Making the move to EMDR Intensives
It is well-documented right now that there is a mental health crisis and a therapist shortage in the US. Add in the lack of trauma-informed therapists and gender-affirming therapists and it can be impossible for people to get the help they need. As someone committed to both helping people reduce the effects of trauma on their lives and a therapist committed to providing affirming care to LGBTQA+ I want to help more people. However, as a therapist, I am limited as to how many clients I can effectively work with during a week using the 45-50 minute session model. As an EMDR Consultant who provides consultation to others providing EMDR, I have heard many recent stories about how longer EMDR sessions have been super effective for clients. Weighing this along with the need for more therapy slots I have decided to transition to an EMDR-intensive model. All new clients will be for EMDR Intensives. This will allow me to see and help more people. It also allows me to work with a client on one specific topic or issue and be laser-focused on it. This model also helps those who cannot commit to the time or expense of ongoing weekly therapy. I will do the work via Tele-Health which means clients can get help while in the comfort of their own homes. They can have their pets or weighted blanket with them or on them while doing the EMDR. In my work, I will do an extensive assessment. Each client gets a workbook where they can answer questions, fill out some assessments, and begin to formulate their Intensive Goals. I will then do a 90-minute assessment session. This allows us to get the goals and to do some resourcing. Resourcing is establishing a plan if a client becomes overwhelmed during or after processing. Then we jump into 1-3 2.5-hour sessions. We do these within a week or two depending on schedule and client desires. We end with a 45-minute session where we review progress and I [...]
What I Want Non-LGBTQ+ People to Know
I am writing this post from my deeply personal place and the opinions expressed here are my own. I speak as a white person with many privileges. What do I want Non-LGBTQ+ people to know and to do. Pay Attention to LGBTQ+ issues You don't need to know or understand everything. But have a basic understanding of what rights LGBTQ+ people have and which they don't. Be aware of what rights are being attacked and removed. The Supreme Court has stated (Thomas) that they are going after gay marriage, the privacy of sex, and birth control (Obergfell, Lawrence, and Griswold). You know who has known this for years. LGBTQ+ people. We have been saying it. But many Non-LGBTQ+ people have not been listening. I don't have the time or the energy to be educating people on this. In my mind, if you cared we would already know what was happening. I have plenty of people in my life that do. Understand and Validate Our Feelings My primary current emotion is rage. There can also be depression and sadness and anxiety mixed in. I deserve space for all of that. Let me have my feelings with you listening or validating them. Don't try and make me feel better. You can't except by listening. Most Non-LGBTQ+ people don't know what it is like to have a right given or taken away by the courts (unless you are of color and then you know for sure). I got married in 2004 in San Francisco. It was an amazing experience. Something I never expected in my lifetime. It got overturned by the courts. Not unexpected but still devastating. More devastating was 2008. I got married in the time frame between when CA legalized marriage and Prop 8 overturned it. From 2008 until 2015 when Obergfell was ruled on I was married in CA but not in the eyes of the federal government. Try filing those taxes. It was devastating. For weeks after the election, I looked at everyone [...]
Filled with Rage Today
I had a list of topics to write this month's blog. Then yesterday happened. There is one topic. The attacks on marginalized people. Right now, it is women. This means that it will affect women of color and women without resources the most. We also see attacks on LGB people, massive attacks on transgender people, and ongoing attacks on people of color. If Roe V Wade is overturned we know the next issues on the agenda are birth control, gay marriage, interracial marriage, and medical privacy. There will be no such thing as an established court precedent anymore. Many of us have seen this coming for years. We have been gaslighted and told we were overreacting. Roe V Wade was a settled law. It would never be overturned. The right has been laser-focused on this issue since Roe in 1973 and have finally begun to reach its goal. Many of us have been feeling this rage for a long time, it gets amplified every time we face another loss. I am rageful at everyone who denied this was happening, who chose not to vote because it didn't matter anyway, and to politicians who have failed on their promises. I am less rageful at people who support the overturn because they have been honest about their intentions for years. This should not be a surprise. Why am I as a therapist being so vocal about this issue? Shouldn't I be a blank slate for a client to work through their pain? No. That is not what I as a social worker believe. I believe in social justice. I am part of marginalized communities as are my clients. For me to be silent in the face of this is to be complicit in it. I don't raise the issue in therapy but if/when my client does I am there with them validating their rage and the parts underneath the rage that are filled with sadness and feelings of powerless and everything else that is there. My clients [...]
