How Does Trauma Therapy Work?

Trauma therapy is a form of experiential talk therapy that works due to the mind-body connection. 

The experiential aspect of trauma therapy is related to the mind-body connection where you're not just talking about what you think in an intellectual way--you're also experiencing your thoughts and feelings in an embodied way.

    See my articles: 

The Mind-Body Connection: The Body Provides a Window Into the Unconscious Mind

Why Experiential Therapy is More Effective Than Regular Talk Therapy to Overcome Trauma)

How Trauma Therapy Works

What Type of Issues Are Processed in Trauma Therapy?

Trauma therapy helps clients to process unresolved trauma including (but not limited to):

• Childhood Emotional Neglect and Other Types of Childhood Trauma

• A History of Sexual Abuse
  

• A History of Physical Abuse

• A History of Emotional or Psychological Abuse

• A History of Traumatic Relationships 

• Traumatic Grief
  

• Shock Trauma: One-time events that were traumatic like natural disasters, getting robbed and so on

• Combat Trauma

• Other Traumatic Experiences including a history of experiencing bullying, emotional and verbal abuse to name just a few issues that clients work on in trauma therapy.

How Does Trauma Therapy Work?

When a person experiences trauma, it triggers heightened activation in the part of the brain called the amydala.

    

    See my article: How Trauma Therapy Can Help You to Overcome Unresolved Trauma

The amydala processes emotions and memory processing (see my article: Trauma and the Triune Brain).

Trauma and the Brain

The amydala can be slow to process trauma. This often leads to activation with regard to everyday stimuli including loud noises, scents, certain visual cues and other triggers which are specific for each person.

This activation can occur even when people haven't developed PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder) symptoms.

Trauma therapy helps clients to reprocess unresolved trauma in a way that is safe and effective without being retraumatizing.

Trauma therapists have advanced training and skills in one or more types of trauma therapy. 

Due to their training and skills, trauma therapists know how to help clients to process trauma without retraumatizing them.

Not all therapists have trauma therapy training so it's important to ask any therapist you contact about their training, skills and background.

Over time, as you process trauma, you can prioritize taking care of yourself and leading a full life again.

What Are the Different Types of Trauma Therapy?

There are a variety of therapies that come under the umbrella of trauma therapy including (but not limited to):

• EMDR Therapy (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)

EMDR Therapy

• AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Therapy)

• Somatic Experiencing (SE)

Somatic Experiencing (SE)

• Parts Work (including Ego States Therapy and Internal Family Systems which is also known as IFS)

Parts Work (Ego States Therapy and IFS)

What is the Negative Impact of Unresolved Trauma?

Unresolved trauma can have a negative impact on every area of your life including:

• Relationships and family life

• Work

• School

• Friendships and social life

What Are the Benefits of Trauma Therapy?

Some of the benefits of trauma therapy include:

• Eliminating or reducing triggers and other trauma-related symptoms

• Learning coping skills and developing internal resources
  

• Overcoming distorted negative beliefs

• Reframing traumatic experiences to make sense of these experiences

• Reducing anxiety, irritability, anger and frustration

When Would Be a Good Time to Seek Help in Trauma Therapy?

As previously mentioned, unresolved trauma can affect every area of your life.

If you are experiencing one or more of the following symptoms, seek help from a qualified trauma therapist:

• Emotional Flashbacks

• Disturbing Triggers
  

• Insomnia and Trouble Sleeping

Insomnia and Trouble Sleeping

• Nightmares

• Isolation and Loneliness

• Anxiety

• Other Trauma-Related Symptoms That Affect You 

Getting Help in Trauma Therapy

It can be difficult to ask for help, especially when you are experiencing the symptoms of unresolved trauma.

Getting Help in Trauma Therapy

When you seek help from a trauma therapist, ask her about her training, background and skills related to trauma therapy (see my article: What is a Trauma Therapist?).

Freeing yourself from your traumatic history can help you to live a more fulfilling life.

About Me

I am a licensed New York City psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, AEDP, EFT (for couples), Somatic Experiencing and Sex Therapist.

I work with individual adults and couples.

As a trauma therapist, I have helped many clients to overcome unresolved trauma so they could go on to live a more fulfilling life.

