Trauma Doesn't Damage People. Here's What Actually Does.

Most people have heard of EMDR. Very few actually understand what it does — or why it works when years of talk therapy haven't moved the needle.

In this episode, Jim Cunningham, LPC breaks it down in plain language: what trauma actually is (it's not what most people think), why you can't always see your own patterns from inside them, and what EMDR does to a traumatic memory that insight alone cannot do.

You'll come away understanding why the past lives in the present — and what it actually takes to change that.

Topics covered:
• Big-T vs. small-T trauma — and why the small ones often do the most damage
• Why understanding your patterns isn't the same as processing them
• The fish, the cage, the cult — why you can't always see your own water
• The bookshelf analogy — how EMDR actually works on a traumatic memory
• The mountainside/binoculars image — what 'zooming out' looks like in a session
• The difference between a wound and a scar
• What EMDR treats beyond PTSD — anxiety, depression, phobias, chronic pain, performance issues
• Why people avoid starting EMDR — and what happens when they push through

SHOW NOTES / REFERENCES

EMDR International Association (EMDRIA). About EMDR Therapy. emdria.org/about-emdr-therapy/

EMDR International Association (EMDRIA). Experiencing EMDR Therapy — Eight Phases. emdria.org/about-emdr-therapy/experiencing-emdr-therapy/

Shapiro, F. (2018). Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy: Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.

Van der Kolk, B.A., et al. (2007). A randomized clinical trial of EMDR, fluoxetine, and pill placebo in treatment of PTSD. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 68(1), 37–46.

Maxfield, L. (2019). A clinician's guide to the efficacy of EMDR therapy. Journal of EMDR Practice and Research, 13(4), 239–246.

Shapiro, F., & Forrest, M. (2016). EMDR: The breakthrough therapy for overcoming anxiety, stress, and trauma. Basic Books.

The Unscripted Mind — real therapy, real talk, no fluff. Hosted by Jim Cunningham, Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC). Each episode delivers practical tools and honest mental health insight to help you gain self-awareness, make better choices, and feel more in control.