What Comes After Covid?
I am writing this post knowing full well Covid is not over. However, it does sometimes appear like we are in a bizarro world where not only is it over but we are acting like it never even happened. This attitude minimizes the trauma most people experienced in the last two years. Many kids had losses from missing in-person school. Many people lost loved ones. Others were ill and are living with the fallout from that. Everyone is living with the effects of having a life-threatening illness hangover their families' heads for over a year and the loss of not being able to be connected with loved ones in the usual manner. In a country that already had a pretty severe mental health crisis, it got worse during the last two years. And while it got worse, there was even less access to care. Unless you could pay out of pocket, many people were out of luck finding a therapist with openings. The other day, I found myself laughing, at a social media post I made in April 2020, about an interaction I had with a loved one about not touching a package without disinfecting it first. Thinking now how silly we were back then believing we had to Lysol everything or leave it in the yard for a week before it came into the house. At a time when we were not even consistently wearing masks. Laughter can be a way of coping with the trauma but it also can be a way of distancing from it or ignoring that it happened. For me, it feels like coping and distancing. This trauma has not just lifted because we can be out and about again. We are all still adjusting to the changes in our lives such as where we work or if we had to reduce work hours to caretake for children or parents. Much of life is still online and will continue to be, for better or worse. We may have some [...]
It is always okay to ask for help
One of the things I hear often is that someone is reluctant to come to therapy because things are just not bad enough for that. My question is why does it have to be VERY BAD to ask for help. Why not seek help when things are just hard? Our culture sends this pull-up by the bootstraps mentality. The message is it is "weak" to ask for help. We must solve things on our own. Turning to a professional can be looked at as necessary only for a level of distress that is severe and debilitating. My question to that is why? Why would we put ourselves in the position of suffering for a certain length of time rather than reach out for help? The longer we suffer the harder it is to shift the pain. Seeking therapy when things are just hard is the time to do it. Get support as soon as you can. Utilize your other supports systems also. Tell your trusted people what is going on. I suspect when things are hard many of us crawl into ourselves. We don't want to be vulnerable or look weak or feel failed. Part of that is buying into what I call the social media lives of our friends. Meaning most of us don't post about our hard stuff on social media. We post about the happy moments. It can be easy for people who are struggling to think that they are the only ones having any particular struggle. That is never true. I know when I became more vulnerable in telling my closest people my struggles I found most of them had experienced something like them. By a certain age, most of us have experienced grief, depression, and/or anxiety. When we normalize those experiences it validates everyone who has them. I understand it is an act of bravery to be vulnerable when you are overwhelmed and have big feelings. However, if you find the people that validate you it will allow you to [...]
What will 2022 Bring?
With all of the chaos outside of our homes, it can be hard to visualize what we want to see for ourselves in the New Year. As a person who just moved across the country and still does not have her belongings with her, I feel like there has also been internal chaos for the last 6 months. Self-induced but there nonetheless. One of the many reasons for the move was that I started envisioning the life I wanted and then looked at what needed to happen to get there. Like many of us through the pandemic, my priorities have shifted. I want more time with my family. I want to live a more active lifestyle. I want freedom around my work schedule. I want to be in a connected community. When I looked at what I wanted I realized that my current life was not it. It was not a bad life it just was not what I wanted for myself. Most people won't and shouldn't pick and move across the country but for me, it allows me to have more of the life I want. With the freedom of being able to work from anywhere, I no longer was pinned to living in one place. I encourage everyone to think about what life they want to be living. It is so easy to get caught up in our day-to-day and lose our priorities. What do you want to wake up thinking about? How do you want each day to end? Decide what your top priority is, and then you can evaluate if there are changes you can make to live those priorities. I suspect to survive the last few years, many of us may have checked out. How else do you cope with perpetual political crises and a pandemic that seems like it may never end? You watch a lot of Netflix, or eat a lot of ice cream, or do something else to check out. No judgments, It is a survival [...]