Break Through Limiting Beliefs with EMDR Therapy

Identifying limiting beliefs is one of the most important elements within the EMDR therapy process. We take time to really understand, what are the negative cognitions, or internalized negative limiting beliefs that are holding you back, and causing you discomfort within your present life. These limiting beliefs may be keeping you from feeling grounded and centered, from taking action in your life, and from allowing yourself to feel and express your worthiness. Once we know what these core wounds are, we can work to reprocess, heal, and release them.

Some of the questions I ask my clients to help identify the limiting belief are:

• Consider what you say you want, such as a goal, a plan, a desire that you seem sabotage unconsciously, or that feels like it won’t happen no matter how hard you try. Now write down all of the reasons you can’t have it. When you reflect on why you believe you can’t have it, what do these reasons mean about you? 

• After reading through why you can’t have what you want, how does this make you feel about yourself?

This is your limiting belief, your core wound, in EMDR we call it a negative cognition. Our brains store the memories and experiences that have created or reinforced those beliefs in the memory network associated with this negative cognition. If your negative cognition is one of the following: I am not good enough, I am unworthy, I have to be perfect to be loved, or I have to please others to be loved, or I am unsafe, or I will fail, or I can’t handle it and so on… then we look for the target memories that have created or reinforced those beliefs. A target memory is a memory that still has a charge, or it still activates your nervous system when you bring it into your awareness in a way that feels uncomfortable. 

These negative cognitions, or limiting beliefs, when triggered, loop through these memories within that specific memory network, and can cause you to feel fear, ungrounded, or disconnected from your body. Feeling fearful, ungrounded, and disconnection from yourself will hold you back from taking action towards what you want. When this happens subconsciously, we wonder, “what’s wrong with me.” Because this is happening on a subconscious level, and this just further triggers the limiting belief or negative cognition. When this occurs, we then usually feel hopeless, frustrated, and this only further reinforces those limiting beliefs. This is where we often get stuck in harmful or non-useful coping strategies, such as emotional eating or any other escape or numbing behaviors. This can also cause us to become emotionally dysregulated and to generally feel overwhelmed. 

EMDR therapy helps to release limiting beliefs through the desensitization and reprocessing phase of the therapy. This is where bilateral stimulation is used while being present with the memories or experiences, and processed within the safe container of your therapy experience. The goal is to fully reprocess the memories, which frees or unravels the negative internalized belief from the memory. The memory now is relinquished to your long-term memory. At this point we create a positive cognition that supports integrating the desired feeling state. This process creates a new inner resource and it’s practiced, once the positive cognition feels true and accessible, using cognitive rehearsal and future templates.

Once all of the target memories have been reprocessed, and they are now relinquished to your long-term memory, and you have the creation of positive cognitions for all of the target memories, the way you desire to feel about yourself is now possible. For example, if your belief is, I am not good enough, a positive cognition could be, I am ok as I am, if your negative cognitions is I am unworthy, your positive cognition may be, I am always worthy. Once you’ve completed the work of EMDR, there is no longer room for the negative cognitions to overwhelm you.

EMDR therapy also includes the components of somatic release through the body scan phase of treatment with each memory. We get curious about any stuck emotions within the physical body. This process creates self-awareness, and through using curiosity and compassion to invite the emotion to process and release somatically, we do this with bilateral stimulation until your body feels clear and grounded when you bring up the target memory.

Throughout the work of EMDR, we get really curious about why an emotion is stuck within your body. We practice emotional awareness and exploration and understand the message of the emotion—why is this emotion here and what does it want us to know—we can then view the emotion as information versus judging the emotion. With this information it makes it more accessible and possible to determine how to respond to the emotion. This allows the processing of your past trauma to move forward with more emotional awareness and acceptance.

When you provide compassion for any emotion you are experiencing, comfortable or uncomfortable, you change how you show up for that emotion, as well as how you show up for yourself. When you respond to the emotion with curiosity and ask what it needs, you can offer it just that with an attitude of compassion and care, allowing you to make space for the discomfort. This process allows the opportunity to invite the emotion itself to flow away from your body, once it’s processed, with intention.