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.

 

How EMDR Therapy Works: EMDR and the Brain

As a psychotherapist who specializes in helping clients to overcome trauma, I learned to do EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) in 2005 (see my article: What is EMDR?).  I decided to learn EMDR because the traditional therapy that I learned in postgraduate training didn't help some of the clients who came to me who had PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder).  I've been using EMDR with many clients ever since with positive results.

EMDR Therapy For Trauma

EMDR and Advances in Brain Research
When I learned EMDR, which was developed by psychologist, Francine Shapiro, Ph.D., researchers still weren't sure exactly how it worked.  They just knew that compared to other forms of therapy and compared to medication, it was more effective.

Since that time, there has been a lot more research on EMDR and brain research, so how EMDR works is starting to become clearer.

EMDR is an integrative therapy.  It combines the best of psychodynamic, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and other mind-body oriented therapies.

Many psychotherapists, myself included, now also integrate Somatic Experiencing and the use of imagination, which has powerfully enhanced EMDR.

How Emotional Trauma Affects the Brain
Before discussing EMDR any further, it's important to understand how emotional trauma affects the brain.

Emotional trauma has a powerful effect on the nervous system.

How EMDR Works: Traumatic Memories and the Brain

People often have problems processing traumatic memories in regular talk therapy because these memories are stored in the nonverbal, nonconscious, subcortical part of the brain, which includes the amygdala, thalamus, hippocampus, hypothalamus, and the brain stem.

Before traumatic memories are processed with EMDR, they're not accessible to the frontal lobes, part of the brain that is used for understanding, thinking and reasoning.

Very often, individuals who are traumatized are unable to give a coherent narrative about their traumatic past because, as previously mentioned, the traumatic memories are stored in the nonverbal part of the brain.

Advances in brain scanning have shown that often when people with a traumatic history remembered these traumatic memories, the left frontal cortex (speech and logic) actually shuts down.

At the same time, the right side of the brain, which is associated with, among things, emotional states, images, and autonomic arousal and includes the amygdala, lit up on these brain scans.

This would explain why traumatized individuals have problems providing a coherent narrative about their traumatic memories--the part of the brain that is associated with thinking and speaking is "off line" when they're asked to think about the trauma.

This is also why, for many people who have PTSD, there are flashes of images from the traumatic event, but no words.

These memories also have a sense of timelessness so that people who suffer with trauma often have a hard time distinguishing "then" from "now" (see my article:  Working Through Emotional Trauma: Learning to Separate "Then" From "Now").

These emotions and sensations are often felt with such immediacy that it feels like they're experiencing the traumatic event now, even though it might have happened many years ago.

For instance, this is a common experience for veterans traumatized in battle as well as for people with other types of emotional trauma.

The corpus callosum is a part of the brain that connects the right and left sides of the brain and it helps both sides to "communicate" with each other.   It helps to integrate the emotional and cognitive parts of the brain.

Trauma, by definition, is overwhelming.  It can cause dysregulation of the body and brain chemistry.

EMDR, the Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) Model, and Bilateral Stimulation (BLS)
Francine Shapiro, Ph.D., developed the Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model to explain the effects of EMDR.

The AIP model says that all memory is associative, and that learning occurs through the creation of new associations.

EMDR Therapy and the Brain

For example, in order to recognize an object, your current perceptions have to link the object with your past experiences.

So, if your only experience of a stick is that sticks were used to beat you, you would have no past memories that could tell you that a stick could also be used for other things, like walking.

But if someone shows you that a stick can be used to help you walk, you can integrate this information with other similar information in your existing memory networks.

Our memory networks help us to survive in the world.  But emotional trauma causes impairment to these networks.

EMDR helps to restore the proper functioning and integration of these networks.

In order to heal from emotional trauma, to start, there needs to be an integration between the right and left hemispheres of the brain.  In EMDR this is done with "bilateral stimulation" (BLS).

Initially, when EMDR therapy was first developed, BLS only consisted of eye movements, hence the name Eye Movement, Desensitization and Reprocessing.

As advances were made in EMDR therapy, researchers and EMDR clinicians discovered that effective BLS in EMDR processing could take many forms, including alternating, rhythmic tapping, pulsing and music that alternates between the right and left ears.

Under normal non-traumatic circumstance, the brain has ways of integrating psychological disturbance.

For instance, if you have a minor disagreement with a stranger, you might feel annoyed, but it's usually not traumatic.

Part of emotional integration might involve talking to a friend or a therapist about the argument, writing about it in a journal or possibly having a dream about the incident.  These are all integrative processes for events that are non-traumatic.

But when there's a traumatic event, which overwhelms the body and the brain chemistry, talking, writing and dreaming often aren't enough to integrate the event, so it remains emotionally unintegrated.

After a while, these unintegrated memories can get triggered by other events.

The most common example that is usually given is when a veteran with PTSD returns from combat and  s/he hears a car backfiring, s/he experiences it as if s/he is back in combat.  This could include the sights, sounds, taste and other sensory experiences from the war.

There are many other types of triggers.  For instance, if you feel belittled by your boss, this could trigger what you experienced if you were belittled as a child.

The problem is that, because these traumatic memories are stored in the nonconscious part of brain, the person who is triggered doesn't realize that much of what they're experiencing is from the past.

As I mentioned before, they often have problems distinguishing "then" from "now" when they're emotionally triggered.

Due to the lack of emotional integration, the traumatic memories are stored in isolated memory networks, which remain just below the surface and ready for reactivation.

EMDR Therapy For Trauma

EMDR was developed to help access and process these traumatic memories.

After accessing these memories, the goal of EMDR therapy is to make connections between the isolated memory networks and functional memory networks.   This is done, as previously mentioned, with BLS.

Next Article:  Part 2 of this article: How EMDR Works will give a composite example to demonstrate how EMDR therapy works.

Getting Help in Therapy
Emotional trauma that creates psychological, physical, and interpersonal problems is much more common than most people realize.

Getting Help to Overcome Trauma With EMDR Therapy

Research has shown that EMDR is one of the most effective forms of therapy to overcome emotional trauma.

If you are suffering with emotional trauma, rather than suffering alone, you could benefit from working with a licensed mental health professional who is trained as an EMDR therapist.

About Me
I am a licensed NYC psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, AEDP, EFT, Somatic Experiencing and Sex Therapist who works with individual adults and couples.

I have helped many clients to overcome emotional trauma so they could lead a more fulfilling life (see my article: What is a Trauma Therapist?).

To find out more about me, visit my website:  Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during. regular business hours or email me.

How Experiential Therapy Can Help You to Overcome Emotional Hijacking

In my last two articles, What is Emotional Hijacking? and Self Help Tips to Cope with Emotional Hijacking, I defined this phenomenon and provided self help tools.  

In this article I'm focusing on how experiential therapy, which is a bottom up therapeutic approach, can help you to overcome emotional hijacking (see my article:  What's the Difference Between Top Down and Bottom Up Approaches to Therapy?)

How Experiential Therapy Can Help You to Overcome Emotional Hijacking

An emotional hijack occurs when the part of the brain called the amygdala, which is an emotional processor, bypasses (or hijacks) your normal reasoning process.  

Although normally your decision making occurs in other parts of the brain, the amygdala takes over during certain circumstances.

There are times when using self help tools aren't enough, especially when unresolved trauma gets activated over and over again.  

At that point, it's important to get help from a therapist who uses experiential therapy to help clients overcome trauma (see my article: Why Experiential Therapy is More Effective For Trauma Than Regular Talk Therapy).

Clinical Vignette

The following clinical vignette illustrates how an experiential approach in therapy helps a client who has unresolved trauma.  As always, this is a composite of many different cases without identifying information.

Glen

At the encouragement of his wife, Glen, 38, sought help in therapy.  

During the prior six months, he began feeling irritable and anxious.  He told his therapist that he started a new job, and his director, John, was highly critical of Glen and all of Glen's colleagues.  

John justified his criticism by saying he believed it would encourage the sales team to work harder (see my article: Coping With a Difficult Boss).

Glen's colleagues, who worked for John for several years, shrugged off John's criticism because they said, even though he was critical, he usually rewarded them with bonuses and merit raises at the end of the year, which was all they cared about. As a result, most of them didn't take John's comments that seriously.

But Glen couldn't shrug it off the way his colleagues did.  He felt deeply wounded by John's remarks--even though, privately, John assured Glen that he thought he was doing a good job.

Whenever John criticized Glen in a staff meeting, Glen felt like he froze emotionally--he couldn't even think straight, which meant he couldn't respond to John's statements or questions.  He felt like something so overpowering came over him emotionally that he felt like he was no longer in the room.

Afterwards, when he had a chance to calm himself, he couldn't understand why he had such severe reactions to John's comments while his colleagues took John's negative comments to them in stride.

Even on his days off, Glen had a hard time letting go of John's criticism, and this affected his relationship with his wife, Barbara.  He no longer wanted to get together with their friends or do the things they usually both enjoyed.  

After watching Glen's mood get worse over time, Barbara told him that he needed to get help. 

When Glen's therapist asked him about his family background, he described a mother who was emotionally distant and a father who was critical and hard to please.  

Until he said this, Glen hadn't made the connection between his current boss and his critical father (see my article: Reacting to the Present Based on Your Traumatic Past).

His therapist explained the concept of emotional hijacking to Glen.  When they did an Affect Bridge to trace the origin of the emotional hijacking, Glen traced it back to his early childhood when his father would often humiliate him in front of his friends--similar to how John humiliated him in staff meetings.  

Based on Glen's response to the Affect Bridge, his therapist recommended that they address his unresolved trauma using EMDR Therapy as well as Ego States therapy.

Using these experiential therapies, over time, they gradually worked on Glen's current triggers, his past triggers and his apprehension about the future.  

Once Glen worked through the past and present triggers and his fears about the future, he no longer felt emotionally hijacked at work.  He also no longer ruminated about his director's critical comments when he was at home.  In addition, his mood improved substantially, and he once again enjoyed his social activities and interests with his wife and friends.

He also decided he deserved to work in a healthier work environment, so he found another job which had a positive work environment with a boss who was much more encouraging.

Conclusion

Unresolved trauma can get triggered in new situations in your personal life as well as in your work environment.  

These triggers can cause you to feel like you're being emotionally hijacked to the point where your logical brain shuts down temporarily.

An experiential approach in therapy is more effective than regular talk therapy in resolving trauma.  

Getting Help in Therapy

If you find that your efforts to cope with emotional hijacking aren't working, you could benefit from working with a trauma therapist who uses experiential therapy (What is a Trauma Therapist?).

Rather than struggling on your own, seek help so you can live a more fulfilling life.

About Me

I am a licensed New York City psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, AEDP, EFT and Somatic Experiencing therapist.

I work with individual adults and couples.

I have helped many individuals and couples to resolve trauma.

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.

 

What is Emotional Hijacking?

The psychologist and science journalist Daniel Goleman introduced the concept of emotional hijacking in the mid-1990s in his book, Working With Emotional Intelligence (see my article: Reacting to the Present Based on Your Traumatic Past).

What is Emotional Hijacking?

As a psychotherapist in New York City who specializes in helping clients to overcome trauma, I see many clients who experience emotional hijacking based on unresolved trauma from the past (see my article: Understanding Why You're Affected By Unresolved Trauma From a Long Time Ago).

What is Emotional Hijacking?

So, let's start by defining this term.

An emotional hijack occurs when the part of the brain called the amygdala, which is an emotional processor, bypasses (or hijacks) your normal reasoning process.  

Although normally your decision making occurs in other parts of the brain, the amygdala takes over during certain circumstances (see my article: Trauma, the Triune Brain and Somatic Experiencing).

This can be a very good thing: If you're being chased by a tiger, you probably wouldn't survive if you had to rely on the logical part of your brain to reason out what you should do.  That would take too long when seconds could mean the difference between life and death.

So, when the amygdala takes over, you react without having to use the logical part of the brain and you run before you even realize that you're doing it.

But there are times when the amygdala reacts when you want the logical part of your brain to help you to pause and process the situation first.

Situations Where People Are Emotionally Hijacked

Here are some examples of people getting emotionally hijacked.  See if you can relate to any of these scenarios, which are based on composites of many different cases with all identifying information removed:

• Feeling Ignored and Invisible: Joe was trying to tell his wife, Betty, about his stressful day with a difficult colleague.  Normally, Betty is attentive and empathetic, but she was distracted by an email that popped up on her computer at home from her boss that needed an immediate response.  As a result, she was only half listening to Joe, which upset him. Without even thinking about it, Joe lashed out at Betty and said, "You never pay attention to me!" Joe was unaware that emotionally he was brought back to all the times when he was a small child and he tried to get his mother's attention, but she was too distracted by Joe's father, who was drunk.  At the point when Joe got emotionally hijacked in the present, he didn't realize he was reacting to unresolved trauma from the past.  But when he spoke to his therapist about it later on in the week, she explained the concept of emotional hijacking to him, and she helped him to understand the connection between the present situation with his wife and his unresolved trauma from the past.  He realized his reaction to his wife was out of proportion to the current situation, and he apologized to his wife. He also told his therapist he wanted to work on his unresolved trauma so he wouldn't continue to get emotionally hijacked (see my article: Growing Up Feeling Invisible and Emotionally Invalidated).

• Feeling Left Out and Unlovable: When Sue asked her close friend, Ann, to go to the movies, she felt hurt to hear that Ann already had other plans with her other friend, Tania.  Not only did Sue feel hurt, she also felt left out and unlovable.  As she walked home, she silently berated herself for even asking Ann to go to the movies. She said to herself, "Why did I even ask her? She obviously doesn't care about me or she would've included me in her plans with Tania.  What an idiot I am to believe she's a good friend of mine!"  During her next therapy session, Sue told her therapist about what happened.  Her therapist had heard many stories prior to this of Sue's good friendship with Ann, so she knew that Sue was reacting to the present based on her past experience as a child with an emotionally unavailable mother.  As her therapist reminded Sue about her long, close friendship with Ann and how loving and supportive Ann had been in the past, Sue realized that her thinking was distorted, and this was another situation where she was emotionally hijacked (see my article: Overcoming the Emotional Pain of Feeling Unlovable).

• Feeling Powerless:  When Bill tried to return a defective laptop he bought the day before, he was turned away at the store by a brusque sales associate who told him that he couldn't, under any circumstances, replace it or give Bill his money back.  The original sales associate, who sold the laptop to Bill had told Bill that he had 90 days to return the laptop for any reason for either a replacement, a refund or store credit.  Bill even had a receipt that confirmed the store's policy.  But the current sales associate was rude and abrupt, and Bill felt powerless.  He didn't know what to say or do, so he left the store feeling confused.  Later that day when Bill spoke to his wife about the incident, she recognized Bill's familiar pattern of getting emotionally hijacked in similar situations.  She helped him to calm down so he could think more clearly about it.  When he was calmer, based on his work in therapy, Bill realized the sales associate's manner was similar to how his father used to berate him when Bill was a child.  He also realized he was reacting to the current situation as if he was living in the past.  The next day, Bill went back to the store and asked to speak with the sales manager, who was very apologetic for how Bill had been treated the day before and he refunded Bill his money (see my article: How Unresolved Trauma Affects How You Feel About Yourself).

The examples above represent only a few of the many situations where people get emotionally hijacked.  You can probably think of many others.

Conclusion

Emotional hijacking occurs when the emotional processor in the brain, the amygdala, reacts and bypasses the logical part of the brain so that you have an immediate response that is usually out of proportion to the current situation.

More times than not, your brain is reacting to memories from the past which are related to unresolved trauma.

People often realize, in hindsight, that they overreacted, but they might not realize why, especially if they're not in therapy.  

By then, they might feel ashamed for their overreaction. 

Over time, there is also the possibility of damaging important relationships if these overreactions keep happening.

My Next Articles

In my next blog article, I'll provide some tips on how to deal with emotional hijacking: Self Help Tips on Emotional Hijacking.

Also see my article: How Experiential Therapy Can Help You to Overcome Emotional Hijacking.

Getting Help in Therapy

If you recognize that you tend to get emotionally hijacked often under certain circumstances, you could benefit from getting help from a trauma therapist (see my article: What is a Trauma Therapist?).

Overcoming unresolved trauma with the help of a licensed mental health professional who has expertise in this area can free you from getting emotionally hijacked.

About Me

I am a licensed New York City psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, AEDP, EFT and Somatic Experiencing therapist.

I work with individual adults and couples.

As a trauma therapist, I have helped many clients to overcome psychological trauma.

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.

How to Use the Wheel of Emotions

The Wheel of Emotions was developed by Dr. Robert Plutchik, who was a professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and an adjunct professor at the University of Florida.  His research included the study of emotions (see my articles: Learning to Sense Your Emotions and How Experiential Psychotherapy Can Enhance Emotional Development in Adults).

The 8 Primary Emotions

According to Dr. Plutchik, there are eight primary emotions:

• Anger
• Fear
• Sadness
• Disgust
• Surprise
• Anticipation
• Trust 
• Joy

These emotions are considered primary, according to Dr. Plutchik, because they have survival value (see my article: Understanding Primary Emotions).

For instance, fear has survival value because when this emotion is triggered, it can save your life due to the flight-fight response.

What is the Wheel of Emotion?

Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions

Plutchik's Concepts:

• Limbic System/Midbrain: The midbrain (or limbic system) of humans is similar to the midbrain of other mammals.  Humans and other mammals experience the same emotions.

• Evolutionary History: Emotions developed long before humans existed.  They have evolutionary value as part of survival.

• Survival Role: Survival is the primary evolutionary role of emotions.

• Combinations of Emotions: Combining primary emotions will create new emotions.  For example, joy and trust = love.

• Opposites: As can be seen from the Wheel of Emotions, each emotion has its opposites.  For instance, sadness is the opposite of joy, and so on.

• Intensity of Emotions: The change in the intensity of emotions can be seen on the Wheel of Emotions: Trust goes from acceptance to admiration, joy goes from serenity to ecstasy, and so on.

Characteristics of the Wheel of Emotions (click on image to make it larger):

• Color: The eight emotions are arranged by colors for similar emotions.  

• Layers: Moving to the center of the circle intensifies the emotions.

• Relationships of Emotions: Emotions are arranged on the Wheel of Emotions with regard to their relationship to each other.  For instance, note the position of polar opposite emotions.

How to Use the Wheel of Emotions

Many people have problems identifying their emotions.  They might have a sense that they feel "off" or "bad," but they don't know what emotions are causing them to feel this way.

The Wheel of Emotions:

• Provides an image or visual tool to get curious about yourself.
• Helps you to be attuned to yourself.
• Normalizes your emotions.
• Increases your self awareness.
• Helps you to stop judging yourself.
• Helps you to identify your emotions.
• Helps you to verbalize the emotions you are experiencing.  
• Helps you to feel empowered.
• Helps you to gain self confidence.

Getting Help in Therapy

If you're having problems identifying and expressing your emotions, you're not alone.

Working with an experiential psychotherapist can help you to develop and enhance your ability to identify your feelings for your own self awareness as well as to improve your communication with others (see my article: Psychotherapy Can Help You to Stop Sweeping Uncomfortable Emotions Under the Rug).

Rather than struggling on your own, seek help from a licensed mental health professional who has expertise in experiential therapy (see my article: Why Experiential Therapy is More Effective Than Regular Talk Therapy).

About Me

I am an experiential psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, AEDP, EFT and Somatic Experiencing therapist.

I work with individual adults and couples.

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 or email me.

Walking in Nature Can Improve Your Mood

Research studies have shown that city dwellers who don't have access to nature are more likely to develop anxiety and depression as compared with people who have access to green spaces (see New York Times article:  How Walking in Nature Changes Your Brain).

Walking in Nature Can Improve Your Mood

Research Study: Walking in Nature Can Improve Your Mood

A research study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences revealed that walking in nature (as opposed to walking on a highway) lowered the volunteers' propensity for brooding (also known as morbid rumination) as demonstrated in the before and after questionnaires that the volunteers took.

According to this study, the volunteers who walked in nature focused less on the negative aspects of their lives (as compared with the volunteers who walked on the highway).

This research suggests that walking in nature can help to improve your mood.

Questions still remain:

• How much time in nature is sufficient to improve mood?  
• What aspects of nature are most soothing?  
• Besides walking, what other types of activities in nature have beneficial effects?

Further research will be needed to answer those questions.

The Other Benefits of Walking

Aside from lifting your mood, a regular walking routine can help you to lose weight.

In addition, walking can help prevent heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes.  

Walking can also help build strong bones.

Getting Started and Staying Motivated to Walk in Nature

One way to get motivated is to have a walking buddy and to decide in advance how often and what days and times you will both get together to walk in nature.

Having a walking buddy is beneficial for social support.  It also helps on the days when you might want to skip the walk and your walking buddy encourages you to get going.  You can also provide the same encourage to your walking buddy when your buddy might want to slack off.

Always check with your medical doctor before you start any new physical regimen.

Getting Help in Therapy

Walking in nature has been shown to improve your mood, but if you still struggle with depression or anxiety, you could benefit from seeing a licensed psychotherapist (see my article: The Benefits of Psychotherapy).

Everyone needs help at some point in his or her life.

A skilled psychotherapist can help you to work through your problems so that you can have a more fulfilling life (see my article: How to Choose a Psychotherapist).

Rather than suffering on your own, get help from a licensed mental health professional.

About Me

I am a licensed NYC psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR and Somatic Experiencing therapist (see my article: The Therapeutic Benefits of Integrative Psychotherapy).

I work with individual adults and couples.

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.

How Reading Literature Has a Positive Effect on Your Brain

I've always been a proponent of having children learn to read for pleasure early in their lives. I've always enjoyed reading from the time I was in the first grade.  My interest in reading was encouraged by my mother, who would read to me everyday when I was a young child, and who each week brought me to the library, a place that seemed magical and filled with possibilities to me.

Reading Literature Has a Positive Effect on Your Brain

I was also fortunate to have a first grade teacher who recognized my love of reading and gave me beautifully illustrated books that were a little challenging for me at the time, like "Heidi" and "Pippi Longstockings," to inspire me to continue reading.

Reading Literature Has a Positive Effect on the Brain

Without the present day distractions of video games and the Internet, my imagination came alive and took flight as I read about characters who lived in places that were so different where I lived.  This also created a curiosity in me about people, customs and places outside of my immediate surroundings.

Reading and Brain Research
We now have research from neuroscience which reveals that brain scans taken while people read a detailed description, a metaphor or an emotional conversation between two characters in a story stimulate the brain.

The Broca's area and the Wernicke's area, among other areas of the brain, are parts of the brain that are involved in interpreting narratives.

Reading Literature Has a Positive Effect on the Brain

According to Annie Murphy Paul, a journalist who writes for the NY Times, the brain doesn't make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and actually living the experience.  She says that the same parts of the brain are stimulated.

This is similar to hypnotherapy, where the unconscious mind, including imagination, are engaged in a hypnotic state and the brain doesn't distinguish between the imagined images or metaphors and actual lived experience.  This is one of the reasons why clinical hypnosis is effective.

Reading Literature Has a Positive Effect on the Brain

As most people who love literature know, reading also gives us an opportunity to enter into the experience  of the protagonist, especially if it contains rich metaphors and descriptions and lively conversations between characters.

Entering into the protagonist's world, we can have an intimate emotional experience of his or her relationships, insights, doubts, fears, joys and sorrows.

By having this intimate emotional experience, we can't help to compare the protagonist's experience with our own.

It's often easier to develop psychological insights when the experiences are outside of ourselves, like, for instance, when we see a protagonist struggle and overcome a particular emotional dilemma, than it is when we're going through it ourselves.

In doing so, we can also develop insight into our own personal experiences, notice something that we've never thought of before or see an experience in a completely new light.

Good literature has a way of transporting us into new psychological states as well as new places in a way that reading nonfiction usually doesn't.

I'll continue this theme with specific examples in a future article.

About Me
I am a licensed New York City psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR and Somatic Experiencing therapist who works with individual adults and couples.

To find out more about me, visit my website:  Josephine Ferraro, NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.

Emotional Trauma Often Creates Negative Expectations About the Future

People who suffer with a history of emotional trauma often have negative expectations for the future because of their trauma.  This is a common experience that many psychotherapists see in their clients, especially among adults with early childhood trauma.

 Emotional Trauma Often Creates Negative Expectations About the Future

Negative Expectations About the Future Are Often Unconscious
These negative expectations are often unconscious so people, who experience them, often don't question them because these thoughts are outside of their conscious awareness.

However a skilled therapist, who is attuned to clients, can recognize these negative expectations, especially when these clients talk about their future in an overly pessimistic way.

If a traumatized client is in therapy where only cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is used, the therapist usually will point out the distortions in the way that the client is thinking and the problematic behavior that s/he is engaging in.

This is a useful first step because it makes clients' unconscious feelings conscious and they can learn to become aware of these feelings in order to change them.

By becoming aware of their pessimism, they can begin to challenge their thoughts and feelings by asking themselves if these thoughts and feelings are objectively true.  This assumes that clients can take a step back for self reflection.

If they're able to challenge their thoughts and feelings, they might be able to entertain an alternate scenario where the possibility of the future could be more realistic.

If they're not at the point where they can actually imagine a positive future for themselves, they might, at least, be able to see that there is the potential for a future that is better than their past or present experiences.

Counteractive Therapy vs Experiential Therapy
As I mentioned in a prior article, Experiential Therapy, Like EMDR, Helps to Achieve Transformational Breakthroughs, CBT works as a counteractive therapy that provides clients in therapy with an alternate scenario to their usual way of thinking and feeling.

But, for many traumatized clients, this form of counteractive therapy isn't enough.  They can see the distortions in their thinking, but they're unable to feel it in an authentic way or to change it.

Emotional Trauma Often Creates Negative Expectations About the Future

This can be very frustrating and, for some clients, it makes them feel ashamed.  They feel like they're "not doing therapy right."  For some clients, the contradiction between how they feel and what they can  see can make them feel that there's something seriously wrong with them.

These clients often leave therapy because they continue to have negative expectations for their future.  At that point, they leave therapy with the idea that "I tried therapy--it doesn't work for me."

But the problem isn't with the client.  The problem is with the type of therapy, CBT.

Experiential Therapy and Brain Research
When it works, CBT affects the logical part of the brain, but it often has no impact on the emotional part of the brain, which is the part of the brain that needs to be changed when emotional trauma is involved.

We're fortunate now to have the brain research to prove this, as cited in Unlocking the Emotional Brain: Eliminating Symptoms at Their Roots Using Memory Reconsolidation by Bruce Ecker, Robin Ticic, Laurel Hulley and Robert A. Neimeyer, and in other recent books and articles about brain research as it applies to emotional trauma.

Experiential Therapy and Brain Research

In their book, the authors discuss research that demonstrates that experiential therapies, like EMDR and other similar types of therapy, help these clients to have a transformational experience, as I mentioned in my prior article about experiential therapy.

Rather than just being a counteractive therapy that only provides an alternative on a logical level, experiential therapy affects the limbic system so that the client not only recognizes the distortion on a cognitive level--they also feel it.

With experiential therapies, like EMDR, Somatic Experiencing and clinical hypnosis, clients remember the narrative of their traumatic memories, but they experience the memories differently on an emotional level from how they did before they came to therapy.

Experiential Therapies Can Provide Transformative Experiences

Often, clients, who participate in experiential therapy, will make comments like:

• "When I think about the memories, I remember everything that happened, but I no longer feel traumatized."
• "I never thought I would be able to think about these memories without feeling upset about them."
• "I used to feel so upset by these memories, but now when I think about them, my feelings about them are neutral."

Experiential therapies also help clients to overcome feelings of foreboding (based on their trauma past) about the future.

Getting Help in Therapy

If you have a history of trauma that causes you to feel pessimistic about your future, you could benefit from getting help in therapy with a licensed psychotherapist who provides experiential therapy.

Getting Help in Therapy

Rather than feeling trapped by your emotional history, you could be free to live a fulfilling life.

About Me

I am a licensed NYC psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR and Somatic Experiencing therapist who works with individual adults and couples.

One of my specialties is helping clients to overcome emotional trauma.

To find out more about me, visit my website:  Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.