a [00:14:00] life. They know some things. Of course, they’re the expert in their experience. What’s the good things that kind of make them feel good or light them up or, you know, they feel proud about, or they feel like is a positive in their life.

[00:14:13] Tamera Broughton: So I wanna, we wanna start to wake that up. We don’t wanna get that good gear, like, you know, activated and, and going as Tracy Lynch would say. So once we start to kind of activate that good gear. And we’ve got that person kind of waking up, the good stuff they’ve got and the scaffolding that they’ve got.

[00:14:33] Tamera Broughton: You know, we can then start to incorporate some of the other elements of EMDR to work on specific incidences or representational incidences that they may have had, which led to the development. Of the way that they feel or the way that they’ve been coping. So it’s kind of like a, I see it as sort of like a partnership in those two things.

[00:14:54] Tamera Broughton: We wanna kind of wake up the good stuff as well as identify what were the experiences that led to the [00:15:00] development of not feeling great about oneself. So once we’ve got that sort of stuff going. And we’re able to target some of those representational images or those experiences that were overwhelming or adverse or stressful in some way.

[00:15:15] Tamera Broughton: See, profound change, actually. Absolute profound change. We’ve seen some of the clients that I’ve worked with go from, you know, being quite upset and distressed over certain things through to a place of actually. I know that was bad, and I know that shouldn’t have happened to me. I know I didn’t deserve that, but I know it’s in the past now, and linking their resources and their good gear with that.

[00:15:41] Tamera Broughton: Adverse experience that that went through is actually a profoundly shifting experience to go through and symptoms, anxiety, depression, even substance issues, all this stuff starts to kind of dim down in intensity once we go through this process enough and do enough of this work. [00:16:00] 

[00:16:00] Marie Vakakis: So really quite life changing stuff.

[00:16:02] Marie Vakakis: Okay. 

[00:16:04] Tamera Broughton: Isn’t it really? I mean, it’s incredible. I feel incredibly privileged to do this work and to have witnessed the level of change for the people that I work with. 

[00:16:13] Marie Vakakis: Yeah, me too. It’s been so great to see, and especially even just the awareness. Like you said, some really bad things happened to me and it wasn’t my fault, and I think that is the key thing is.

[00:16:27] Marie Vakakis: Some of us hold those stories of various things and they can be very minute. They could be a teacher in primary school said something to you and so you’ve taken that story to mean I am a shit at art or nothing I do will be good. And you can pinpoint it down to one or two memories that then create. Not a self-fulfilling prophecy, but can create more situations in which that gets reinforced.

[00:16:55] Marie Vakakis: Because either you’re so scared to try because you don’t want to get, get it [00:17:00] wrong. So your effort isn’t your best. So then of course you’re gonna get the feedback that it’s, you know, not your best work and then that reinforces you. I’m no good at it. So we have these dancers that we play with parts of ourselves.

[00:17:12] Tamera Broughton: Yeah, absolutely. 

[00:17:14] Marie Vakakis: Yeah. So now as a convert to EMDR therapy, it’s a very mysterious thing for a lot of people. How do you explain, like if someone calls up and they’re like, I wanna do some EMDR therapy with you, or you came recommended, how do you actually explain to them in your words, like what do you say to people about what happens in a session or what that might look like?

[00:17:36] Tamera Broughton: Mm. So I always go back to talking about the underpinning. Model or theory that informs EMDR. So I’m talking about something called the adaptive information processing Theory. So this theory informs our EMDR work, but basically it’s this idea that the brain has this innate capacity. To heal. [00:18:00] It wants to, it wants to move towards processing and processing through difficult or adverse experience, and it wants to come back to a place of like homeostasis, I guess.

[00:18:11] Tamera Broughton: So when we have adverse experiences, so things that are stressful or overwhelming or indeed traumatic, that can cause a disruption to that natural adaptive information processing system. So the way that I like to explain it is if we think about the body, the body works similarly, right? So if you get a cut on your hand, the body will naturally move towards wanting to heal itself.

[00:18:35] Tamera Broughton: You don’t have to tell it what to do, it just does it. And we think that the brain works Similarly, it wants to move towards resolving this difficult material, but traumatic memories are stored differently in the brain. They can be stored in these kind of different isolated memory networks. So if you think back to the body and you’ve got your cut, if you had something in there like a [00:19:00] splinter or a foreign object or whatever, it’s not going to be able to keep healing.

[00:19:03] Tamera Broughton: It might get stuck. So it’s same kind of idea in the brain and without like adverse experiences are a bit stuck like a splinter. So when that occurs, you know, when we’ve got those stuck bits, it can feel like that memory or that experience is happening again and again and again. You’re reliving it over and over and over.

[00:19:22] Tamera Broughton: It just keeps being activated quite easily. That’s where we come to things like mental health issues. So anxiety, depression, drug and alcohol stuff, panic. That’s where this stuff all kind of comes into it. So from an A IP model, so if we removed that splinter. Which is what we use the EMDR for. Then we can kind of kickstart the brain’s natural ability to want to move towards resolving that experience.

[00:19:49] Tamera Broughton: And we kickstart the brain with something that we call bilateral stimulation. So when we do this, that experience, so the stressful or overwhelming experience that you had is no longer [00:20:00] isolated because it becomes integrated with the larger memory networks. And it joins in with the adaptive information, the good gear, you get a wider perspective on your life and the, the ups and downs rather, it being like right in your face and creating all sorts of havoc for you.

[00:20:18] Tamera Broughton: So that’s kind of like what it’s about, like the, the, the underlying model of it. So if somebody comes to do EMDR, what we hope, what the ideal outcome is, is that. The memory or the experience or the set of experiences that they went through when they recall it. It’s just more distant. It’s not like right in your face and feeling really present.

[00:20:43] Tamera Broughton: It just becomes more distant. The experience no longer evokes significant distress. So we’ve really dialed down the intensity on the emotions that are associated with the experience and the meaning and the beliefs linked to the memory shift to become more adaptive. Like I said before, like it might have [00:21:00] come in being like, I deserved that to, I didn’t deserve that.

[00:21:05] Tamera Broughton: That’s the kind of shift. So that’s a little bit about how I explain it. Would it be helpful for me to talk through actually what a session looks like? 

[00:21:14] Marie Vakakis: Yeah, I guess because everyone runs it a little bit differently and everyone has different flavors and incorporates different things. So that was a very thorough explanation.

[00:21:23] Marie Vakakis: And if people want, there’s I think another couple episodes right back through. The podcast, I’ll put links to those in the show notes about what A MDR is, and you can hear a few more conversations. So if someone, I mean, does someone needs to even know what it is to ask for the work? Like how do you just sit with someone in that space and nut it out together?

[00:21:43] Marie Vakakis: Mm. 

[00:21:45] Tamera Broughton: Yeah, so if somebody calls in and they say, look, I just feel really anxious. I’m struggling with panic. I get overwhelmed at work and I’m having problems with my partner, [00:22:00] and I really wanna work on all of that stuff, that’s a lot. You know, I might say, well. I might ask a few curious questions about, you know, what was life like for them when they were really young?

[00:22:12] Tamera Broughton: What did they learn about relationships and themselves? Maybe it might be helpful actually. So if when I’m running my like sessions, I run like EMDR intensives, this is like a little bit different because if somebody agrees to come and work with me. Then they are really committing to quite a focused and structured sort of process.

[00:22:34] Tamera Broughton: When they come and work with me, I’m asking them about all sorts of stuff before we even have our first session. So I send out a workbook and I wanna get a sense of like what their underlying beliefs look like, what their family relationships look like, family rules. I wanna get a sense of how they.

[00:22:54] Tamera Broughton: Think about themselves through their different developmental periods so that this workbook is really [00:23:00] thorough and really intense, and I wanna get a really good sense of what this person understands about themselves and what’s like their triggers and all sorts of stuff. So I, I send out that workbook and that is what they complete before they come along and do their first session with me.

[00:23:15] Tamera Broughton: So when we have our first session, I sit down with somebody and I work through something called a formulation. So in EMDR we have case conceptualisation and it’s this kind of tool which helps us make sense of all the really key things that, uh, inform what’s kind of bringing somebody into our room. So we wanna know what were the past experiences that feel significant and key to you.

