EMDR Retreats – An Interview with Rebecca Strong

coming in for an intensive um there’s a whole set up for it so i call it the sacred pause that’s the that’s the number one reason to do it is to take a sacred pause and i think you know kovit has taught us that we can that we can do that we can actually slow things down and re-prioritize uh and so the sacred pause we have that person actually set up their whole life around slowing it down in this interview with rebecca strong we will talk about emdr intensives and a very unique way to do emdr intensives rebecca will share her retreat style intensive emdr she does with her clients and how to make them more efficient she will talk about the benefits of doing emdr on your feet including rdi on your feet and other practices that help integrate her somatic practices into emdr therapy rebecca is an emdr therapist from boulder colorado she is also a yoga teacher and has background in mindfulness meditation and embodiment practices she integrates nature movement and yoga into her therapy practice here’s the interview with rebecca strong [Music] rebecca strong welcome to the art and science of emdr and thank you so much for joining me today it’s great to be here ro tim thank you for the invitation yeah so rebecca i am excited to learn about your emdr intensive retreat so i want to start by asking what is an emdr intensive or what is an emdr retreat um yeah great question so an emdr intensive i have mini intensives or micro intensives that are two to three and a half hours so um the shortest would be a two hour the longest would be a half day of a of a micro intensive and then it moves a mid level would be like a day long um usually though what i’ve been doing are three days back to back with clients and then sort of the high level intensive is 10 to 15 days and that can be clustered together or spread out over one to three months wow that’s a long time of emdr um what what are the benefits of doing an emdr intensive yes excellent one of the benefits is undivided healing attention and when i ask people when have you ever had a whole day of undivided healing attention people really kind of you know sort of rub their chins and look to the left and look to the right trying to locate a time in their life when they had really truly undivided attention where you know here in the therapeutic office i’m not moving and doing the laundry or catching a text or it truly is uh a time of providing a container for another person to really focus on what are the things that keep catching you or keep you keep getting hooked up on that feel preventative to forward momentum so a huge benefit is undivided attention yeah i would imagine that probably a lot of the the people you ask this question say never like never at least in their adult life right nobody has time to take a a whole day just to for themselves for healing yes yes do you make them uh do you make them uh turn their phones off so are they completely off of electricity yes yes that’s such a great question so coming in for an intensive um there’s a whole setup for it so i call it the sacred pause that’s the that’s the number one reason to do it is to take a sacred pause and i think you know covet has taught us that we can that we can do that we can actually slow things down and re-prioritize and so the sacred pause we have that person actually set up their whole life around slowing it down slowing things down so i’ll usually bring in the person’s spouse if they have a significant other or i’ll get at least one other person in their life on board to actually help protect the time before the intensive that morning um i always have them bring lunch so we take you know usually start at ten and end at six we’ll take a an hour break i invite them to eat but then also either rest or move you know so they’re not checking emails if they can help it when they get home in an ideal situation doesn’t always happen this way but that someone else is helping to nourish them or at least protect the space so they can nourish themselves and not sort of slip back into the everyday rational ordinary consciousness but to actually preserve that time and create a retreat-like atmosphere for themselves yeah i love how you phrase it protect the time i often ask my emdr clients to just take time after right after the session not to go straight to your you know your phone and check your emails and texts um and i think it’s so important because the brain keeps processing and there’s there are benefits that uh people can get from protecting their time after processing definitely there’s new insights right so the brain as you know after 20 minutes of doing the bilateral work the brain starts becoming more receptive to new neural pathways so if we’ve worked up to seven hours in a day we’re not going to do seven hours of bilateral work but and the brain is is more malleable it’s more receptive new new insights new possibilities are more available and really protecting that time is is to um garner that to to harvest that and also to expand the possibility of that yeah so rebecca i want to ask you so emdr retreat is is a recent growing trend in our emdr community and i know that some people do that and i know of colleagues who have been doing a few years but i want to ask you specifically about your retreat uh and what makes it different than other emdr intensives um yeah it’s a good question i think you know partly i come from a somatics background so um to be totally transparent the one of the reasons the emdr retreat style is appealing to me is because i’m a hakomi trained clinician as well so if you’re familiar with um you know that style of psychotherapy when we trained we trained for two years one weekend a month we would you know arrive at 9 00 a.m leave at 6 or 7. we worked intensively with each other all day long and you know building in bio breaks and wellness breaks so i bring that background um the somatics piece the early childhood trauma developmental trauma focus but i also have training in embodied leadership so what that means is how do we cultivate a sense of presence through the body and keep the circulation of the body-mind connection happening throughout our work together so i know there are a lot of clinicians who bring different body mind tools um and that’s one in particular that i that i love and that just naturally flows into the work right and in a previous conversation you shared that you have a strong background in yoga you’ve been teaching yoga for about two decades can you talk a little bit about how how you integrate yoga into your india retreat um sure so healing you know i’ve always been taught and i believe uh that healing takes place in the present moment right and the the body is here and then the mind can can be elsewhere you know the power of that is the power of imagination and the detriment of that is distraction right so i think most of us in my i can spend a day not having moved and i’m not playing with my full deck right and so i can tell when a client comes in that they’re sort of more in their head and they’re not really inhabiting their the fullness of their of their body therefore also the fullness of their experience and and really the fullness of their potential so yoga um different mindful movement practices breathing and also a lot of pushing i do um wall squats um plank you know full planks um half planks push two hands pushing against the wall things that really bring a sense of presence you know we’ve got the the gym knife back back at the head scale right so how how present are you now you know so if i’m working with someone and i’m sensing they’re about here or they report they’re about here i actually want them a lot closer to here before we even start working right so it’s like let’s really arrive and and really discover what that means together and explore what that means together and open up the back of the body open up movement open up the bottoms of the feet i have an accupuncture mat that’s got you know it’s got like 108 little sewn in um spiky things and you stand i i will have um clients you know as they’re willing of course this is their choice but the invitation is to stand on that and start to open up the bottoms of the feet and that that um stimulus trickles it trickles up right so the brain becomes more on board um the circulation of the body so so much more presence starts to happen and i like to arrive into that space before we start working i find that people get a lot more further faster so to speak yeah that that makes so much sense what you’re saying you know i’m thinking about now about a 50-minute session how you know we’re checking in and then we’re rushing into processing and then we have to leave time at the end of you know the session for closing the session especially if there’s you know intense emotions coming up or some intense memories that takes a long time and you know before we know the session is over and then you know 15 minutes later the client is in their office checking email or you know whatever they’re they’re doing back to live and that really that model really allows people to take time and and process and then reflect on the processing so that all really makes sense i wanted to ask you more specifically about um one of the things that you use and and you call it um emdr on your feet and you also have um a technique that you you call rdi on your feet can you talk a little bit about that sure yeah that that’s great um i feel that in my experience as an emdr clinician and and as a clinician in general but specifically the emdr work i feel like resourcing is a huge part of the healing process you know i i worked with a client recently whose um one of one of his children went to a rehab facility and the first thing they took was a family tree but the but the family tree was all of the bad stuff like um addictions mental illness um all of sort of the challenges that that family went through and i said did they also take a family tree of all the strengths and all the health and i feel like resource rdi um resource development installation that resourcing that is the um that’s the elixir of life like that’s the strength that carries people through the difficulty and when we lift that up and especially um you know through the the embod more embodying those resources then there’s a deeper cellular awareness of of the good stuff of the strength we would call that strength-based treatment right so and and having having a client identify the rdi we could sit and have them talk about it but i have them stand up and embody it inhabit it move it you know i’ve got the little buzzers in their hands while while they’re um feeling into it talking it through bringing up a recent memory of of embodying that and having them stay with that that i find so much generativity so much generosity so much that degenerative opens up and that’s actually the river we flow on um through the work always coming back to that and allowing that to be the source of the work yeah it it does make a lot of sense both for the rdi and for processing i know that you know many of us process you know traumas and disturbing memories while clients are sitting and there’s so much that is going on in the body and what we’re doing when when they’re just sitting we’re not letting them release that that trauma that is stuck in the body