Transcript

The Fish That Can’t See Water

Jim Cunningham 0:00

Does a fish know it's wet? Think about that for a second. Because the fish is completely surrounded by water. It has been its whole life. The water isn't something it really notices. It's not a thing, and yet it's kind of everything, but also invisible. But here's the question that really matters. What if you're the fish? What if the thing that's shaping your every reaction, driving every decision you make? Coloring every relationship you're in isn't something you can see. It's not because you're not smart enough, not because you haven't done the work, but because you're in it. You've always been in it. And from the inside, it doesn't feel like a belief. It doesn't feel like a pattern. It just feels like reality. I've sat across from some of the most self-aware people I've ever met, people who have read the books, they've done the therapy, understand where their anxiety comes from, know the name of every defense mechanism that they use, and they still can't seem to get outta their own way because understanding and processing something are two completely different things. So in today's episode, it's about the difference. It's about a therapy called EMDR, eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. And it reaches places insight cannot. And it's about why the water you've been swimming in your whole life doesn't have to stay invisible. I'm Jim Cunningham. I'm a licensed professional counselor, and this is the unscripted mind. So before we go any further, I kind of needed to talk about trauma. EMDR is a trauma based therapy and I think most people have the wrong definition of trauma, and I think that makes a big difference in this discussion. When people hear trauma, they think car accident, combat, assault, big, undeniable, life altering events. That obviously leave a mark on people. It's what a lot of people call the big T traumas and yes, those do qualify. Absolutely. But trauma is also the look of disappointment I got when I was a kid, maybe from a parent, from a coach, something I was never able really to explain, but something I've been carrying for a very long time because for some reason that day the thing just stuck. You know, the feeling of being left out, overlooked, told you were too much or not enough, and at an age before you had really a framework to dispute it or to understand it. These are called little T traumas. And in my experience these are often the ones that do the most quiet, sustained damage. Not because they're catastrophic, but because they happened early, they happened repeatedly, or they happened before we had cognitive tools to be able to put them in any kind of appropriate context. So they kind of languished there. But here's the part that really gets missed in almost every conversation about trauma, the most damaging and lasting effects of trauma are usually not about the event itself. And that sounds counterintuitive, right? But the real problem is what we came to believe about ourselves because of the event. So it's not just the event, but it's the meaning we make from the event. And then from that we get these beliefs about ourselves. And these are what we would call cognitive distortions. They're irrational thoughts. The boy who got cut from the team doesn't just remember the rejection, He walks away with, well, I'm not good enough, right? I don't belong. And if I try, I fail, So I quit trying, or somebody got yelled at in front of class when they were in third grade. They don't remember just being embarrassed. They walk away with a belief that, well, I'm stupid. I'm not good enough. I'm not safe when I speak up. Maybe I should just stay quiet and small. And the problem with these beliefs is that they become these apps that are running in the background and they don't just stay in childhood. They travel with us. They show up in relationships and careers and the way we talk to ourselves at two o'clock in the morning. Horrible thoughts, Or when something goes sideways, they become the operating system underneath the life we're consciously trying to build, and the reason they're so hard to shake is that they aren't a thinking problem. You can't think your way out of a problem you didn't think yourself into. You can know rationally that your inner critic is all wrong. You can understand the origin of the belief. You can see it clearly, and it can still feel completely real and completely true in the moments that it matters most. Because trauma isn't stored where logic lives. It's stored in the body, in the nervous system, in parts of the brain that don't respond to reason. The past really does live in the present. That's not a metaphor, that's neuroscience. And that's exactly why we need a different kind of tool. So let's go back to our fish for just a second, because here's the thing about the water. You can't see it from the inside. You can't feel it. You can't analyze your way out of it because from where you're standing, there is no water. There's just life. If you're in a cult, one of the most striking things is that you can't see it the distorted thinking, the closed loop of reinforcement, the manipulation, it's completely invisible to people in a cult, not because they're stupid, but because they're actually in it. The system makes perfect sense from inside the system, it's not denial. Exactly. It's that the cage doesn't look like the cage, especially when you're living in it. So I think one of the most important things I can tell you about why EMDR works is that the therapist is the person outside the cage. You need someone like that. Not because they have some magical ability to see truth, but because they aren't living inside your nervous system, your history, your beliefs about yourself, they're standing in a different place and sometimes that allows them to actually see the water. and here's what I see consistently in EMDR work. When the brain finally gets space to process a traumatic memory, clients often arrive at the same place on their own. They see the water. They feel that the cage is open Now, not because I told'em the cage was open, but because the processing gave them enough distance to see it for themselves. That's not talk therapy, making a rational argument. It's the nervous system and it's updating its own files. And like I said, you can't think your way out of a problem you didn't think your way into. So let me explain a little bit what EMDR is, what it stands for. As I said, it stands for eye movement, desensitization and reprocessing. And I know that that sounds like a lot of woo woo. It's not, I don't really like explaining it because it's better understood, I think experientially, but I, I'll give it a shot here. It started in the late 1980s, early 1990s. Dr. Francine Shapiro was the founder, and she noticed a connection between side to side eye movements and the way distressing memories seemed to lose their power. So over the decades, what became a clinical observation became one of the most rigorously studied therapies in our field, recognized as effective by the American Psychiatric Association, the World Health Organization, department of Veterans Affairs, and the EMDR International Association, or EMDRIA. This is not a fringe therapy. It's mainstream, it's evidence-based clinical care. But let me clear up a few misconceptions because I think they're almost as common as the therapy itself EMDR is not hypnosis. You are completely awake. You are aware, and you are in control at every point. You can stop at any moment. And that's built into the protocol. It does not require you to describe your trauma in detail, and I think that is one of the, big advantages for a lot of clients who don't want to have to try and verbalize this horrible, horrible memory. So with proper EMDR, though, there is some preparation work. Careful titration. Make sure that we don't expose too much at any given time. And there are some tools that we have to keep you inside what's called the window of tolerance so you don't get overwhelmed because the last thing we wanna do is make sure we don't re-traumatize anyone. So what we want you to be distressed enough to process the memory, but not so distressed that you become overwhelmed by it. So EMDR uses bilateral stimulation, and that can look like a lot of different things. Which can be side to side eye movements, It can be a dot on a screen in telehealth settings. Alternating tones through headphones butterfly tapping for a lot of people works. It creates the conditions for processing. So the way I like to think about this, there's a lot of theories about why EMDR works as well as it does, but this is how I like to describe it to clients. Think of going on a nice long walk and by a mile and a half or so, you find that you feel a little better. You start to think a little more clearly and you're able to process through ideas, especially if you're not listening to music, you're just walking. And that's bilateral movement tends to make us feel better, feel more calm, self-regulate, but it also, as it turns out, facilitates processing. So with the bilateral stimulation you get in a session, it's, it's kinda like walking without walking. It's the best way I can think of to describe that. So most people associate EMDR primarily with PTSD but it'd be a mistake just to stop there. EMDR has been shown to work on anxiety, depression, phobias, OCD, addictions, chronic pain, physical and emotional abuse, performance anxiety, disturbing dreams, grief. And it's worked on all kinds of people from children to first responders, combat veterans, and people that are just carrying wounds from decades ago. And I always say, you know, if you have a memory that when you think about it now, it's still a 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 outta 10, in terms of upsetting, that's always a good candidate for EMDR again, even if it was just that look of disappointment I got, or being picked on when I was in middle school. So one of the most common things that people bring into the office are questions. Why do I keep ending up in the same kinds of relationships? Why does criticism from one particular person completely derail me when I know intellectually it should not? Why do I have anxiety when I know rationally there is absolutely nothing to be stressed out about? I don't think these are abstract memories. I think they're usually traceable, in connecting that belief that formed at a time when a person had no way to protect themselves from it. I think that's exactly the territory EMDR is built for. What clients often report after EMDR though, is less distress, better sleep and more awareness and control over the reactions and improved relationships. if EMDR is successful, people still have the memory. It just doesn't bother them, and that can happen as quickly as one session, and not because they learn new coping strategies, but because the thing that drives the old patterns finally got resolved at the root. So what does the EMDR actually do? Well, there's a lot of clinical, descriptions of how it works and what it does. This is my version and how I explain it, just to keep it in plain terms that, that I think is maybe a little more digestible. So when you think about traumatic memories, they're different from regular memories. A regular memory is, you know, you got up this morning, you had breakfast, or you had a meeting. You keep what you want, you throw away what you don't, it's fully processed. It, there's no emotion tied to it. it has a past tense now. That happened, but it's not still happening. Traumatic memories work a little bit differently in that it goes in and gets stuck. Essentially, the way it came in, the images, the sounds, the sensations of a traumatic event, the beliefs about yourself in that moment, they don't get organized or contextualized. They just get frozen. when you think of the reprocessing part of EMDR, that's kind of what we're trying to do is give the brain some space to process a memory that was never fully processed. So when a memory is not processed and something gets triggered, a smell, a situation that resembles the original event even slightly. That memory doesn't come back as a recollection. It doesn't come back as a memory. It comes back as an experience and the past doesn't feel like the past, it feels like right now. So here's how I describe what I've seen EMDR do. So I'd like you to think about a traumatic memory as a bookshelf. Except instead of books neatly arranged, on the shelf, they're all in a pile on the floor. Nothing is sorted. It's not organized, it hasn't been processed, So it's just a heap of experiences and feelings and beliefs, and they're all kind of tangled up together. It doesn't make a lot of sense, and I think that explains why when people get triggered, rationally it shouldn't be there, and yet it is. So every time I get triggered, I get the whole thing. I get the whole pile of books all at once, and overwhelming. What EMDR is trying to do is to give your brain some time and space to go through that pile, not to relive it, not to analyze it. Just look at it. Just notice what's there, sit with it without judgment, and what tends to happen, and I've watched this more times than I can count. Is that the brain starts doing what it's always been designed to do. It starts sorting. Sorting through the books, sorting through the details, putting things in context. We are meaning making machines, and the brain is great at doing that if you give it the space to do that. So it starts finding things in that pile that weren't visible when everything was tangled up together. Things like, oh, I, I forgot that somebody was right beside me during that memory, I forgot that I wasn't the one in charge during that moment. I forgot that what happened wasn't about my worth as a person. These aren't manufactured insights. They're things the person already knew somewhere, but they just couldn't access because the pile of books was in the way. And so as people start processing through this and looking at the pile, the next thing that starts to happen is they start to zoom out, It's about the details because one of the first questions you ask when you do EMDR is when you think about that traumatic moment and you play it through as a movie in your mind and you pause it at the worst part, what are you looking at? And most people remember a face, an image, something as they process through this, the perspective starts to change again. They start to zoom out, the view starts to pull back. And so

