A Comprehensive EMDR Therapy Session
Kelly O’Horo, EMDR Therapy Facilitator as therapist, and Jaime Castillo, Consultant in Training as the client, demonstrate a comprehensive EMDR Therapy session. All 8 phases of EMDR Therapy, with the exception of reevaluation, are demonstrated. An abbreviated history regarding the subject targeted specifically is modeled. The Standard Protocol is utilized with EMDR 2.0 strategies, which are a modification to standard bilateral stimulation (BLS).
Kelly O'Horo:
All right.
Kelly O'Horo:
How's everything? On par?
Jaime Castillo:
We're good.
Kelly O'Horo:
So, miss Jaime, thank you so much for being brave to do this piece of work with me so that we can share with other EMDR therapists the appropriate protocols and how to set something up from - presenting information and taking that presenting information and putting it into the standard protocol and doing a target in a session. That's what we're trying to show we can do today. With an explicit memory that was rooted more in fear and less in shame, we're not working on attachment stuff.
Kelly O'Horo:
We're going to model some 2.0 strategies as well. So, deviating a little bit from standard ELS, which is what we all learn in basic training and we're going to do some ways to modify that a little bit to decrease distress in processing, and hopefully accelerate processing a bit. So, thank you for doing this with us.
Jaime Castillo:
Yeah, I'm excited.
Kelly O'Horo:
And I think that we can share this with people and hopefully they learn a lot from it, or at least have a sample that we can see. Also, for our clients who are nervous about what is EMDR going to be like, and what can we expect when we choose to do EMDR, to be able to have a little bit of a snapshot about what it might look like if we are clients. So, hopefully this will serve a few purposes.
Jaime Castillo:
Yes.
Kelly O'Horo:
I'm excited to have you here and hopefully we find it a beneficial experience for us.
Kelly O'Horo:
So, tell me a little bit about what you'd like to work on today.
Jaime Castillo:
Yes. So, I experienced a couple months ago a chemical pregnancy. My husband and I have been trying to conceive for several years and started the IVF process about a year ago. We had our first IVF transfer and it resulted in a positive pregnancy test, but my levels were so low that the pregnancy didn't stick. That brought up a lot of sadness and grief.
Kelly O'Horo:
Right.
Jaime Castillo:
And some kinds of feelings of being broken or defective in some way.
Kelly O'Horo:
Yeah. And is this your first pregnancy? Have you had other children? Have you ever been pregnant before? Can you tell me a little bit about your history on this topic?
Jaime Castillo:
Yeah, so I have been pregnant once before this. That was a result of an IUI procedure that we did. I miscarried that pregnancy at about seven or eight weeks.
Kelly O'Horo:
Okay.
Jaime Castillo:
Before that, I had never experienced a pregnancy.
Kelly O'Horo:
Okay.
Jaime Castillo:
And that was about a year and a couple of months ago.
Kelly O'Horo:
And have you done any EMDR processing on that other miscarriage?
Jaime Castillo:
I did.
Kelly O'Horo:
Okay.
Jaime Castillo:
Yeah, I did.
Kelly O'Horo:
Okay. When you had the recent chemical pregnancy, did you notice any feeling, flashbacks at all from the previous miscarriage? Can you recall that?
Jaime Castillo:
Yeah. I wouldn't call them flashbacks. I did have a sense of this general sort of it's taken this long. This combined with that must mean there's something wrong with my body, really. So it does feel kind of meshed together.
Kelly O'Horo:
You spoke to me before about this being longer than three months ago, this chemical pregnancy, which indicates we would want to use a standard protocol. If it's sooner or more recent than three months, we would want to use a more recent incident protocol, like R-TEP or something like that. Since this event was more than three months ago, we'll use the standard protocol for this.
Kelly O'Horo:
I wanted to just make sure you feel okay doing this with me. It's sensitive material and I know that it can... you have choices and don't have to do this and I have no expectations about any of that. I just really want to make sure that you're checking in with yourself in this moment and that it feels all right to do a little bit of work with me on this.
Jaime Castillo:
It does. It feels good.
Kelly O'Horo:
Okay. So I'm going to go ahead and I know you have good resources, I know you have strong supports, I know you have a consistent therapist, so I feel comfortable just inviting you to do this piece of work with me and not doing a really elaborate history taking. I think that's unnecessary for today.
Kelly O'Horo:
A little bit of history around the getting pregnant, I think, is probably important, just in case something comes up that I can use as an interweave that might help.
Jaime Castillo:
Okay. Great.
Kelly O'Horo: