Zero Disturbance

The new year is often a time for goal-setting and resolution-making, but so many people struggle with following through over the next 12 months. That’s not true for those who are using EMDR in their treatment. Why? Because the foundation of EMDR is about desensitizing disturbance of what happened in the past, what’s happening in the present, and creating a bridge into the future to feel calmer and...

When there’s a loss like the death of a loved one, there’s a cultural acknowledgement of that loss that gives us the time and space to grieve and to heal. But we experience grief in so many other situations, outside of death. Grief is something that helps us to process changes , like the death of an idea of the life we thought we’d have. We can never fully imagine how change and grief hits us beca...

We all know someone who has anger “problems,” but I believe that there’s a different conversation we need to have about anger. Anger is a feeling, not a problem, and it’s not bad unless expressed in a way that’s disproportionate to what’s happening. But not expressing enough anger is an even bigger problem than too much anger. Let me convince you why. Anger is a biologically-programmed survival re...

  We all have a relationship with something that’s helping us to feel a certain way, full and in control, empowered and attached. But we’ve been given so many different curricula around what we’re supposed to look and feel like , we’re using behaviors like food restriction or binging and purging in an effort to feel a certain way. Disordered eating isn’t a term I love, but it’s what’s used in...

When someone seeks treatment for addiction, the truth is that we’re not actually treating the addiction; we’re treating the brain’s associations with the behavior that feels addictive. We’re delinking the positive feelings someone has with things like alcohol, compulsive shopping, smoking, gambling, and binge eating,, and looking for alternative ways for the person to have those same positive feel...

The holiday season can be incredibly stressful and triggering for many reasons, from trying to defy our natural inclination to hibernate in the winter, to how our brains link to challenging events from all the holidays that came before. But you don’t have to dread the holidays or family get-togethers, if you can understand where your feelings come from and how to work through them. We store so man...

The true definition (and outcomes) of depression goes far beyond what we typically think of: someone pulling away from loved ones, extreme sadness, maybe even feeling suicidal. But the truth is that depression is often a symptom of trauma, and can manifest in individuals in so many different ways. It may be a collapse after extreme anxiety that we may not even notice because we’ve normalized livin...

Thanks to Gabor Maté, we know that trauma isn’t just something that happens; it’s something that happens inside of you. So when something happens to us (or doesn’t happen, like in an omission of care) and we feel anxiety, that anxiety is a result of trauma. Anxiety can come from so many things, like overextending ourselves and trying to do too much, divorce, job loss, and even things that some mig...

Parenting is a challenge for everyone, no matter what someone’s Instagram feed claims. And if we’re looking outside the “traditional” definition of trauma, every parent has experienced trauma at some point. So many parents want to raise their children in a different way than they themselves were raised: more extracurricular options, no spanking, being more present. And where we end up is stressed...

EMDR works. It’s well-known that it works for those who want to heal trauma, but you don’t have to be a trauma survivor to benefit from EMDR. In fact, I believe that it works for nearly every human on the planet. This week, I’m starting a new series that I think will convince you that EMDR is for children, athletes, executives, parents, empty nesters, those going through a divorce, and more. And o...

Want to learn more about offering intensives in your practice? My Intensive Kit can help! Find out more here. I've been offering intensive therapy programs for my EMDR clients for 5 years now and I've learned a lot about about how to design successful intensive models. And I've made it my mission to share my experience so that other clinicians may benefit in their own private practices. And, now,...

Have you struggled with finding the right therapy for your needs? Maybe you’ve had a few appointments with several different therapists but never found someone you felt was on the same page as you for your treatment. The client-therapist relationship is so important and it’s not something that anyone should enter lightly. For clients, it might be one of the most important relationships they build....

EMDR is a fantastic brain-based modality for trauma therapy, but there are so many other uses that we don’t talk about enough because of the focus on trauma. What gets lost the most is that EMDR supports anyone who wants to rewrite the curriculum they learned as a result of experiences from their past. When we talk about EMDR being good for trauma victims, we essentially close the door of possibil...

Identifying and pulling on positive resources is essential to processing trauma, but it’s also something you can do when you want to change your mindset around specific feelings and events. Even better, it’s something you can do on your own with a little bit of work and reflection. Resourcing is a biologically natural process your body already has to create adaptive material. It’s what your body d...

Doing mindset work isn’t always the answer. We’re inundated with messages from coaches and therapists on Instagram telling us that if we just worked on our mindset, we could get past so many of our limiting beliefs and roadblocks. And while maybe mindset works for some, for many therapy clients it’s actually harmful. When therapy clients don’t yet have the ability to protect themselves from negati...

Most of us know how to behave appropriately in society, which is helpful in navigating the world. We follow the laws of our community, pay our bills, wait in the grocery lines, treat animals with kindness, etc. But sometimes, society (or our culture) teaches us a set of rules that don’t align with what is best for us. If you’re a woman, you’ve likely felt this. We’ve been given this curriculum aro...

Too often I hear therapists share that a client “isn’t doing the work.” They’re not progressing or working through their trauma because in session they talk about what’s going on in their life today, rather than talking about what happened in the past. I believe that when a client hears from their therapist that they’re not “doing the work,” it’s a red flag. Therapists need to put on their clinica...

The way we’ve been talking about triggers is an incomplete conversation and it’s time to change that. The more information you have about what triggers you will help inside trauma therapy and help create adaptive material to help with trauma. Here’s where we need to rethink what we’ve learned about triggers: A trigger is a stimulus that elicits a reaction. Any stimulus; any reaction. But our cultu...

Curiosity should always be the default for therapists working with clients, and clients should know this and look for it in session. This is especially true when we’re talking about phobias. There’s often a lot of shame around phobias because they’re characterized by a disproportionate response to a feeling or fear. At the surface level, it might not seem logical. But if a therapist responds in th...

Adaptations are all things we created in response to something we learned in life, often during a traumatic experience. Whether that experience happened in childhood or as adults, we learned how to cope and feel safe. And those adaptations perform a positive function, whether they’re healthy or not. The important thing to remember is that adaptations can and should change over time, especially if...

While every therapist has their own methods and systems for working with clients, one of the most harmful things they can say to a client is, “You’re not ready for trauma therapy.”  Especially when there’s no explanation or plan for getting the client “ready.” Every client is ready for trauma therapy because, if you’re following along with this series, we’re rebranding the practice itself. Th...

Talking about details of trauma doesn’t feel good for the therapy client, which is why it’s so important that we create a reframe not only around therapy in general, but especially in brain-based modalities like Brainspotting and EMDR in particular. Not convinced that we should stop talking about “trauma therapy”? This week, I’m sharing three truths around why in an effort to convince you of anoth...

Would you rather watch the episode ? Head over to our YouTube channel  and be sure to subscribe. After a hiatus from the podcast, I’m back. I’m listening to my heart and what I truly believe others need so that therapy can positively impact as many people as possible. So I’m here, talking to those who are curious about how to make their therapeutic experience smarter and more customized for t...

In our field, we hear and use the word attachment so often. And, in the community of trauma-informed clinicians, I'd always felt like we had a deep understanding of what this word means. But when I sat down with Dr. Mara Tesler-Stein for the second time on The Zero Disturbance Podcast, we got to unpack the lack of understanding that lies within this concept for our clients... and possibly even for...

Supporting families, even under the best circumstances,  can be challenging . So what happens when we need to support families when the world is not set up for their kids to succeed... or even survive? I had the opportunity to sit down with author Wendy Jones to discuss what it means to show up not only as a therapist for our young, trans clients but also wh...