Avoidance Before EMDR And Pushing Through

Finding An EMDR Clinician And Closing

14:57

an analogy I use is, if you imagine being on a mountain and you look across the valley with some binoculars and you see a goat over there, he fills the whole frame. But as you start to zoom back out, the goat just kind of disappears and kind of blends into the mountain side. You don't really see it. You see it in context all of a sudden. And I think that's what happens with EMDR. That memory doesn't disappear. But it stops filling the whole frame. It finds its place in the larger context of a bigger file. So it all kind of makes sense and this is the key piece, what I think EMDR ultimately does is that it allows people to finish the story because the story didn't end there. I was a victim at that point. Today I am a survivor, and that's how the story ends. It's like watching the first Rocky movie and just being sad the rest of your life that he didn't win. You gotta watch the other movies. Maybe you stop after, the fourth sequel. But we wanna finish the movie. Most traumatic memories when people first describe them, feel very present tense. Not that it happened 15 years ago, but that it's happening now and the brain's still processing that as an open loop, it's a threat that has not been resolved. So that part of me is still hypervigilant for threats or similar threats, that might still exist, So, EMDR gives the brain the conditions to close that loop, to put an ending to the story. And then when that happens, something shifts at a level that insight alone can't reach. See clients don't just understand intellectually that they're safe now. They actually feel it. They believe it So it's the same thing I would say to somebody, Hey, I have this anxiety, and I'm like, yeah, but that's not real. And they go, yeah, I know, but I feel it. With EMDR, a lot of times they come to the very same conclusion except they actually believe it. A hundred percent. So I've worked with a lot of first responders, military, who many of'em came in barely able to describe what they had witnessed, and some were even unable to do that. But after processing, sometimes a single session, they'd arrive at something like, man, I'm really glad we were there. We made a big difference that day. It's the same coin. I'm just looking at the other side of it and they can see the positives that happened there aren't just stuck on that original image of how terrible it was. It's in context, and this is not because I told'em anything. It's not because they forced themselves to think positively. It's because their brain finally had the space to see the whole picture. See, the wound doesn't disappear. But it becomes something they survived, not something they're still surviving. And I think that's the difference between a wound and a scar. A scar, you can see that something has happened, A wound, you know when it gets poked, you still feel it. I will say one more thing about kind of what happens in a, in the room doing EMDR. A lot of people we will meet and plan on doing that, say the next session. And what I find, is that people will become avoidant, right? There's a part of them that does not want to look in the corner, open Pandora's box, and deal with the thing that's there. They know what it is. So I see a lot of people no show, they cancel. Something just comes up ironically. And I understand that completely. Like I said, there's a part of me who has organized my life around not opening that particular box. Going back and dealing with that painful thing. And being asked to open it, even in a safe environment, still feels like too much. So what I tell'em is this, you know, the intensity, when you start thinking about something, truly thinking about it, the intensity is probably gonna go up a little bit. We have tools to keep you from being too overwhelmed. And what I find is the vast majority of people who push through that initial surge come out on the other side saying something that they didn't expect to say when they walked in. Something like, I can think about that now and it doesn't own me. I still don't like it, but it's in context and it doesn't drive things. The other thing they will say is. Where did I get that idea? That is crazy that I even thought I had responsibility for my parents getting a divorce or that accident. So it's a whole different way of thinking about it, and again, they honestly believe it. So as we kinda wrap up, let me go back to the fish. Yeah, the one that doesn't know he is wet. what I know from years of doing this is people who get free, the ones who actually change the patterns they came in wanting to change are the ones who eventually get enough distance from the water to see it, because in order to heal from some kind of trauma, you have to get a little distance from it to be able to see it in perspective. When that happens, it doesn't feel like therapy anymore. It feels like finally being able to breathe again. It's a relief. Now, I will say this, if we're successful, and this is one of the caveats to EMDR, if we're successful and this one event has defined you your whole life and we fix that, you might feel a little free and that might feel a little weird, kinda like the indoor cat getting out. It's just a big world out there. And it feels a little different. So it might take some time to adjust to that, but it's a good adjustment and that's what I want for everybody who walks through my door more room, more choices, more of themselves available when they want it. if any of this has resonated with any of you, if you've heard something that I described today, I'd encourage you to find an EMDR trained clinician. And maybe have a conversation. Uh, EMDRIA maintains a directory at EMDRIA.org. I put that on the screen. Where you can search by specialty, by location. You don't have to figure it out before you make a call either. You just have to make the call. And again, I think this work is better understood experientially. But it's also good to be able to find somebody that you feel like you can trust and might have good chemistry with. And if you don't, that's okay. There's a lot of other therapists out there that, might be a good fit. So that's what we do. That's what EMDR looks like. If you found this episode helpful. Share it with somebody who might need to hear it. There's a lot of people carrying a lot of stuff around, and maybe don't even know that these kind of resources are available or that this kind of treatment is possible and how effective it actually is. Feel free to subscribe, follow us, leave a review. It helps more people find the information that might help them. And finally, remember, you know, life doesn't come with a script. So embrace the unexpected. Cherish the unplanned, stay curious, and most of all, have an amazing day. We'll see you next time on the unscripted Mind.