EMDR therapy is a very useful way to help identify, breakthrough, and heal limiting beliefs. Please know that there are many therapeutic modalities out there that can support healing, growth, and that support you to move closer towards a more integrated, whole self that operates from a place of empowering beliefs. No matter how you find the courage and inner strength to address what is holding you back so that you can move forward with hope, growth, and inner-strength, know that you deserve to heal.

10 Reasons You're in a Funk + What to Do About It

When you feel stuck in a rut, a bad mood, or negative mindset, it can be challenging to get out of that funk when you are deeply entrenched in it. Sometimes you might just wake up in a funk that you can’t seem to shake. You might wake up feeling anxious, generally more pessimistic, stressed, or grumpy, for seemingly no reason. Moods can strike at any time, and sometimes these moods seem way out of alignment with what your current circumstances might actually be presenting you with. Trying to “think positive”, “just snap out of it”, or “just let it go” is not helpful advice, because in those moments it may feel like, sure, I would if I could, and wouldn’t that be nice if that could be the case— but when you feel stuck, most likely, you can’t just let it go.

Emotions are powerful, important, and necessary. Emotions provide information about how you are experiencing the present moment through your physical body. When you stuff, repress, or suppress your emotions, they only fester, they do not go away. When you bury emotions, you bury them alive.

The good news is that you actually have more ability to manage your emotions than you might think. However, it takes practice to develop emotional awareness, and a willingness to be present with feeling states that are uncomfortable. When you are struggling with shaking the feeling of being in a funk, it’s important to explore why it’s even there in the first place.

Emotional congruency occurs when you are experiencing an emotion that is providing direct information about your current experience. The emotion is directly congruent with the cause. This is so important as it creates an opportunity in the moment to make a choice about how to respond to the emotion. When you can evaluate the emotion, and begin to understand the message of the emotion, you can then make a sound choice about how to feel, process, and cope, or just be with the emotion. This allows an opportunity to move forward from the feeling state in a way that feels empowering. This is very advanced emotional awareness and intelligence and comes with intentional practice over time. However, now is always the best time to practice.

When we are experiencing an emotion that feels incongruent, like when we wake up in a funk, anxious, stressed, grumpy (or any other uncomfortable internal experience that does not seem to relate to our current experience), it may be time to do some emotional exploration, excavation, and awareness building. Emotional incongruence causes mood states that can take over and feel uncomfortable, and these funks can occur for a number of reasons. Below I’ll explain ten common reasons you might be in a funk, and further down I offer some suggestions to help yourself understand the funk, and hopefully begin tp help yourself out of the funk.

-1. There is an emotion that you have suppressed or repressed that wants to be expressed, felt, understood, and processed.

-2. You are living outside of the present moment. If you evaluate how you are feeling and there is no triggering or causal experience conjuring this emotion, then you might ask yourself, is this feeling connected to something from my past or a worry about my future? If so, there is actually a lot that can be done to help move forward from this feeling state.

-3. You are struggling with a more chronic mental health challenge and it may be of great benefit to talk with a therapist or other medical professional about what you are experiencing. There are so many tools that can support mental health including a variety of therapeutic techniques, lifestyle practices, medication, and supplements. Please don’t suffer alone, there is help available.

-4. You had a rough night of sleep and feel unrested, not fully ready to take on your day and tiredness is impacting your mood.

-5. You had a bad dream that is difficult to shake off, and it’s left a residue of fear, frustration, or other uncomfortable emotion.

-6. You were triggered the previous day and haven’t yet re-stabilized into a feeling of being connected to your body, you still feel unsafe/uncomfortable.

-7. You have created a habit of mindlessly going through the motions of your day, and you feel uncomfortable with and disconnected from your life.

-8. There is something in your current life circumstance that is draining your energy, and you are not confronting it, you are not changing something that you know needs to change.

-9. Your life feels out of alignment with your goals, desires, dreams, and personal needs.

-10. You carry the negative internalized belief that you function best when you are in a state of negativity, self-punishing, and pessimism (these are subconscious, limiting beliefs).

There may be many more reasons you might be in a funk, or experiencing a mood that seems to be incongruent with your present experiences. However, the good news is that when you can evaluate the why, you create more self-awareness. With greater self-awareness, you can make a choice about how to respond to the why, and determine how you can feel empowered rather than powerless to your moods.

Here are some ways to help support yourself and possibly un-funk yourself for each of the above 10 possible causes:

-1. If you are suppressing or repressing emotions, it is most helpful to start creating some type of practice to develop emotional awareness. When you have a greater understanding of why you might be avoiding, suppressing and/or repressing certain emotions, you can begin to do some emotional excavation. This is where therapy can be tremendously useful, EMDR therapy in particular. However, there is a lot you can do on your own as well. Having a feelings wheel handy, and spending time linking emotions that you most seem to avoid feeling with either past experiences or triggers, you can begin to unearth these emotions and learn to process them.

-2. If you are living outside of the present moment, you are letting feelings about the past or future impact your present experience. Practicing mindfulness consistently allows more awareness of how to live in the here and the now, not the past or future. If you think about your life in terms of a set of journals, consider that all of your past journals are filled with feelings, experiences, and memories. If you are living in the past and re-experiencing those feelings in the present, it’s like reading those old journals over and over again without wanting to do so. If you are worrying about the future, it’s as if you are trying to fill up your future journals before you’ve had the lived experience, and often you are filling those journals with fearful, worst-case scenario material. If you imagine the journal that you have for this moment, it is simple, you are writing out your experience based on what is true right now. With each moment, you write only about NOW. If you have material from your past that just keeps showing up, you may benefit from doing some form of therapy to process those memories with a professional. You also may benefit from developing a mindfulness and/or meditation practice to learn how to live more consistently in the here and the now. If you are struggling with constant worries about the future, there are wonderful therapeutic treatments for anxiety, reach out and find the support you need.

-3. If you are struggling with a more chronic mental health challenge, and you feel there is no specific trigger for your current mood state, I encourage you to consider some form of mental health treatment as help is available. You deserve to find a way towards healing. As I previously said, there are so many tools that can support mental health, including a variety of therapeutic techniques, lifestyle practices, medication, and supplements. Please don’t suffer alone, there is help available.

-4. If you had a rough night of sleep, can you practice self-compassion? Remind yourself that if you did not sleep well, it will have an impact on your mood, energy, focus, and your ability to fully engage in the tasks that need to get done. Be gentle with your rough mood, and try to get some rest. Creating a sleep hygiene practice that you stick with consistently for at least a month can help shift your sleep schedule into one that is more restorative and restful.

-5. If you had a bad, uncomfortable, or distressing dream, and now you just feel icky from it, it can be helpful to journal about your dream. One technique that is very helpful is to write out your dream but re-write a new ending. This will help to release the lingering uncomfortable emotions and therefore help to un-funk your mood.

-6. If you were triggered on a previous day and not yet feeling stabilized or grounded in your body, it can be helpful to do somatic exercises. Somatic exercises help to release distress from your physical body. Some examples are, deep breathing, visualizing the discomfort as a color that you can clear out with your breath, shaking out your body all at once while lying down or even just through one limb at a time. Tensing and releasing your body from head to toe—or toes to head—can be helpful to exaggerate the discomfort, but then to release it with a deep exhale to practice letting the discomfort go. You can use your five senses to ground into your present place and time to feel more connected to your body. This may look like naming something you can see, hear, smell, taste, and touch and let your senses create a connection to your body in the present moment. Yoga, exercising, stretching, tai-chi, and other movement can all help release somatic discomfort lingering from a trigger. Journaling, talking about your trigger, and addressing it in therapy can also be very helpful.

-7. If you notice that you are going about your daily life mindlessly and living for the perceived “fun times” such as the weekend, vacation, or some other experience that you have to wait for, you are going through the motions rather than truly living your life. If you are feeling as though you are lacking meaning and purpose in your daily life, you might benefit from working with a coach, volunteering, taking up a new hobby, and journaling about what brings you a sense of meaning, and pursue how to bring that into your life more consistently. You also can try to find meaning and purpose in the small, simple joys of life, stretch out your day a little and find pockets where you have space to breathe, to stop and smell the flowers. Find what enchants you, and pursue that daily. Learn mindfulness techniques to live in the present moment more consistently.

-8. If you just feel like something is off in your current day to day and yet you are doing nothing to address it, it is helpful to get honest with yourself. This might be a relationship that is draining your energy and impacting your mood. It could be someone at your job that you are not happy with, or any other circumstance that is troubling you, and you are actively avoiding it, as you are really attempting to avoid the perceived discomfort you will feel through confrontation. Typically, these types of moods fester and can become more difficult mental health struggles if left unaddressed. Many people struggle with confrontation and/or fear having to change something they aren’t sure how to change. If something feels off in your life, and you are not considering how to deal with it, I encourage you to talk with someone you trust, a therapist, coach, mentor or otherwise, to help you create a plan for how to move forward with more intention so that you can address and cope with what is robbing you of joy on a daily basis.

-9. If something feels out of alignment with your goals, dreams, and personal needs, it is helpful to address this as well. For example, it could be something such as you feel you have pursued a particular career, only to find that you don’t really want to do that for the rest of your life, or that you aren’t satisfied with your peer group, where you live or otherwise. This is a scenario that is usually more connected to a lack of fulfillment versus a deep unhappiness with the direct circumstances you are in. Working with a therapist, coach or mentor can help you sort out how to proceed, how to live more in alignment with what brings you a sense of personal fulfillment. Life is too short to not live in alignment with your dreams. Sometimes you have to make a radical change to create a life you love.

-10. If you struggle with negative self-talk, you may feel that you are motivated by the negative inner language that gets you up and going each day. However, this negative self-talk also causes you to feel pretty bad about yourself most of the time. If you are running your life based on negative internalized beliefs that can be changed! If you feel you need to beat yourself up to get things done such as get out of bed, exercise, eat nourishing foods, even simple daily tasks like brushing your teeth, there is a better way. Having self-compassion, speaking to yourself as you would a friend, and giving yourself the opportunity to motivate yourself through believing in yourself will actually help you go much farther in the long run.

If you carry negative internalized beliefs, such as I am not good enough, I am unworthy, I am a failure, I have to be perfect to be loved, I am unsafe… (the list goes on and on)… please know that you are not alone and that there is help to rewrite these old negative cognitions and beliefs into their opposites. EMDR is a powerful therapeutic modality that is evidence-based, and proven to help release negative beliefs and create positive ones through the course of treatment. Cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness techniques, self-compassion practices, compassionate inquiry, and traditional talk therapy can all help as well.

I am going to be back to talk more about common emotional incongruences soon, but in the meantime, I hope you will take a deeper look at the mood states you are experiencing and just get curious, ask yourself, “is this about what I am currently experiencing, or can I look deeper within and learn more about my emotions, my present experience, and is there anything I can do in the here and the now to feel empowered to un-funk myself?” If so, I hope you choose to do it, so that you can feel more hopeful, grounded, and aligned. I hope you choose to take hold of the power within yourself to live and feel in alignment with how you want to live and feel in this very moment.

What Exactly Is an EMDR Intensive?

Do you ever feel as though you are reliving the same patterns, or having the same recurring negative thoughts or experiences? Many of us are operating out of subconscious negative beliefs that are creating distressing patterns of thoughts, behaviors, and limiting our ability to feel worthy and deserving of the life we desire.

EMDR is a powerful therapeutic modality that helps to release these beliefs from our subconscious and unconscious minds, and allows us to live in a less uncomfortable, anxious, and fearful state of being. Through EMDR therapy we can release these limiting beliefs so that we can feel more empowered, confident, and safe in our daily lives.

One way to confront these limiting beliefs and negative cognitions is to do intensive EMDR therapy. This is where session times are extended so we can do a deep dive into releasing these beliefs about ourselves. Since I began offering EMDR intensives, I have had a lot of inquiries about why choose an EMDR intensive model over more traditional, weekly, 50 minute sessions. So I thought I’d write a little about what an EMDR intensive even is, and how to know if it might be right for you. (If you are not familiar with EMDR as a therapeutic modality, you can read a previous blog I wrote on the topic HERE or learn more about it from the EMDRIA homepage HERE.) 

An EMDR intensive is indeed, just as the name implies, intense. They are longer EMDR sessions (usually 2.5-hours, 4-hours, or even longer) where you focus for an extended period of time on your desired area of inner work. EMDR is considered a maximum exposure therapy, where you are reprocessing a specific trauma, memory, feeling state, or experience in a way that you are fully present with any lingering and unprocessed distress of that particular experience.