[00:23:41] Tamera Broughton: We also wanna know like, what are the triggers? What are the everyday things that are happening for you when you feel overwhelmed or you’re having big emotional reactions that maybe feel a bit more. Disproportional to the situation. Also wanna get a sense of like what are the underlying core beliefs?

[00:23:56] Tamera Broughton: What’s happening for you? What are you believing about yourself or the situation when these [00:24:00] things are happening? And what are the things that have been really tricky for you? So what are the life difficulty stuff? Have you felt like you can’t connect with people? Have you felt like you do get panic? Do you feel like you get really angry and reactionary towards people?

[00:24:16] Tamera Broughton: Do you feel like you’ve struggled with drug and alcohol or maybe with eating or like, we kind of get a sense of like, what, what are the ways in which you’ve learned how to cope with some of these big emotions and these painful core beliefs? So. In the first session that I have with someone, I’m pulling all these pieces of information together and kind of, you know, sharing it with the client really from a perspective of, have I got this right?

[00:24:40] Tamera Broughton: Does this make sense? Are we on the same page here? Does this seem like it’s making sense? All that sort of stuff. Another thing that we do in that kind of formulation is understand what are the, the resources and the resiliences that you have. That you’ve learnt over the course of your life that we can kind of tap into wake up or maybe like [00:25:00] even strengthen even stronger.

[00:25:02] Tamera Broughton: So when somebody comes in to work with me, that’s what a first session looks like. I put together this formulation, I wanna make sure that we’re on the same page, and I find that that is. Incredibly helpful for people to come in and work through these, make those connections between how things are showing up today, where they may have come from.

[00:25:26] Tamera Broughton: And why it’s been so tough. So once I sort of take people on this journey and we’ve got the shared sense, honestly, it just makes sense to people to want to go and process through the difficult experiences, which led to the development of these things. Does that make sense? Kind of took us on a bit of a journey.

[00:25:45] Marie Vakakis: Yeah, I mean, it’s very similar to how I run my intensives, but it’s helpful, I think for people to understand that it can be quite structured and that works really well for some people. There are different types of therapies that are really suitable for different [00:26:00] seasons of your life and different things that you’re trying to look for.

[00:26:03] Marie Vakakis: So EMDR intensives can be really great if you’ve got a really great connection with a different therapist and there’s a stuck point. Sometimes that’s where I get some of my referrals. I might do a two week intensive with someone on a couple of particular things, and then they re-engage back with their previous therapist.

[00:26:19] Marie Vakakis: And so there’s this flexibility in that, and I think. I mean, as a busy professional, if I had an issue, I, I just wanna kind of get it over and done with. I’d be like, great, let me take some annual leave. Let me get through all of this stuff and then piece me back together and I’ll continue on with life for a little bit.

[00:26:35] Marie Vakakis: So the intensive do offer some of that, like it’s, it’s in it’s intensive so it can actually progress quite quickly. I know when I run them, you know, two weeks at six sessions. Six double sessions, that’s almost 12. If someone is coming fortnightly, which is usually people’s budget, even if sometimes weekly would be better, that’s 24 weeks worth of therapy in two [00:27:00] weeks.

[00:27:00] Marie Vakakis: That’s six months. And so the progress you can get when you’re not interrupted with the, how was your day, what’s been happening this week? Anything new and the sort of the stuff that can come up, it’s so, so powerful. 

[00:27:13] Tamera Broughton: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. Yeah. And I, I think. Two, the, just to kind of come back to your point around, you know that this is a very intense and a very focused way of working.

[00:27:25] Tamera Broughton: We can get through a lot and it can be incredibly helpful. It is true that it isn’t necessarily for everybody and it might not be right. For where you’re at right now, but it could be something to work towards. And it also means kind of understanding what your own preferences are. You know, some people want to come along and build up that relationship over time.

[00:27:50] Tamera Broughton: The way that they process information, the way that the, you know, coming in for weekly or fortnightly sessions just makes more sense to them. And then other people who just kind of really wanna [00:28:00] just jump in and, and work in that more focused way. 

[00:28:03] Marie Vakakis: So if people are thinking about, oh my goodness, this just seems a way too scary and intense, that’s okay too.