so i think it it does make sense both for the rdi both for the resourcing and for the mdr processing itself is that something that you do as well the the processing itself do you do it while they’re in in movement or while they’re you know standing up the reprocessing it kind of depends on the person’s energy level um it depends you know i i think the the rdi step we we do a lot of of movement and embodiment like i just shared commonly that we sort of speed up to slow down so what i find is it’s more of a leading into the reprocessing and then commonly what i find is people actually want to be more still when they’re in like a trauma memory they want to be kind of more in the visual landscape and a little bit deeper in in their psyche in that way but when we talk more about emdr on your feet in the next episode i’ll go more into kind of how what i’ve seen how i’ve seen being on your feet through the reprocessing can be useful as well the one other thing i want to say about the resourcing when when i have clients stand and embody that resource and then pull up a recent memory and do the bilateral work the other thing that i love is that they that inhabiting you know the inhabiting of of the positive so to speak the inhabiting i mean they’re they’re accessing the aip first of all right and and they’re accessing all of this intelligence that is coursing through them that they don’t usually associate with trauma they think i’m gonna come in and work on my trauma and it’s gonna be awful right it’s gonna i’m not really wanting to it’s gonna be dark it’s gonna be heavy it’s gonna be loaded and to focus so much on their resourcing really lifts people up i commonly find that people say two things one rebecca this is really fun right like to to realize that therapy could be fun and not fun for fun’s sake but to realize that the healing adventure is is is life-giving it’s it like generates energy which we can experience is fun the other thing is they walk out of my office they literally walk out the door with more of that strength available and they’ve been up on their feet i have them picture when’s the next time you’re gonna need this right so the future template comes in they imagine themselves in the kitchen and their son calling and him kind of being a grump and that they’ve got this new way of responding that they’ve just practiced several times and they’ve visualized doing it in their setting and then next time they come back i’m like how did that go oh i was way more able to stay with how i wanted things to go versus how they usually go yeah so emdr on your feet plus future template that sounds good good combination uh rebecca one more question um i have i want to ask you and this is something i ask every person i interview and the question is how do we get better how do emdr therapists get better at being emdr therapists we talked about this a little bit and i was sharing with you the faculty of listening the art of listening the art and science of listening i feel is so central to what we do and clinicians have a very um you know where we’re trained to listen and i think that looking for what delights you in the other person is a helpful way of listening and it’s you it i feel like it’s it’s a combination of listening but listening with curiosity listening for that thread of of aliveness or delightfulness and i feel that that kind of listening and then being able to mirror that back to reflect that such a gift right it’s such a gift to our clients to be able to appreciate them in a natural way enjoy them that’s often a lot of the healing right that right there um is for someone to feel cherished or or delighted in and and then to be to be seen you know in in that um in what those strengths are so yeah finding i think emdr clinicians we can all continue to deepen by finding what is our particular way of listening what are the gifts that um our listening actually brings forth or lifts up and and then even and then even deepen deepen in that play in that play in that territory even more yeah so the art and signs of listening rebecca strong thank you so much for coming on the show you’re so welcome thanks for having me and i look forward to um i’m welcoming uh clinicians to come do emdr intensives with me um i love serving people who serve people and to take a golden pause a sacred pause for yourself and to clean up the past in order to shine into the future i’d love to support people in that way absolutely and we know that you know we therapists need to do our own work and you know we absorb a lot of what we do by listening to our clients and being and being present with our clients so um yeah definitely so rebecca you have a retreat specific for emdr therapists can you talk a little bit about that yes so i i have a retreat for professionals it’s a three and a half day retreat and right now we’re figuring out is this going to be at a distance in person or remote but three and a half days seems to be a real you know really potent amount of time where you get kind of far enough away from the shore of your of your current overwhelm and situation and then some time to really deepen we usually take one to two things that are kind of looping or causing the most distress either past or current and really spend time cleaning those up with a lot of bilateral work as well as writing as well as some a little bit of time out on the land and movement practices and then the third day we really harvest we kind of complete the deeper process and then start preparing for the future taking those new insights into into the into your life going forward so that sounds wonderful rebecca thank you again you’re welcome thank you [Music] you