The discomfort that remains is based on a subjective level of distress you still experience when thinking about the memory. This is based on somatic, mental, and emotional discomfort. Through the bilateral stimulation of the brain, (and through the lens of the adaptive information processing model) repeated exposure and reprocessing of the memory allows the brain and body to release the physical, mental and emotional pain associated with the memory, so the distress level inevitably comes down. The goal is to have the distress become a 0 (subjectively on a 0-10 scale) where it feels that no distress remains present. The memory is then successfully reprocessed and released into your long term memory, rather than looping and causing triggering responses to your present life circumstances.

Once the distress is a 0, a positive cognition is created and reinforced through bilateral stimulation as well, and once it feels absolutely true (this is gauged subjectively on a number scale as well) as an inner felt sense, it is practiced with future templates. Imagining yourself accessing this new positive cognition in potentially distressing or triggering circumstances within the future helps to create new patterns and possibilities. Through this work you can now begin to respond and react within those future challenging moments in a more grounded and steady manner.

All that I’ve described so far is a very rough and quick overview, there are certainly many more elements incorporated into EMDR therapy, however this intended as just a basic gist. Our goal is to rewrite negative cognitions, or beliefs about the self, that have been created or reinforced through these distressing memories, experiences, and traumas. These experiences created beliefs about the self that perpetuated patterns of behaviors, thoughts, and feelings that can create negative internal experiences as well as difficulty feeling truly confident, hopeful, grounded, and worthy just as you are.

Through the inner work, you can release the trauma still stored mentally, physically, and emotionally, and therefore release the negative beliefs that have arisen out of those experiences. This creates a new way of existing within your life that is freeing and empowering.

With a traditional 50 minute session there is some preparation, potentially reprocessing and desensitization, verbal processing, grounding and re-stabilization in a relatively short time. With an EMDR intensive you are in that potentially reprocessing and desensitization phase for a much more extended period of time. I have found that a 2.5-hour EMDR intensive is similar to approximately 4 sessions when using the traditional, basic protocol. A 4-hour intensive is similar to approximately 6-7 sessions when using the traditional, basic protocol. There are always potentially other elements incorporated into sessions depending on each person’s individual needs along the way.

If you are someone who has done some personal work already and feels that EMDR could be helpful to resolve some traumatic memories, this could feel really nice, to get in a lot of therapy in a shorter, more intensive period of time. These intensives are useful if you find that you have some patterns that you seem to repeat in relationships, with money, with food, with negative self-talk, and with specific anxieties. Initially, we identify the primary negative cognition, and then use the protocol to work through these memories or experiences that seem to repeat themselves in a way that makes sense for you. 

For example, if you are someone who finds that you seek out relationships with people who are emotionally unavailable over and over, there may be a limiting believe or negative cognition that is stuck in your subconscious that can be worked through in a short series of EMDR intensives. We first identify the negative belief about yourself, and then work with the memories that have created or reinforced that belief. Or, if you are someone who seems to fall into the same patterns with food, or money and spending that you have repeatedly tried to change, this too could be reinforced subconsciously by a negative internalized belief that can be worked through with EMDR intensives. I have found intensives to be helpful for those struggling with perfectionism, creative blocks, resistance to or fear of change, specific anxieties (such as flying, driving over bridges…) and much more.

If you are interested in an EMDR intensive, it is best to reach out to a few certified EMDR therapists who offer them, who are also licensed in your state. Many therapists are willing to offer a 15-minute consultation where you can describe your current needs/goals and they will be able to determine if you may be a good candidate for intensive EMDR therapy. I am licensed in New York and Virginia, and therefore only can offer them to those currently living in either of those states. For people with chronic or complex post traumatic stress disorder who are just beginning treatment, those with a low distress tolerance, and for those with certain chronic conditions, I have found that traditional weekly sessions tend to work best, however, everything is truly determined on a case-by-case basis. 

I hope I’ve piqued your interest and maybe you will think about considering EMDR intensives as part of your personal growth, mental wellness, and emotional health process. Here’s to confronting our negative internalized beliefs head-on and creating a more empowered, confident self and living a life fully immersed in a feeling of worthiness. You deserve to feel your best and live your best life.