In this episode of Functional Medicine Research, I speak with therapist Martina Barnes about how EMDR can help people overcome trauma. I have personally used EMDR with great success in overcoming trauma and I routinely refer for EMDR to help patients get well. One of the most important aspects of practicing functional medicine is understanding how much trauma can be connected to chronic illness. Many patients won't get well until they address their past and how it is affecting their current health issues. All the healthy diets, supplements, exercise, sleep, exposure to nature, community etc. won't be enough if there is underlying trauma history wearing you down.
Mental health professionals are severely underutilized yet they should be the first line of therapy for the majority of patients with chronic illness. Unfortunately, they usually end up being the last. This interview should help shed some light on the benefits of EMDR and how it can help you heal and get well for lasting health and well-being.
Below is a transcript on overcoming trauma with EMDR
Dr. Hedberg: Well, welcome everyone to "Functional Medicine Research." I'm Dr. Hedberg and really excited today to have Martina Barnes on the show. Martina has a Master's Degree in Counseling Psychology from Western Carolina University and that was completed in the year 2000. So, many, many years of experience and Martina's theoretical underpinnings are informed by attachment theories of human development which determine our interpersonal basis for relationships. And when working with individuals together, we seek to understand the attachment wounds developed in childhood and how your style impacts your relationship with yourself and others.
And Martina says you can transform your life by transforming the way your brain and nervous system are wired. She utilizes a range of evidence-based yet cutting-edge holistic modalities such as Trauma Resilience Model, EMDR, which is what we're gonna be talking about today in detail, Internal Family Systems, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, and mindfulness, and Martina has been a speaker and educator at trauma recovery conferences and seminars for victims of murder, suicide, and even sudden death. So, Martina, welcome to the show.
Martina: Thanks, Nick, and great to be here. I'm excited to share what I know about EMDR.
Dr. Hedberg: Yeah. I'm excited as well. This is something that I've been wanting someone on the show for a long time to talk about EMDR. This is something that I've used myself and recommended to many patients. So, why don't we just talk about some of the basics and why don't you give us an idea of what exactly is EMDR and what does it stand for?
Martina: Yeah. Great. So, EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing. And it's a modality that originally only used eye movements to help give the brain bilateral stimulation to help clear trauma. It's gone to incorporate other types of bilateral stimulation. Maybe hand taps or also bilateral auditory tones can be incorporated as well. And it's one of the most powerful trauma recovery modalities that I've ever utilized. It was discovered in 1988. So, it's been around quite a long time.
Dr. Hedberg: And who invented EMDR?
Martina: Francine Shapiro who was a psychologist invented EMDR quite by accident. She loved to take long walks and when she was walking, she would notice if she was thinking about something that's setting or something disturbing that her eyes would dart back and forth, back and forth, and then they would stop darting, and she would notice that she had cleared that disturbing thought. So, it occurred to her that she might be able to develop some kind of protocol that would involve the eye movements to help clear disturbing thoughts. And she first decided to try this on veterans who had PTSD.
Dr. Hedberg: Fascinating. And so, this modality, so, like you said, it's been around for quite a long time and I've had it with two different practitioners. One used the lights and the handheld vibration device.
Martina: Yes.
Dr. Hedberg: And then the other one just used her hand with her finger moving back and forth. So, can you talk about the different ways to do EMDR? Is there any advantage to one way of doing it over the other?
Martina: That's really up for debate. There's been a lot of clinical studies on EMDR and some of the clinical studies have indicated or the meta-analysis of several research studies have indicated that there is a higher benefit to doing the eye movement. However, other studies indicate that that's not necessarily the case, as long as the brain is getting the bilateral stimulation. So, when I began, I would say, probably the first 8 to 10 years, I just use my hand or my fingers and would have the client follow the backend force of my hand with their eyes. And sometimes I would speed up, sometimes I would slow down.
Then these machines, like the light bar came into and that could sound like the clinician use with you. There are handheld devices that individuals can use that they will administer, like, a vibration back and forth to the palms of the hands, which again is bilateral stimulation. And then as I mentioned before, sometimes auditory tones are used. And I found in my experience that it's really dependent on the patient because some patients don't tolerate eye movements well without feeling a little bit off-balance or dizzy, sometimes a little nauseous, some tolerate the hand vibrations or the hand taps better. So, some like a combination of the hand taps and the auditory stimulus. So, the most important component seems to be that you are getting the brain bilateral stimulation. So, personally, I have not found any significant difference. The differences are really in the individuals.
Dr. Hedberg: Let's talk about trauma because that's what it's mainly used for. Trauma is such a difficult thing to deal with for any type of practitioner. And obviously, there's different types of trauma. Some can be a single event or trauma can be an ongoing, you know, stress to the body. How do you define trauma? How do you look at trauma? And what kind of trauma do you think EMDR is best used for?
Martina: Those are all great questions. So, in the trauma recovery field, we often talk about big traumas and small traumas. And right now, as we're recording this, we're in a pandemic. I would say that to most everyone in the world, this is resulting in some type of trauma and defining trauma to be an incident that occurs to the brain that impacts the survival mechanism, the fight-flight mechanism. And it's defined really as having an incident or several incidences or exposure to long-term incidences that are more than the body's system can process. So, I would include in that the body, I would include the nervous system, I would include the brain. So, in my experience, single episode traumas such as having a car accident, going through a really difficult divorce, moving through the after effects of being raped or sexually assaulted or mentally abused, if it's a single event like a car accident, for example, or one rape, or maybe several single incidences, I find that the EMDR is most helpful in clearing those types of trauma.
When you get into the trauma that comes out of childhood with repeated exposure to trauma which we call complex trauma, then the EMDR may need to be paired with some other modality such as the Trauma Resiliency Model, which is helping regulate the nervous system, or perhaps internal family systems, which is working with the young parts that are traumatized. We can also use EMDR. However, I find that we need a multipronged approach when there has been long-term exposure. Also keep in mind that if a child is exposed to physical, mental, or emotional abuse, alcoholism as a child or a parent that is mentally ill, then that trauma is occurring while their body's developing, their nervous system is developing, and their brain is develop. So, it's a much more complex situation that we're trying to treat. Does that make sense?
Dr. Hedberg: Yeah. It makes perfect sense. So, for example, I'm just thinking through, you know, patients that I've had. So, for example, let's take a woman who was forced to be a ballerina at the age of five, and she had an ongoing critical mother about her body and also, a highly critical, you know, teacher for years. That would be something that, like you said, that would be kind of an ongoing trauma that EMDR might not be the best thing for. Would that be correct?
Martina: Yes. That's exactly correct because the neural pathways in the brain have been formed as that individual is developing. So, we can imagine those grooves are quite deep. If you contrast to that, another situation where a person has a single-event trauma, for example, someone came in with a car accident, they have not been in a car accident before, but it was quite traumatizing, they're having PTSD symptoms, they're having flashbacks, they don't feel safe driving anymore, their startle response is quite heightened, then EMDR is such a beautiful and effective choice for that. Also, if a person has done, let's say, one tour adaptive duty as a military person, and there are perhaps a couple of incidences that were quite traumatic, EMDR would be an excellent choice. One of the reasons is because we are not requiring the individual to go through that entire week counting or recalling of that trauma blow by blow. Instead, we work with a template, we work with a protocol, and we're pulling out significant aspects of the trauma to treat. And because the brain has otherwise been healthy, we just need to clear some of the inroads, not vast amounts of the network. Does that make sense?
Dr. Hedberg: Yes. Yes. Definitely. Yeah. You know, as someone who is not trained in mental health as a practitioner,
