Breaking Free from Trauma: How EMDR Transforms Lives - Heyam & Hanaan Haddad

About the Guests:

Heyam Haddad and Hanaan Haddad are accomplished clinical psychologists with an impressive track record of over 18 years in the field. Both guests have a robust background in trauma therapy, having worked extensively with different forms of trauma ranging from refugee and front-line emergency services trauma to child sexual abuse and domestic violence. With thriving private practices in Sydney, they specialize in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, which has revolutionized their approach to trauma and mental health treatment.

Key Takeaways:

• Understanding Trauma: Trauma involves potentially threatening events that often alter one's perception of self and safety, significantly affecting mental health.
• EMDR Therapy: EMDR is a revolutionary therapy using bilateral stimulation to desensitize traumatic memories and encourages adaptive reprocessing.
• Types of Trauma: Trauma is not always due to what happens but also due to omission, like emotional neglect, which affects mental wellbeing.
• Healing the Brain: The brain, with its innate healing abilities, can recover from trauma when the right therapy is applied, as demonstrated by EMDR.
• Real-Life Impact: EMDR has proven effective in diverse situations and disorders, offering clients a reclaiming of control and peace in their lives.

Notable Quotes:

1. "The reality is, is that not everything's traumatizing… it's about our interpretation of the event, our relationship to the event." - Heyam Haddad
2. "The word trauma means wound. And we know that wounds heal with the right care." - Hanaan Haddad
3. "EMDR therapy… it's profound." - Hanaan Haddad
4. "There’s no need to judge it, there’s no need to minimize it. In fact… there is a need and benefit in reaching out for the support." - Heyam Haddad
5. "It's almost as though God's given our bodies and our brains a way to say, hey, you can heal." - Hanaan Haddad

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Transcript

0:00:00 - (Heyam Haddad): So the urge to have a drink, the urge to reach for the vape or the cigarettes or one more punch on that pokey machine, you often get some pretty successful results. With getting to the core of what that's about and empowering the client to feel I have choice around this, it's not overpowering me. I can take charge of what I choose to do here and build that awareness around what is happening for them as they reach for that addictive tool.

0:00:30 - (Hanaan Haddad): Welcome to Finding Satisfaction Sanctuary, our shared conversations into how we think and feel and how we find peace and comfort in daily life. We get together with experts to chat about all things mental health, getting insights and understanding on the struggles of life.

0:00:49 - (Eddie Reaiche): And welcome back to another episode of Finding Sanctuary. I'm Eddie Reich, your host, and today we're diving into a topic that's always intrigued me. Have you ever wondered if your brain has the hidden ability to heal itself from trauma not by talking endlessly, but through a particular movement and specific technique? For countless people around the world, trauma isn't simply a memory, it's an ongoing physical and emotional experience they live every day.

0:01:20 - (Eddie Reaiche): But there's hope on the horizon. With a revolutionary therapy called EMDR that's transforming our understanding of trauma recovery. We're exploring what EMDR therapy is, how it works and why it might be the breakthrough you've been waiting for to achieve deep emotional healing. Joining us today on our podcast are two incredible guests, Haman and Heyam Haddad. They're clinical psychologists with thriving practices in Sydney and they've successfully used emdr, among other therapeutic methods, to help their clients heal and move forward in life.

0:02:01 - (Heyam Haddad): So my name's Hiem. Yes, clinical psychologist, and Hanan and I both have been practising over the last 18 years. I have a special interest in trauma, have been working with that in the last. In those last years, from refugee trauma, torture and trauma survivors, child sexual abuse, all the way through to frontline emergency services, incident response and currently in private practice.

0:02:26 - (Hanaan Haddad): I'm a registered psychologist and I've been working heavily with the forensic population, both in Sydney and I've worked in the UK as a childhood forensic psychologist and trauma's where it's at. EMDR has revolutionised absolutely everything that I do with clients and it's profound.

0:02:44 - (Eddie Reaiche): Could you give our audience an idea of what trauma really is?

0:02:48 - (Heyam Haddad): Absolutely. We often use the word trauma very flippantly these days and one of the kind of had a joke with Hanan. Often we might open up the fridge and go, there's no food in there. And we feel traumatized that we haven't had something nice to eat. And the reality is, is that not everything's traumatising. When we talk about trauma, we talk about potentially traumatic events. Not everything's traumatic, but it has the potential to be traumatic. And that depends on a few number of things. And one of those things is the incident often has to have some level of being potentially a threat to self or to others, a risk to safety or harm. And it's often coupled with a strong emotional response.

0:03:28 - (Heyam Haddad): And so I'll give an example. Often what happens is that, you know, we can. So I often say, Hannah and I could be driving down the road, we may come across a, say car accident. We both hop out to render first aid. We do a job, we do a really good job. We get back in the car and off we go. And we reflect. And Hanan saying, we did a good job, we did what we could. Hopefully they'll be okay, God willing. But I might go, oh no, my first aid certificate is completely out of date. I could have harmed someone, I could have killed someone, I could have done more damage here.

0:03:57 - (Heyam Haddad): And so I walk away having a very different experience. Whereas Hanem, I walk away going, but we did what we could and we helped. And this is the really other important element of trauma which makes it quite unique is that it's not just those elements. It's about our interpretation of the event, our relationship to the event, which starts then to change our beliefs about ourselves. And that's how it becomes stored in the body, which is very important. When you come back and talk about emdr, that is what trauma is. So it is an event, could be potentially traumatic and it can influence our relationship to that event.

0:04:27 - (Heyam Haddad): There's many different types of traumas. There's your single once off events like an armed robbery or a car accident. But then you can also have repeated prolonged trauma like childhood sexual abuse or childhood neglect, domestic family violence, where it's prolonged and repeated over at times many, many years. And so that, that gets stored in the body as well. And then there's also natural or man made trauma. So natural disasters, war, you know, all those types of atrocities as well are still traumatic. But there's many other types of traumas yet again which I can rattle off.

0:05:01 - (Heyam Haddad): I think something we, we often experience as well in our field can be vicarious trauma as well, which I think.

0:05:07 - (Eddie Reaiche): You'Re gonna have to explain the word vicarious.

0:05:09 - (Hanaan Haddad): Yeah.

0:05:09 - (Heyam Haddad): So vicarious trauma for any of those impacted by trauma. Vicarious trauma is experiencing trauma through someone else's experience. So vicariously experiencing that trauma, say as ourselves hearing the trauma, we can be over time impacted by hearing those events. You often see this quite a lot with doctors, emergency services workers, nurses. You might see it with case managers who work with complex trauma.

0:05:35 - (Heyam Haddad): You might see it in hospital staff and so forth.

0:05:39 - (Eddie Reaiche): You make me think a lot about Bissell van der Kolt's book the Body Keeps the Score. I think every therapist knows that book.

0:05:47 - (Hanaan Haddad): Yes.

0:05:48 - (Eddie Reaiche): And everything you said just reflects back to that book as well. It's a great way of looking at it. What about you, Hanan?

0:05:54 - (Hanaan Haddad): So I think it would be just staying on trauma, what Hian's talking about with the types of trauma. I think it's really good for our listeners to understand that trauma is sometimes things that happen to us. So commission traumas and then we have whole range of traumas where we refer to them as omission traumas. So things that didn't happen. This can get a little bit gray. But omission traumas are things like emotional neglect, the absence of a safe person, a safe attachment. And when we think about, well, how's that traumatic? We think about a child's brain safety is the attachment to the mother and the reason that's an omission trauma. If mum is removed, you're emitting mum at a biological brain level. That's an emission trauma. So we look at things, things that happen and then things that didn't happen. So emotional neglect, absence of caregivers, invalidating emotional environments.

0:06:50 - (Eddie Reaiche): So would you say that a developing brain is more susceptible to trauma?

0:06:54 - (Hanaan Haddad): Yes, yeah, absolutely. So we know with the earlier experiences of maltreatment for a child has longer lasting impacts on the brain and the body.

0:07:03 - (Heyam Haddad): You did ask a question though and you know, you often get the question why? I get the question. Is there a formula for how trauma impacts us? I think that's a very important part. The impact on the brain developing early in life is an important, important part in how one is impacted by trauma later in life. But also there is no other formula around it. The main thing we do know is that there's sort of a dose response relationship between the amount of trauma we have and how much it impacts us.

0:07:31 - (Eddie Reaiche): We talk about the brain a lot and most people look at the brain as this grey blob that sits in our head.

0:07:37 - (Heyam Haddad): It's a fancy blob.

0:07:38 - (Eddie Reaiche): Yeah, it's a very, very fancy blob. And the funny thing about it is it's hard for people to comprehend what happens in that because it's not like going to a hospital because you break your arm because you can see it on an X ray.

0:07:51 - (Hanaan Haddad): That's right.

0:07:51 - (Eddie Reaiche): And then when someone says they're traumatized, they just stare off into space. And you can't X ray that. You can't point at that and say there's something wrong. Are there particular areas in the brain that we look at for trauma?

0:08:04 - (Heyam Haddad): Absolutely. It's funny you say that because there is still parts of the brain that light up differently depending on what trauma response you're having. So we know very well that when you have a trauma response, often what goes offline is your prefrontal cortex. This bit in here which does, which is the smart, we call it the smart brain is what it's called because it does all those higher order things like problem solving, risk mitigation. It does empathy, language, all those things that we need to get around day to day in a sophisticated way that all comes from that prefrontal cortex or that smart brain.

0:08:38 - (Heyam Haddad): When we have a traumatic experience, what often happens is that part goes offline and we move down to the sort of lower, very internal parts of the. Which sort of sits behind our eyes. And that is what we call the limbic brain. When we all have this, we all need this because it helps us step back off the curb when there's a fast car driving past. But often what happens is when someone's been really traumatized, when they've been exposed to many traumas, what you find is that brain starts. That part of the brain starts to get activated much easier, almost in preparation, just in case trauma happens.

0:09:11 - (Heyam Haddad): And you find other parts of the brain start to change, both in shape, in the responsiveness. So things like the amygdala. Amygdala is a, is a little bit more enlarged. It starts to activate much more frequently than say a non traumatized brain. And you did also say there's the sort of this staring off to space, which is what we call the freeze response. Right. You've got fight, flight, freeze and freezes even further sort of down the bottom base of the brain. And that part gets sort of activated when we are in that freeze state. It's much like a lizard playing dead until that danger goes away.

0:09:46 - (Heyam Haddad): And so we have that capacity as well. When we exceed the amount that can cope with, we go into that freeze state. So you will see those in an MRI scan, you will see those light up in different ways depending on what's happening for the client. Not like an X ray, but quite similar.

0:10:00 - (Hanaan Haddad): It might just be that you get the client to recall a traumatic event and you see those areas light up, particularly the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex goes offline. So at an imaging level, there's been studies to show pre and post treatment that change when people recall memory.

0:10:17 - (Eddie Reaiche): I think I've seen freeze with kids more so than adults. It may. I may exhibit a lot of freeze response when I don't notice that my wife has changed her hair color because I know that she's done something, but I'm not sure what it is. I'm really scared not to notice. But I think a lot of young kids actually, when they're being yelled at or scolded, they just freeze. So do you think that would be something that you're saying?

0:10:45 - (Heyam Haddad): Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Kids hate yelling. I mean, as soon as we start raising our voices, that's when they go, this is. I can't compute, even just from a basic communication perspective. And someone raises their voice, our brain goes, this is more dangerous and unsafe or even disrespectful that I will shut down. And I'm no longer listening to what you're saying because the delivery of it is so not respectful or it's not what I am willing to listen to.

0:11:11 - (Heyam Haddad): And for children, they do if they. If it's not a, you know, I'm frozen state. It's also an amygdala hijack as well, which means that fight or flight, flight response gets so triggered.

0:11:22 - (Hanaan Haddad): And the amygdala is the part of the brain that we're not aware, but that part of the brain, for babies and for children, they're picking up on those micro changes in a parent or someone's expression that if there is threat, the amygdala knows that there doesn't need to be words yet. And so when we look at trauma, we're looking at in utero, what was mum like? Was she unwell? What was the stress like for mum?

0:11:50 - (Eddie Reaiche): So you're saying that while someone's pregnant, they can transfer that across? I think that's an important.

0:11:56 - (Hanaan Haddad): It's a stress response. So what mum is carrying has implications for a child in utero? Absolutely.

0:12:04 - (Eddie Reaiche): We don't want all the mums to blame themselves for everything that goes wrong.

0:12:08 - (Hanaan Haddad): Absolutely.

0:12:08 - (Eddie Reaiche): Just want to put that in there. But I think it's important to understand how mum's health and wellbeing is really important. So it's up to the dads to step up and make sure the mums are comfortable through their pregnancy.

0:12:22 - (Heyam Haddad): Yeah, absolutely. We only ever want good enough Parenting though, right? Like we're all going to get it wrong in some way or another.

0:12:27 - (Hanaan Haddad): Absolutely.

0:12:29 - (Eddie Reaiche): Always try and be good enough parent, just good enough.

0:12:31 - (Hanaan Haddad): Not the perfect.

0:12:32 - (Heyam Haddad): No such thing.

0:12:34 - (Hanaan Haddad): Eddie, you said something about the brain going offline and I think that's really important to talk about that experience. When the body is hijacked and the brain's doing what it can to survive, the brain will switch off so that there is an ability to still be present. It's a safety mechanism. And I think we're gonna have a look at some of those groupings of.

0:12:56 - (Heyam Haddad): Coping just in relation to post traumatic stress. There's four areas we tend to look at, which kind of help to define or what you should be looking for, I guess for our listeners to know whether I am impacted by trauma or not, regardless of if I had a mission or commission trauma. So a lot of clients will come in and say, but I should be okay. I had a pretty good childhood. My parents worked as hard as they could to give us what we can. I hear that a lot in our col as well. Which, you know, a lot of immigrant parents came here working so hard to make a life.

0:13:26 - (Heyam Haddad): But for those clients that come in, like I should be okay. My parents did what they can. And the reality is, is that we can still be impacted by what we didn't receive. What we didn't receive through validation, through love, care and affection, through time, through spontaneity and play. If parents are traumatized, well, they're not spontaneous and playing often, are they? And as well, you know, even limits setting in boundaries. If we didn't have that growing up, that's an omission of what we needed. But and Hanel's referring to is for those listeners that want to know, am I impacted by trauma? The areas you want to look for is often we have strong responses, strong activation of our nervous system, our fight or flight system. So it can be hyper vigilant, always on edge, easily startled. We might be having nightmares and other experiences.

0:14:11 - (Heyam Haddad): We also have a lot of avoidance. So whether it's substance use, withdrawal, isolation, not wanting to go certain places that remind us of those events. But the very important part is when you start to see changed beliefs. I am not worthy, I'm not safe, I can't trust others. The world's a dangerous place. When we start to see change in meaning and interpretation, that's really your trauma starting to settle in. And that's when you start to see you shape your life very differently according to now what those new beliefs are and what Evidence has supported those beliefs.

0:14:43 - (Heyam Haddad): And then we start to see the whole world through that lens. And suddenly your world becomes smaller and smaller as an individual impacted by trauma.

0:14:51 - (Eddie Reaiche): I think you mentioned the word hijack, the hijack of the amygdala. I think we know that anxiety can hijack the amygdala, and sometimes we can have similar symptoms that you would with trauma, but it could be just anxiety because it tends to do that. But I think a lot of time what we're trying to work on now is how do we get out of this? Trauma's a bad thing and it's not a good experience. But I think there's one more thing I want to touch on before we get onto emdr, the difference between traumatic memory and a normal memory.

0:15:23 - (Heyam Haddad): So when you say traumatic memory, you've got to go back to an unprocessed memory that needs time, it needs space to be aired and explored and reappraised to hold a different meaning at the end. So when we talk about traumatic memory, traumatic memory is something that's happened, and the interpretation around it is that it's a negative interpretation about others or the world that we live in. And when that happens, the belief that we've sort of taken from that memory is unhelpful. It's maladaptive. And we start to see the rest of the world in that lens, and we start to generalize.

0:15:57 - (Heyam Haddad): Traumatic generalization starts to happen where we are now starting to see, well, for example, every person in a black hoodie is a terrible person because that's who robbed me at the ATM only several months ago. And so now I'm easily triggered by anyone that is wearing a black hoodie. And now I don't leave or I don't go to any atm. I do all my banking online now. I never hold cash anymore, just in case I am in that place. And there's suddenly, I'm not going to any shop. So that's what I mean about an unprocessed traumatic memory.

0:16:28 - (Heyam Haddad): Other memories we can hold in mind. So you said also about how it's stored. Often what we see is a lot of our memories are stored in the hippocampus, amongst other parts of the brain. But when a traumatic memory is stored in the brain, what happens every time it comes up? You get the story, the linear story, the logical story, and alongside of that comes the emotions. And often what you see is that become too overwhelming, that it then flips the brain and we go down into that limbic brain or the free.

0:16:55 - (Heyam Haddad): And so that memory Then goes back and stored into the hippocampus in a very unprocessed way, creating a lot of anxiety, a lot of stress in the body, and a lot of nervous system elevation. EMDR has the capacity to bring that up to the surface in a way that's accessible. It's safe enough to be able to work with it.

0:17:12 - (Eddie Reaiche): I think it's important for people to understand that there is a difference between the two and why trauma becomes something that you can't really control, whereas a memory you can, it's not as emotional. And if we look at people, like if you look at people who've had sexual abuse or people who've come back from war, they hear a backfire of a car and they just drop down to the floor. It's not something they can control absolutely.

0:17:37 - (Hanaan Haddad): I like to use the metaphor with clients to help them understand without. Some of the neuroscience talk is thinking about a filing cabinet. And each file has a date, it's ordered, it's filed away in an orderly fashion. Whether it's by date or name, that's your normal memory. So what did you have for breakfast this morning? You can recall that without the limbic brain being turned on. Whereas with a traumatic memory, you walk into a room, everything else is ordered.

0:18:07 - (Hanaan Haddad): But you might have five files laying around, maybe the papers are everywhere. And now we've got these memories that we need to figure out how to file away. But because the limbic system is on, it's hard to get to those files and make sense of them because they're too traumatic. And so the result of, of other psychotherapists, but also EMDR is to be able to hold those files safely in a contained manner, update them, time them, make sense of them, and file them away.

0:18:35 - (Hanaan Haddad): And that's the end result of trauma work, amongst many others. But when we're working with memory storage.

0:18:43 - (Eddie Reaiche): Okay, so we've heard all the things trauma does to us and how it's not very healthy. And now there's a way out. And the way out is called emdr?

0:18:53 - (Heyam Haddad): Correct.

0:18:53 - (Eddie Reaiche): So do you want to explain first of all what the acronym means?

0:18:57 - (Hanaan Haddad): Sure. It's a long acronym. So EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. I'll break it down really simply. We'll go with the eye movements. Eye movements are used in order to access the brain's ability to self heal. And it's almost as though God's given our bodies and our brains a way to say, hey, you can heal. You've got the Skills there you've got the brain and the body to be able to heal from trauma and from, from these negative life events that have happened.

0:19:28 - (Hanaan Haddad): The end goal, or one of the goals, is to activate both hemispheres of the brain so you're turning on the right side and the left side of the brain. By doing that, we are allowing memories to be desensitized. The reprocessing part of EMDR is around finding a more adaptive understanding, belief and meaning from a trauma. Trying to bring this all together. Clients will initially start with, I'm in the memory, it feels unsafe, it's happening all again.

0:20:01 - (Hanaan Haddad): And as we start to process a memory using the eye movements, clients might move from that state and desensitize to eventually reprocessing to a belief that that happened to me, I'm safe now, I'm here in the room. EMDR is an eight phase therapy and it has really revolutionised trauma treatment. It was the bilateral stimulation that was able to reduce the vividness and the distress of that memory. And it's taken off from single incident traumas like a robbery. And now we know that EMDR is effective for not only trauma and complex trauma, but mood disorders, anxiety disorders, addictions, emotion regulation, and particularly when there's a trauma based space for some of those presentations.

0:20:51 - (Eddie Reaiche): When you were explaining EMDR to me, you actually said it's eye movement and then you said tappers on both hands or there was another one. You were talking about the hearing, the tones, one to the other. And then you mentioned a term called bilateral stimulation. Can you tell me what that means?

0:21:11 - (Heyam Haddad): So when you talk about bilateral stimulation and we're talking about the two, two different sides of the brain, the left brain, the right brain. So the left side is the linear, the logical side of the brain, but on the other side you've got the emotion brain. And so in that part of the brain, we have the less, less logical, less linear and more emotional part of the brain. Often when a traumatic memory is stored in the brain, we access the memory itself.

0:21:39 - (Heyam Haddad): The right brain, the emotion brain, gets too worked up and then it sends that memory offline and it sends it back down. And so when we're talking about bilateral stimulation, we're talking about eye movements where we're moving our eyes left to right looks. Honestly, when I work with clients, we have a bit of a joke. I say, I know it sounds crazy, you're going to have to trust me till we get there, because it does feel that way. But it's eye movements left to right. So we're engaging both parts of the brain. Or it can be, as you said, the tappers. I call them the buzzers, where one buzzer goes off at a time. One left, right, left, right.

0:22:11 - (Eddie Reaiche): In your hands.

0:22:12 - (Heyam Haddad): In your hands. Y. So the client will hold them.

0:22:14 - (Eddie Reaiche): Can't see this.

0:22:15 - (Heyam Haddad): Yes, of course. Yes, yes. Good reminder. So the tappers are buzzers that sit in one in your left hand, one in your right hand, and those buzzers will go off one at a time. So left one will go off, right one will go off, and vice versa. Continuation. The other option is also audio, where you have these sounds in your ears, so it might be headphones. And the sound goes from one ear to the other ear, then back again as you go through the processing. And that's what we call bilateral stimulation, activating both sides of the brain one side at a time.

0:22:51 - (Eddie Reaiche): Do they all work together or can you have one rather than the other?

0:22:55 - (Hanaan Haddad): The most common is eye movements, but post Covid, there's a whole range of sources available. So eye movements on the computer. Some clients have a preference. So some clients prefer either knee tapping or the buzzers. It's collaborative, so we would arrange that with the CL after.

0:23:14 - (Heyam Haddad): A lot of my clients also prefer the. What we call the butterfly hug, where you interlock your thumbs. They go up against your chest and sort of up near your collarbones and you're tapping left, right, left, right. I'm probably one of those people as well. If, when I have done emdr, I would prefer to do the butterfly hug rather than the eye movements because I find them a little bit distracting. But you work with your client to figure out what they prefer.

0:23:36 - (Eddie Reaiche): And I like that because it's kind of like it's eye movement, but some people may find it difficult to track. And so you're giving them another option.

0:23:45 - (Heyam Haddad): Absolutely.

0:23:47 - (Eddie Reaiche): And it's just as effective.

0:23:48 - (Hanaan Haddad): The point is, both sides of the brain are being activated when you're engaging them.

0:23:53 - (Eddie Reaiche): Fantastic. It sounds so simple, doesn't does?

0:23:57 - (Heyam Haddad): Like we often say, there's a lot going on in the background. There's a lot of preparation work we do, and it's extremely effective. Like I have to say, for 18 years I've worked in the trauma space. I've done everything from your prolonged exposure therapies, your trauma focused CBT's and other modalities. And I have to say that EMDR gives quite quick relief from the symptoms and a quicker return to functioning, often with a more contained level of distress for the client.

0:24:26 - (Heyam Haddad): And the whole time the client's in control. They can tap out if they want to. We do encourage them to keep working through the set, and we have ways to support them through that. But the client maintains control, which is fundamentally so important for a trauma impacted person. Control and safety is key to recovery, and EMDR offers that to.

0:24:45 - (Hanaan Haddad): And because the EMDR is now it's out in the media and we're hearing more about it, I think there's this idea that I'll come in for one or two sessions, do some eye movements, and I'll be fixed or healed or I won't have these symptoms anymore. But I think what's really important when a client comes in is to do a very thorough history, but also to have a clear discussion around what to expect for clients.

0:25:10 - (Hanaan Haddad): So for some clients, it's really important to give them the resources to then be able to tolerate an EMDR processing session. And that's where EMDR is. Great. So it helps the client develop adaptive skills and instill those resources that you're building in therapy, instilling those using EMDR as an adaptive resource that they can then use to be able to process and tolerate the trauma work.

0:25:38 - (Eddie Reaiche): I think that's an important point because some people may listen to this and think they'll come in, knock on your door and say, hi, I'm here for EMDR. Can we do it? Because I've got a 6:30 appointment I need to get to.

0:25:48 - (Hanaan Haddad): Yeah, that's right.

0:25:49 - (Eddie Reaiche): Just fix my trauma. Thank you. So the reality is it's really part of a process, isn't it? Yeah. And I think it's important for people to know that. So you guys have been doing EMDR for some time. So how successful has it been in your practice?

0:26:07 - (Heyam Haddad): Excitingly successful.

0:26:08 - (Hanaan Haddad): It's amazing.

0:26:09 - (Heyam Haddad): I have to say. I wish I'd done it a little bit earlier, but it's been an exceptional addition to the suite of therapies that we do. And it's nice to give clients options. And I can tell you it's been very successful with a range of different presentations. I know it works with most of the anxiety disorders, including trauma in particular, but it goes beyond trauma. So you can use it for things like panic attacks.

0:26:34 - (Heyam Haddad): You can use it for various age groups as well, use it for addictions and urges. You can use it for quite a number of different presentations. And the success, I would say, has been pretty remarkable. You know, I was a skeptic for a long time beforehand, and I would, you know, often say, what is this crazy stuff we're talking about here? How can it Be that, you know, you move your, you move your eyes left to right and follow, follow your fingers. It almost felt to me as hypnosis. But having learned about it and now having been practiced it for a while now, it's, it's really not. And there's just so much for the client. And if we've ever had stuck points with clients, we've been able to get through and troubleshoot them. And often it would be, as Hernan said, a opportunity to go back and build the resources before we go into the trauma processing part.

0:27:25 - (Eddie Reaiche): What's a stuck point?

0:27:27 - (Heyam Haddad): Stuck point. So it could be that the client has difficulty sitting with emotions after one of the main ones. I see the client really is quite avoidant, finds discomfort very uncomfortable and unable to sit with that. That would be enough of a reason to go back and do some emotion coaching. Teaching them how to sit with emotions, giving them emotion tolerance skills. That's an important one. But we also need to ensure that we're keeping them within a space that they can handle and cope.

0:27:55 - (Heyam Haddad): And there's different tools for that. Like with emdr, there's various versions of EMDR that can help keep them within a space that's tolerable. Yeah, these are the kind of stuck points you, you would often come across.

0:28:06 - (Eddie Reaiche): I think it's important to know that there's a bit of hand holding in this. It's just not throwing you into this. It's always working with the client. And it's not a one size fit all, is it? That's why it's important people understand that there is something called the window of tolerance. So we work with the client, not the therapy, but with the client as well.

0:28:25 - (Heyam Haddad): Absolutely. Always tailored to the client first.

0:28:28 - (Hanaan Haddad): I think EMDR, there's been EMDR, EMDR, EMDR 2.0. And so the rang of options available to clients means that we can process a memory that's so distressing, I don't even have to know what you're processing. You might just label it as incident A. That happened to me when I was 10. And we can process that. And we know that there's been a cognitive shift, the emotional distress around that has shifted and we can close book.

0:28:56 - (Hanaan Haddad): And so I think that's a power of emdr. Whereas there are other, like prolonged exposure, for example, where clients have to sit through and sit with their distress and recall, recall the details of the memory until the distress reduces and they're desensitized. So emdr, there's no one size fits all. It's up to the trained clinician to provide what's necessary. Yeah.

0:29:20 - (Eddie Reaiche): Now, I wonder if you can give us some real life experiences from your clients.

0:29:26 - (Heyam Haddad): Absolutely.

0:29:26 - (Hanaan Haddad): I mean, we've got a few. We love these data. Okay. I have a client who she is 17, under the NDIS for trauma. She also has a diagnosis of ADHD and she has been living in a little bubble in her home. The extent of the trauma that she's had, she's had it all. She's had loss, she's had sexual abuse, she's held at gunpoint overseas, she's had her partner suicide. I mean, you name it, there's been so much trauma for this person.

0:29:59 - (Hanaan Haddad): And there was one event that happened when she was younger and it happened very early in the morning. And every day since she was 20, she wakes up in a fright because of that memory. We processed it without recalling the memory. For the first time in her life, she's not woken up with this nightmare and she can sleep through to the morning. And that was a few sessions of processing that memory. I want to highlight that there is potential for working with the memory in that way and desensitizing without actually knowing all of the details that happened.

0:30:33 - (Hanaan Haddad): And whilst this person has a lot of trauma to process, the impact of just sleep, being able to sleep through the night is profound. I had another client who had lost his mother and he was presenting with traumatic grief. And there are a lot of events leading up to her death that resulted in avoidance and hypervigilance and avoidance of any memory of Mum, which meant grieving, thinking about Mum, going to the funeral was not gonna be possible.

0:31:03 - (Hanaan Haddad): About four sessions of processing those traumatic events, he's been able to go home and say, I miss Mum. This is what I loved about her. To have those wholesome conversations with his kids around. This is who Mum was. This is what I miss about her. So we worked with those memories, the traumatic grief, so that he could then grieve his mother. I'll keep going, but your turn.

0:31:26 - (Eddie Reaiche): Oh, they're great.

0:31:28 - (Heyam Haddad): It's not just trauma, but it's also, as I said, you can work with addictions, you can work with panic attacks, you can work with various presenting concerns. And I mean, just to add to, yes, there's definitely many trauma successes through EMDR we can talk about, but also with panic. I know that there's what you're recently, just very recently actually working with a young lady who had worked with some time ago, and we'd done a lot of processing and she'd done really, really well. And then Suddenly, what had happened, she'd come back to therapy and made contact and said, out of nowhere, I'm just panic attacks. And really, she'd never had one before, was starting to withdraw and not leave the home, and said, okay, given I know your history, given I know all the work we've done, let's get straight into it. So second session we were in and got straight into some processing around the panic and just the sensation of the panic and what that was about.

0:32:17 - (Heyam Haddad): And we processed that. So you don't even have to go into the actual event or where it started. We're just going into the feeling of being out of control, unable to breathe, thinking, I'm going to die. Which is what panic involves within that first session. And I'm not. Look, they're not all success stories in the sense of the first session. You're going to be on cloud nine. But it's enough to take the edge off, to then be able to feel more functional in the therapy and more able to access the work that needs to be done.

0:32:44 - (Heyam Haddad): With addictions as well, we often work with the urge. So the urge to have a drink, the urge to reach for the vape or the cigarettes or one more punt on that pokey machine, and you often get some pretty successful results. With getting to the core of what that's about and empowering the client to feel have ch around this, it's not overpowering me. I can take charge of what I choose to do here and build that awareness around what is happening for them as they reach for that addictive tool.

0:33:13 - (Hanaan Haddad): I think it's important here, when we're reprocessing a memory we've desensitised from the trauma or from the urge or that target. The other part that EMDR allows the client to get to organically is to access adaptive networks that have been weakened or aren't as apparent or aren't as strong as those maladaptive networks. So once a memory's been desensitized from the reprocessing allows them to access networks or access experiences or access perspectives.

0:33:48 - (Hanaan Haddad): But the end result is, wow, I did have the skills. I was just seeing it as though it was. I failed. Or I can see like it's just a blip in the ocean, like, it wasn't so bad. I can get through this. It's so powerful. To see a client rely on their own cognitive restructuring organically through this process is profound. They've got the skills, their brain has those networks. For the most part, people have those adaptive networks that they Just need access to. We're just helping them put their hand in the bucket and see what else is in there.

0:34:21 - (Eddie Reaiche): It's interesting, isn't it? It's like we've got our own first aid kit in our brain. Didn't even realize it was there.

0:34:26 - (Heyam Haddad): Yeah.

0:34:27 - (Eddie Reaiche): Which is really good. I think in wrapping up this session, which has been amazing, I've really enjoyed this. Would you have some final words you may want to talk to our listeners about?

0:34:38 - (Heyam Haddad): I definitely do. I just want to say to whoever is listening, if any of this has stood out to you, whether it's a trauma presentation or your symptoms that you might be experiencing, there's no need to judge it, there's no need to minimize it. In fact, I say, you know, if you feel that there is something here that resonates with you, then reach out. There is a need and a benefit in reaching out for the support and the support is available.

0:35:01 - (Heyam Haddad): The therapies sound a little bit quirky sometimes, but they do work. And I've seen countless clients walk away feeling better after the work that they've done. And you can access what we call post traumatic growth, which is the growth that happens after working through those traumas, working through the challenges and adversity. You do become new, evolved version of yourself. And, you know, who doesn't deserve that?

0:35:28 - (Hanaan Haddad): I think the important thing to take away from today is also on top of what Heamis has shared is that the word trauma means wound. And we know that wounds heal with the right care. And so if we can get past the shame and we can connect with people, we can talk about some of these wounds and get perspective. It might be a way for. Then you can say, I do need help. Maybe this is the time to change my rigid views on my past or how I react in situations. And we think that we do things without thinking.

0:36:02 - (Hanaan Haddad): Sometimes our responses, they might seem automatic, but there's more autonomy and choice. And through therapy, we can help with that to get you to access what you already have to do that and then yam.

0:36:15 - (Eddie Reaiche): It's been an absolute pleasure. Pleasure. And if you'd like to learn more or get in touch with Hanan or Hiem, their contact information is included in the show notes. Thank you for sharing your valuable time with us and your stories and the information and your knowledge.

0:36:31 - (Heyam Haddad): Thank you. Thanks for having us and thanks for sharing it.0:00:00 - (Heyam Haddad): So the urge to have a drink, the urge to reach for the vape or the cigarettes or one more punch on that pokey machine, you often get some pretty successful results. With getting to the core of what that's about and empowering the client to feel I have choice around this, it's not overpowering me. I can take charge of what I choose to do here and build that awareness around what is happening for them as they reach for that addictive tool.

0:00:30 - (Hanaan Haddad): Welcome to Finding Satisfaction Sanctuary, our shared conversations into how we think and feel and how we find peace and comfort in daily life. We get together with experts to chat about all things mental health, getting insights and understanding on the struggles of life.

0:00:49 - (Eddie Reaiche): And welcome back to another episode of Finding Sanctuary. I'm Eddie Reich, your host, and today we're diving into a topic that's always intrigued me. Have you ever wondered if your brain has the hidden ability to heal itself from trauma not by talking endlessly, but through a particular movement and specific technique? For countless people around the world, trauma isn't simply a memory, it's an ongoing physical and emotional experience they live every day.

0:01:20 - (Eddie Reaiche): But there's hope on the horizon. With a revolutionary therapy called EMDR that's transforming our understanding of trauma recovery. We're exploring what EMDR therapy is, how it works and why it might be the breakthrough you've been waiting for to achieve deep emotional healing. Joining us today on our podcast are two incredible guests, Haman and Heyam Haddad. They're clinical psychologists with thriving practices in Sydney and they've successfully used emdr, among other therapeutic methods, to help their clients heal and move forward in life.

0:02:01 - (Heyam Haddad): So my name's Hiem. Yes, clinical psychologist, and Hanan and I both have been practising over the last 18 years. I have a special interest in trauma, have been working with that in the last. In those last years, from refugee trauma, torture and trauma survivors, child sexual abuse, all the way through to frontline emergency services, incident response and currently in private practice.

0:02:26 - (Hanaan Haddad): I'm a registered psychologist and I've been working heavily with the forensic population, both in Sydney and I've worked in the UK as a childhood forensic psychologist and trauma's where it's at. EMDR has revolutionised absolutely everything that I do with clients and it's profound.

0:02:44 - (Eddie Reaiche): Could you give our audience an idea of what trauma really is?

0:02:48 - (Heyam Haddad): Absolutely. We often use the word trauma very flippantly these days and one of the kind of had a joke with Hanan. Often we might open up the fridge and go, there's no food in there. And we feel traumatized that we haven't had something nice to eat. And the reality is, is that not everything's traumatising. When we talk about trauma, we talk about potentially traumatic events. Not everything's traumatic, but it has the potential to be traumatic. And that depends on a few number of things. And one of those things is the incident often has to have some level of being potentially a threat to self or to others, a risk to safety or harm. And it's often coupled with a strong emotional response.

0:03:28 - (Heyam Haddad): And so I'll give an example. Often what happens is that, you know, we can. So I often say, Hannah and I could be driving down the road, we may come across a, say car accident. We both hop out to render first aid. We do a job, we do a really good job. We get back in the car and off we go. And we reflect. And Hanan saying, we did a good job, we did what we could. Hopefully they'll be okay, God willing. But I might go, oh no, my first aid certificate is completely out of date. I could have harmed someone, I could have killed someone, I could have done more damage here.

0:03:57 - (Heyam Haddad): And so I walk away having a very different experience. Whereas Hanem, I walk away going, but we did what we could and we helped. And this is the really other important element of trauma which makes it quite unique is that it's not just those elements. It's about our interpretation of the event, our relationship to the event, which starts then to change our beliefs about ourselves. And that's how it becomes stored in the body, which is very important. When you come back and talk about emdr, that is what trauma is. So it is an event, could be potentially traumatic and it can influence our relationship to that event.

0:04:27 - (Heyam Haddad): There's many different types of traumas. There's your single once off events like an armed robbery or a car accident. But then you can also have repeated prolonged trauma like childhood sexual abuse or childhood neglect, domestic family violence, where it's prolonged and repeated over at times many, many years. And so that, that gets stored in the body as well. And then there's also natural or man made trauma. So natural disasters, war, you know, all those types of atrocities as well are still traumatic. But there's many other types of traumas yet again which I can rattle off.

0:05:01 - (Heyam Haddad): I think something we, we often experience as well in our field can be vicarious trauma as well, which I think.

0:05:07 - (Eddie Reaiche): You'Re gonna have to explain the word vicarious.

0:05:09 - (Hanaan Haddad): Yeah.

0:05:09 - (Heyam Haddad): So vicarious trauma for any of those impacted by trauma. Vicarious trauma is experiencing trauma through someone else's experience. So vicariously experiencing that trauma, say as ourselves hearing the trauma, we can be over time impacted by hearing those events. You often see this quite a lot with doctors, emergency services workers, nurses. You might see it with case managers who work with complex trauma.

0:05:35 - (Heyam Haddad): You might see it in hospital staff and so forth.

0:05:39 - (Eddie Reaiche): You make me think a lot about Bissell van der Kolt's book the Body Keeps the Score. I think every therapist knows that book.

0:05:47 - (Hanaan Haddad): Yes.

0:05:48 - (Eddie Reaiche): And everything you said just reflects back to that book as well. It's a great way of looking at it. What about you, Hanan?

0:05:54 - (Hanaan Haddad): So I think it would be just staying on trauma, what Hian's talking about with the types of trauma. I think it's really good for our listeners to understand that trauma is sometimes things that happen to us. So commission traumas and then we have whole range of traumas where we refer to them as omission traumas. So things that didn't happen. This can get a little bit gray. But omission traumas are things like emotional neglect, the absence of a safe person, a safe attachment. And when we think about, well, how's that traumatic? We think about a child's brain safety is the attachment to the mother and the reason that's an omission trauma. If mum is removed, you're emitting mum at a biological brain level. That's an emission trauma. So we look at things, things that happen and then things that didn't happen. So emotional neglect, absence of caregivers, invalidating emotional environments.

0:06:50 - (Eddie Reaiche): So would you say that a developing brain is more susceptible to trauma?

0:06:54 - (Hanaan Haddad): Yes, yeah, absolutely. So we know with the earlier experiences of maltreatment for a child has longer lasting impacts on the brain and the body.

0:07:03 - (Heyam Haddad): You did ask a question though and you know, you often get the question why? I get the question. Is there a formula for how trauma impacts us? I think that's a very important part. The impact on the brain developing early in life is an important, important part in how one is impacted by trauma later in life. But also there is no other formula around it. The main thing we do know is that there's sort of a dose response relationship between the amount of trauma we have and how much it impacts us.

0:07:31 - (Eddie Reaiche): We talk about the brain a lot and most people look at the brain as this grey blob that sits in our head.

0:07:37 - (Heyam Haddad): It's a fancy blob.

0:07:38 - (Eddie Reaiche): Yeah, it's a very, very fancy blob. And the funny thing about it is it's hard for people to comprehend what happens in that because it's not like going to a hospital because you break your arm because you can see it on an X ray.

0:07:51 - (Hanaan Haddad): That's right.

0:07:51 - (Eddie Reaiche): And then when someone says they're traumatized, they just stare off into space. And you can't X ray that. You can't point at that and say there's something wrong. Are there particular areas in the brain that we look at for trauma?

0:08:04 - (Heyam Haddad): Absolutely. It's funny you say that because there is still parts of the brain that light up differently depending on what trauma response you're having. So we know very well that when you have a trauma response, often what goes offline is your prefrontal cortex. This bit in here which does, which is the smart, we call it the smart brain is what it's called because it does all those higher order things like problem solving, risk mitigation. It does empathy, language, all those things that we need to get around day to day in a sophisticated way that all comes from that prefrontal cortex or that smart brain.

0:08:38 - (Heyam Haddad): When we have a traumatic experience, what often happens is that part goes offline and we move down to the sort of lower, very internal parts of the. Which sort of sits behind our eyes. And that is what we call the limbic brain. When we all have this, we all need this because it helps us step back off the curb when there's a fast car driving past. But often what happens is when someone's been really traumatized, when they've been exposed to many traumas, what you find is that brain starts. That part of the brain starts to get activated much easier, almost in preparation, just in case trauma happens.

0:09:11 - (Heyam Haddad): And you find other parts of the brain start to change, both in shape, in the responsiveness. So things like the amygdala. Amygdala is a, is a little bit more enlarged. It starts to activate much more frequently than say a non traumatized brain. And you did also say there's the sort of this staring off to space, which is what we call the freeze response. Right. You've got fight, flight, freeze and freezes even further sort of down the bottom base of the brain. And that part gets sort of activated when we are in that freeze state. It's much like a lizard playing dead until that danger goes away.

0:09:46 - (Heyam Haddad): And so we have that capacity as well. When we exceed the amount that can cope with, we go into that freeze state. So you will see those in an MRI scan, you will see those light up in different ways depending on what's happening for the client. Not like an X ray, but quite similar.

0:10:00 - (Hanaan Haddad): It might just be that you get the client to recall a traumatic event and you see those areas light up, particularly the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex goes offline. So at an imaging level, there's been studies to show pre and post treatment that change when people recall memory.

0:10:17 - (Eddie Reaiche): I think I've seen freeze with kids more so than adults. It may. I may exhibit a lot of freeze response when I don't notice that my wife has changed her hair color because I know that she's done something, but I'm not sure what it is. I'm really scared not to notice. But I think a lot of young kids actually, when they're being yelled at or scolded, they just freeze. So do you think that would be something that you're saying?

0:10:45 - (Heyam Haddad): Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Kids hate yelling. I mean, as soon as we start raising our voices, that's when they go, this is. I can't compute, even just from a basic communication perspective. And someone raises their voice, our brain goes, this is more dangerous and unsafe or even disrespectful that I will shut down. And I'm no longer listening to what you're saying because the delivery of it is so not respectful or it's not what I am willing to listen to.

0:11:11 - (Heyam Haddad): And for children, they do if they. If it's not a, you know, I'm frozen state. It's also an amygdala hijack as well, which means that fight or flight, flight response gets so triggered.

0:11:22 - (Hanaan Haddad): And the amygdala is the part of the brain that we're not aware, but that part of the brain, for babies and for children, they're picking up on those micro changes in a parent or someone's expression that if there is threat, the amygdala knows that there doesn't need to be words yet. And so when we look at trauma, we're looking at in utero, what was mum like? Was she unwell? What was the stress like for mum?

0:11:50 - (Eddie Reaiche): So you're saying that while someone's pregnant, they can transfer that across? I think that's an important.

0:11:56 - (Hanaan Haddad): It's a stress response. So what mum is carrying has implications for a child in utero? Absolutely.

0:12:04 - (Eddie Reaiche): We don't want all the mums to blame themselves for everything that goes wrong.

0:12:08 - (Hanaan Haddad): Absolutely.

0:12:08 - (Eddie Reaiche): Just want to put that in there. But I think it's important to understand how mum's health and wellbeing is really important. So it's up to the dads to step up and make sure the mums are comfortable through their pregnancy.

0:12:22 - (Heyam Haddad): Yeah, absolutely. We only ever want good enough Parenting though, right? Like we're all going to get it wrong in some way or another.

0:12:27 - (Hanaan Haddad): Absolutely.

0:12:29 - (Eddie Reaiche): Always try and be good enough parent, just good enough.

0:12:31 - (Hanaan Haddad): Not the perfect.

0:12:32 - (Heyam Haddad): No such thing.

0:12:34 - (Hanaan Haddad): Eddie, you said something about the brain going offline and I think that's really important to talk about that experience. When the body is hijacked and the brain's doing what it can to survive, the brain will switch off so that there is an ability to still be present. It's a safety mechanism. And I think we're gonna have a look at some of those groupings of.

0:12:56 - (Heyam Haddad): Coping just in relation to post traumatic stress. There's four areas we tend to look at, which kind of help to define or what you should be looking for, I guess for our listeners to know whether I am impacted by trauma or not, regardless of if I had a mission or commission trauma. So a lot of clients will come in and say, but I should be okay. I had a pretty good childhood. My parents worked as hard as they could to give us what we can. I hear that a lot in our col as well. Which, you know, a lot of immigrant parents came here working so hard to make a life.

0:13:26 - (Heyam Haddad): But for those clients that come in, like I should be okay. My parents did what they can. And the reality is, is that we can still be impacted by what we didn't receive. What we didn't receive through validation, through love, care and affection, through time, through spontaneity and play. If parents are traumatized, well, they're not spontaneous and playing often, are they? And as well, you know, even limits setting in boundaries. If we didn't have that growing up, that's an omission of what we needed. But and Hanel's referring to is for those listeners that want to know, am I impacted by trauma? The areas you want to look for is often we have strong responses, strong activation of our nervous system, our fight or flight system. So it can be hyper vigilant, always on edge, easily startled. We might be having nightmares and other experiences.

0:14:11 - (Heyam Haddad): We also have a lot of avoidance. So whether it's substance use, withdrawal, isolation, not wanting to go certain places that remind us of those events. But the very important part is when you start to see changed beliefs. I am not worthy, I'm not safe, I can't trust others. The world's a dangerous place. When we start to see change in meaning and interpretation, that's really your trauma starting to settle in. And that's when you start to see you shape your life very differently according to now what those new beliefs are and what Evidence has supported those beliefs.

0:14:43 - (Heyam Haddad): And then we start to see the whole world through that lens. And suddenly your world becomes smaller and smaller as an individual impacted by trauma.

0:14:51 - (Eddie Reaiche): I think you mentioned the word hijack, the hijack of the amygdala. I think we know that anxiety can hijack the amygdala, and sometimes we can have similar symptoms that you would with trauma, but it could be just anxiety because it tends to do that. But I think a lot of time what we're trying to work on now is how do we get out of this? Trauma's a bad thing and it's not a good experience. But I think there's one more thing I want to touch on before we get onto emdr, the difference between traumatic memory and a normal memory.

0:15:23 - (Heyam Haddad): So when you say traumatic memory, you've got to go back to an unprocessed memory that needs time, it needs space to be aired and explored and reappraised to hold a different meaning at the end. So when we talk about traumatic memory, traumatic memory is something that's happened, and the interpretation around it is that it's a negative interpretation about others or the world that we live in. And when that happens, the belief that we've sort of taken from that memory is unhelpful. It's maladaptive. And we start to see the rest of the world in that lens, and we start to generalize.

0:15:57 - (Heyam Haddad): Traumatic generalization starts to happen where we are now starting to see, well, for example, every person in a black hoodie is a terrible person because that's who robbed me at the ATM only several months ago. And so now I'm easily triggered by anyone that is wearing a black hoodie. And now I don't leave or I don't go to any atm. I do all my banking online now. I never hold cash anymore, just in case I am in that place. And there's suddenly, I'm not going to any shop. So that's what I mean about an unprocessed traumatic memory.

0:16:28 - (Heyam Haddad): Other memories we can hold in mind. So you said also about how it's stored. Often what we see is a lot of our memories are stored in the hippocampus, amongst other parts of the brain. But when a traumatic memory is stored in the brain, what happens every time it comes up? You get the story, the linear story, the logical story, and alongside of that comes the emotions. And often what you see is that become too overwhelming, that it then flips the brain and we go down into that limbic brain or the free.

0:16:55 - (Heyam Haddad): And so that memory Then goes back and stored into the hippocampus in a very unprocessed way, creating a lot of anxiety, a lot of stress in the body, and a lot of nervous system elevation. EMDR has the capacity to bring that up to the surface in a way that's accessible. It's safe enough to be able to work with it.

0:17:12 - (Eddie Reaiche): I think it's important for people to understand that there is a difference between the two and why trauma becomes something that you can't really control, whereas a memory you can, it's not as emotional. And if we look at people, like if you look at people who've had sexual abuse or people who've come back from war, they hear a backfire of a car and they just drop down to the floor. It's not something they can control absolutely.

0:17:37 - (Hanaan Haddad): I like to use the metaphor with clients to help them understand without. Some of the neuroscience talk is thinking about a filing cabinet. And each file has a date, it's ordered, it's filed away in an orderly fashion. Whether it's by date or name, that's your normal memory. So what did you have for breakfast this morning? You can recall that without the limbic brain being turned on. Whereas with a traumatic memory, you walk into a room, everything else is ordered.

0:18:07 - (Hanaan Haddad): But you might have five files laying around, maybe the papers are everywhere. And now we've got these memories that we need to figure out how to file away. But because the limbic system is on, it's hard to get to those files and make sense of them because they're too traumatic. And so the result of, of other psychotherapists, but also EMDR is to be able to hold those files safely in a contained manner, update them, time them, make sense of them, and file them away.

0:18:35 - (Hanaan Haddad): And that's the end result of trauma work, amongst many others. But when we're working with memory storage.

0:18:43 - (Eddie Reaiche): Okay, so we've heard all the things trauma does to us and how it's not very healthy. And now there's a way out. And the way out is called emdr?

0:18:53 - (Heyam Haddad): Correct.

0:18:53 - (Eddie Reaiche): So do you want to explain first of all what the acronym means?

0:18:57 - (Hanaan Haddad): Sure. It's a long acronym. So EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. I'll break it down really simply. We'll go with the eye movements. Eye movements are used in order to access the brain's ability to self heal. And it's almost as though God's given our bodies and our brains a way to say, hey, you can heal. You've got the Skills there you've got the brain and the body to be able to heal from trauma and from, from these negative life events that have happened.

0:19:28 - (Hanaan Haddad): The end goal, or one of the goals, is to activate both hemispheres of the brain so you're turning on the right side and the left side of the brain. By doing that, we are allowing memories to be desensitized. The reprocessing part of EMDR is around finding a more adaptive understanding, belief and meaning from a trauma. Trying to bring this all together. Clients will initially start with, I'm in the memory, it feels unsafe, it's happening all again.

0:20:01 - (Hanaan Haddad): And as we start to process a memory using the eye movements, clients might move from that state and desensitize to eventually reprocessing to a belief that that happened to me, I'm safe now, I'm here in the room. EMDR is an eight phase therapy and it has really revolutionised trauma treatment. It was the bilateral stimulation that was able to reduce the vividness and the distress of that memory. And it's taken off from single incident traumas like a robbery. And now we know that EMDR is effective for not only trauma and complex trauma, but mood disorders, anxiety disorders, addictions, emotion regulation, and particularly when there's a trauma based space for some of those presentations.

0:20:51 - (Eddie Reaiche): When you were explaining EMDR to me, you actually said it's eye movement and then you said tappers on both hands or there was another one. You were talking about the hearing, the tones, one to the other. And then you mentioned a term called bilateral stimulation. Can you tell me what that means?

0:21:11 - (Heyam Haddad): So when you talk about bilateral stimulation and we're talking about the two, two different sides of the brain, the left brain, the right brain. So the left side is the linear, the logical side of the brain, but on the other side you've got the emotion brain. And so in that part of the brain, we have the less, less logical, less linear and more emotional part of the brain. Often when a traumatic memory is stored in the brain, we access the memory itself.

0:21:39 - (Heyam Haddad): The right brain, the emotion brain, gets too worked up and then it sends that memory offline and it sends it back down. And so when we're talking about bilateral stimulation, we're talking about eye movements where we're moving our eyes left to right looks. Honestly, when I work with clients, we have a bit of a joke. I say, I know it sounds crazy, you're going to have to trust me till we get there, because it does feel that way. But it's eye movements left to right. So we're engaging both parts of the brain. Or it can be, as you said, the tappers. I call them the buzzers, where one buzzer goes off at a time. One left, right, left, right.

0:22:11 - (Eddie Reaiche): In your hands.

0:22:12 - (Heyam Haddad): In your hands. Y. So the client will hold them.

0:22:14 - (Eddie Reaiche): Can't see this.

0:22:15 - (Heyam Haddad): Yes, of course. Yes, yes. Good reminder. So the tappers are buzzers that sit in one in your left hand, one in your right hand, and those buzzers will go off one at a time. So left one will go off, right one will go off, and vice versa. Continuation. The other option is also audio, where you have these sounds in your ears, so it might be headphones. And the sound goes from one ear to the other ear, then back again as you go through the processing. And that's what we call bilateral stimulation, activating both sides of the brain one side at a time.

0:22:51 - (Eddie Reaiche): Do they all work together or can you have one rather than the other?

0:22:55 - (Hanaan Haddad): The most common is eye movements, but post Covid, there's a whole range of sources available. So eye movements on the computer. Some clients have a preference. So some clients prefer either knee tapping or the buzzers. It's collaborative, so we would arrange that with the CL after.

0:23:14 - (Heyam Haddad): A lot of my clients also prefer the. What we call the butterfly hug, where you interlock your thumbs. They go up against your chest and sort of up near your collarbones and you're tapping left, right, left, right. I'm probably one of those people as well. If, when I have done emdr, I would prefer to do the butterfly hug rather than the eye movements because I find them a little bit distracting. But you work with your client to figure out what they prefer.

0:23:36 - (Eddie Reaiche): And I like that because it's kind of like it's eye movement, but some people may find it difficult to track. And so you're giving them another option.

0:23:45 - (Heyam Haddad): Absolutely.

0:23:47 - (Eddie Reaiche): And it's just as effective.

0:23:48 - (Hanaan Haddad): The point is, both sides of the brain are being activated when you're engaging them.

0:23:53 - (Eddie Reaiche): Fantastic. It sounds so simple, doesn't does?

0:23:57 - (Heyam Haddad): Like we often say, there's a lot going on in the background. There's a lot of preparation work we do, and it's extremely effective. Like I have to say, for 18 years I've worked in the trauma space. I've done everything from your prolonged exposure therapies, your trauma focused CBT's and other modalities. And I have to say that EMDR gives quite quick relief from the symptoms and a quicker return to functioning, often with a more contained level of distress for the client.

0:24:26 - (Heyam Haddad): And the whole time the client's in control. They can tap out if they want to. We do encourage them to keep working through the set, and we have ways to support them through that. But the client maintains control, which is fundamentally so important for a trauma impacted person. Control and safety is key to recovery, and EMDR offers that to.

0:24:45 - (Hanaan Haddad): And because the EMDR is now it's out in the media and we're hearing more about it, I think there's this idea that I'll come in for one or two sessions, do some eye movements, and I'll be fixed or healed or I won't have these symptoms anymore. But I think what's really important when a client comes in is to do a very thorough history, but also to have a clear discussion around what to expect for clients.

0:25:10 - (Hanaan Haddad): So for some clients, it's really important to give them the resources to then be able to tolerate an EMDR processing session. And that's where EMDR is. Great. So it helps the client develop adaptive skills and instill those resources that you're building in therapy, instilling those using EMDR as an adaptive resource that they can then use to be able to process and tolerate the trauma work.

0:25:38 - (Eddie Reaiche): I think that's an important point because some people may listen to this and think they'll come in, knock on your door and say, hi, I'm here for EMDR. Can we do it? Because I've got a 6:30 appointment I need to get to.

0:25:48 - (Hanaan Haddad): Yeah, that's right.

0:25:49 - (Eddie Reaiche): Just fix my trauma. Thank you. So the reality is it's really part of a process, isn't it? Yeah. And I think it's important for people to know that. So you guys have been doing EMDR for some time. So how successful has it been in your practice?

0:26:07 - (Heyam Haddad): Excitingly successful.

0:26:08 - (Hanaan Haddad): It's amazing.

0:26:09 - (Heyam Haddad): I have to say. I wish I'd done it a little bit earlier, but it's been an exceptional addition to the suite of therapies that we do. And it's nice to give clients options. And I can tell you it's been very successful with a range of different presentations. I know it works with most of the anxiety disorders, including trauma in particular, but it goes beyond trauma. So you can use it for things like panic attacks.

0:26:34 - (Heyam Haddad): You can use it for various age groups as well, use it for addictions and urges. You can use it for quite a number of different presentations. And the success, I would say, has been pretty remarkable. You know, I was a skeptic for a long time beforehand, and I would, you know, often say, what is this crazy stuff we're talking about here? How can it Be that, you know, you move your, you move your eyes left to right and follow, follow your fingers. It almost felt to me as hypnosis. But having learned about it and now having been practiced it for a while now, it's, it's really not. And there's just so much for the client. And if we've ever had stuck points with clients, we've been able to get through and troubleshoot them. And often it would be, as Hernan said, a opportunity to go back and build the resources before we go into the trauma processing part.

0:27:25 - (Eddie Reaiche): What's a stuck point?

0:27:27 - (Heyam Haddad): Stuck point. So it could be that the client has difficulty sitting with emotions after one of the main ones. I see the client really is quite avoidant, finds discomfort very uncomfortable and unable to sit with that. That would be enough of a reason to go back and do some emotion coaching. Teaching them how to sit with emotions, giving them emotion tolerance skills. That's an important one. But we also need to ensure that we're keeping them within a space that they can handle and cope.

0:27:55 - (Heyam Haddad): And there's different tools for that. Like with emdr, there's various versions of EMDR that can help keep them within a space that's tolerable. Yeah, these are the kind of stuck points you, you would often come across.

0:28:06 - (Eddie Reaiche): I think it's important to know that there's a bit of hand holding in this. It's just not throwing you into this. It's always working with the client. And it's not a one size fit all, is it? That's why it's important people understand that there is something called the window of tolerance. So we work with the client, not the therapy, but with the client as well.

0:28:25 - (Heyam Haddad): Absolutely. Always tailored to the client first.

0:28:28 - (Hanaan Haddad): I think EMDR, there's been EMDR, EMDR, EMDR 2.0. And so the rang of options available to clients means that we can process a memory that's so distressing, I don't even have to know what you're processing. You might just label it as incident A. That happened to me when I was 10. And we can process that. And we know that there's been a cognitive shift, the emotional distress around that has shifted and we can close book.

0:28:56 - (Hanaan Haddad): And so I think that's a power of emdr. Whereas there are other, like prolonged exposure, for example, where clients have to sit through and sit with their distress and recall, recall the details of the memory until the distress reduces and they're desensitized. So emdr, there's no one size fits all. It's up to the trained clinician to provide what's necessary. Yeah.

0:29:20 - (Eddie Reaiche): Now, I wonder if you can give us some real life experiences from your clients.

0:29:26 - (Heyam Haddad): Absolutely.

0:29:26 - (Hanaan Haddad): I mean, we've got a few. We love these data. Okay. I have a client who she is 17, under the NDIS for trauma. She also has a diagnosis of ADHD and she has been living in a little bubble in her home. The extent of the trauma that she's had, she's had it all. She's had loss, she's had sexual abuse, she's held at gunpoint overseas, she's had her partner suicide. I mean, you name it, there's been so much trauma for this person.

0:29:59 - (Hanaan Haddad): And there was one event that happened when she was younger and it happened very early in the morning. And every day since she was 20, she wakes up in a fright because of that memory. We processed it without recalling the memory. For the first time in her life, she's not woken up with this nightmare and she can sleep through to the morning. And that was a few sessions of processing that memory. I want to highlight that there is potential for working with the memory in that way and desensitizing without actually knowing all of the details that happened.

0:30:33 - (Hanaan Haddad): And whilst this person has a lot of trauma to process, the impact of just sleep, being able to sleep through the night is profound. I had another client who had lost his mother and he was presenting with traumatic grief. And there are a lot of events leading up to her death that resulted in avoidance and hypervigilance and avoidance of any memory of Mum, which meant grieving, thinking about Mum, going to the funeral was not gonna be possible.

0:31:03 - (Hanaan Haddad): About four sessions of processing those traumatic events, he's been able to go home and say, I miss Mum. This is what I loved about her. To have those wholesome conversations with his kids around. This is who Mum was. This is what I miss about her. So we worked with those memories, the traumatic grief, so that he could then grieve his mother. I'll keep going, but your turn.

0:31:26 - (Eddie Reaiche): Oh, they're great.

0:31:28 - (Heyam Haddad): It's not just trauma, but it's also, as I said, you can work with addictions, you can work with panic attacks, you can work with various presenting concerns. And I mean, just to add to, yes, there's definitely many trauma successes through EMDR we can talk about, but also with panic. I know that there's what you're recently, just very recently actually working with a young lady who had worked with some time ago, and we'd done a lot of processing and she'd done really, really well. And then Suddenly, what had happened, she'd come back to therapy and made contact and said, out of nowhere, I'm just panic attacks. And really, she'd never had one before, was starting to withdraw and not leave the home, and said, okay, given I know your history, given I know all the work we've done, let's get straight into it. So second session we were in and got straight into some processing around the panic and just the sensation of the panic and what that was about.

0:32:17 - (Heyam Haddad): And we processed that. So you don't even have to go into the actual event or where it started. We're just going into the feeling of being out of control, unable to breathe, thinking, I'm going to die. Which is what panic involves within that first session. And I'm not. Look, they're not all success stories in the sense of the first session. You're going to be on cloud nine. But it's enough to take the edge off, to then be able to feel more functional in the therapy and more able to access the work that needs to be done.

0:32:44 - (Heyam Haddad): With addictions as well, we often work with the urge. So the urge to have a drink, the urge to reach for the vape or the cigarettes or one more punt on that pokey machine, and you often get some pretty successful results. With getting to the core of what that's about and empowering the client to feel have ch around this, it's not overpowering me. I can take charge of what I choose to do here and build that awareness around what is happening for them as they reach for that addictive tool.

0:33:13 - (Hanaan Haddad): I think it's important here, when we're reprocessing a memory we've desensitised from the trauma or from the urge or that target. The other part that EMDR allows the client to get to organically is to access adaptive networks that have been weakened or aren't as apparent or aren't as strong as those maladaptive networks. So once a memory's been desensitized from the reprocessing allows them to access networks or access experiences or access perspectives.

0:33:48 - (Hanaan Haddad): But the end result is, wow, I did have the skills. I was just seeing it as though it was. I failed. Or I can see like it's just a blip in the ocean, like, it wasn't so bad. I can get through this. It's so powerful. To see a client rely on their own cognitive restructuring organically through this process is profound. They've got the skills, their brain has those networks. For the most part, people have those adaptive networks that they Just need access to. We're just helping them put their hand in the bucket and see what else is in there.

0:34:21 - (Eddie Reaiche): It's interesting, isn't it? It's like we've got our own first aid kit in our brain. Didn't even realize it was there.

0:34:26 - (Heyam Haddad): Yeah.

0:34:27 - (Eddie Reaiche): Which is really good. I think in wrapping up this session, which has been amazing, I've really enjoyed this. Would you have some final words you may want to talk to our listeners about?

0:34:38 - (Heyam Haddad): I definitely do. I just want to say to whoever is listening, if any of this has stood out to you, whether it's a trauma presentation or your symptoms that you might be experiencing, there's no need to judge it, there's no need to minimize it. In fact, I say, you know, if you feel that there is something here that resonates with you, then reach out. There is a need and a benefit in reaching out for the support and the support is available.

0:35:01 - (Heyam Haddad): The therapies sound a little bit quirky sometimes, but they do work. And I've seen countless clients walk away feeling better after the work that they've done. And you can access what we call post traumatic growth, which is the growth that happens after working through those traumas, working through the challenges and adversity. You do become new, evolved version of yourself. And, you know, who doesn't deserve that?

0:35:28 - (Hanaan Haddad): I think the important thing to take away from today is also on top of what Heamis has shared is that the word trauma means wound. And we know that wounds heal with the right care. And so if we can get past the shame and we can connect with people, we can talk about some of these wounds and get perspective. It might be a way for. Then you can say, I do need help. Maybe this is the time to change my rigid views on my past or how I react in situations. And we think that we do things without thinking.

0:36:02 - (Hanaan Haddad): Sometimes our responses, they might seem automatic, but there's more autonomy and choice. And through therapy, we can help with that to get you to access what you already have to do that and then yam.

0:36:15 - (Eddie Reaiche): It's been an absolute pleasure. Pleasure. And if you'd like to learn more or get in touch with Hanan or Hiem, their contact information is included in the show notes. Thank you for sharing your valuable time with us and your stories and the information and your knowledge.

0:36:31 - (Heyam Haddad): Thank you. Thanks for having us and thanks for sharing it.