[00:28:12] Marie Vakakis: It’s totally fine to have a different type of therapy. That’s your preference. If someone’s listening and they’re like, oh, maybe this memory or this thing that’s popping out. You know, this feeling of inadequacy, it’s usually something around too, something too much, too dumb, not enough. Those kinds of, if you have those reoccurring sort of beliefs, there’s a good chance it’s rooted somewhere in your history and they’re just too scared to go there.

[00:28:39] Marie Vakakis: What’s something that you, people can maybe like a little DIY tip, something that they can just test out or read about? That might be a nice more palatable first step into understanding what’s behind that. Do you have any go-to resources 

[00:28:57] Tamera Broughton: other than our website where we put up a lot of [00:29:00] information about EMDR?

[00:29:02] Tamera Broughton: We’ve got some blogs around what signs, like what you might be working with or what, what’s happening for you and how EMDR might be helpful for that. But in terms of what you’re asking, which is how to help people. Identify or make that connection between like what they’re feeling and what they’re believing?

[00:29:21] Tamera Broughton: Is that what you, what you’re saying? 

[00:29:23] Marie Vakakis: Well, yeah, just sort of like. I mean, I, I, I tend to recommend the book, what happened to you as something that people can try to sort of understand where some of those reactions might come from. I might encourage people to think about, just notice that reactivity and that phrasing hysterical historical, like, oh, is this.

[00:29:46] Marie Vakakis: Because this moment is genuinely that painful, or is it poking at something that is more sensitive to me? Do I have a sensitivity to this? In couples, I often describe it as, you almost step on your partner like a [00:30:00] landmine, and you have no idea where that reaction came from. So if you are having big reactions or big feelings and it seems disproportionate to what’s happened, that is a clue that you might want to dig a bit deeper.

[00:30:16] Marie Vakakis: And yeah, the book where, uh, what happened to you is a really good one and just starting to notice that pattern can already be a helpful step in that direction. 

[00:30:25] Tamera Broughton: Yeah, definitely. So I’m just having a think about what kinds of books that I might suggest. I mean, this is a very powerful book. It’s also very intense, so like, go gently if you are gonna read it.

[00:30:37] Tamera Broughton: But the one. I’m gonna have to Google it. Can’t quite remember the name of it. What My Bones Know by Stephanie. Do you know that one, Marie? 

[00:30:47] Marie Vakakis: I’ve heard of it. It’s on my massive book to-do list. 

[00:30:50] Tamera Broughton: Yeah. 

[00:30:51] Marie Vakakis: You can see my bookshelf behind me is full of half read books, but yeah, there’s The Body Keeps Score as well.

[00:30:56] Marie Vakakis: Yeah. And what else? I’m just [00:31:00] having a peek behind me. I think those I would start with. Yeah. Something like that. 

[00:31:05] Tamera Broughton: Yeah. 

[00:31:06] Marie Vakakis: I, I. Nothing else is coming to me. Sorry. We’ll put some links in the show notes and some resources and people who follow either of us on any of the socials can kind of grab those and have a look.

[00:31:18] Marie Vakakis: It’s been so awesome chatting to you about EMDR therapy and childhood trauma and where can people find you if they wanna get in touch? 

[00:31:25] Tamera Broughton: Definitely. So check out our website. It is send to self.com. Au lots of information in there. You can also email me at Tamera T-A-M-E-R a@centerself.com au. Flick me an email if you like.

[00:31:41] Tamera Broughton: I would love to hear from you and chat more about how EMDR could be helpful for you. Great. Thanks so much. Okay. Thank you.

[00:31:53] Marie Vakakis: Thank you for listening to keep the Conversation going. Head on over to Instagram or LinkedIn and follow me if you’d like to [00:32:00] keep updated with episodes and other interesting things happening in mental health. Join my Weekly, this Complex Life newsletter. Where I’ll share tools, tips, and insights. There’s a link in the show notes, got a question you want answered, ship me an email or a dm.

[00:32:13] Marie Vakakis: I’d love to hear from you and if you enjoy the show, I’d really appreciate it if you could leave a rating and a review. It helps other people find the podcast.