HM297 Neutralize Feelings about your Ex with EMDR

Can unresolved emotional triggers from past relationships still affect your present? Absolutely!

Despite a decade-long divorce and his temporary recovery from throat cancer bringing brief peace, old patterns recently emerged, rekindling anger and emotional turmoil with Dr. Liz’s ex-husband. Dr. Liz shares her personal story navigating the complexities of managing reactivity towards her ex-husband and being frustrated with feeling like she’s in the same place.

Hear how Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy became a crucial tool in addressing these deep-seated emotions, especially during this significant life transition as her youngest daughter heads off to college.

About Dr. Liz

Support the podcast by joining my Patreon at https://patreon.com/HypnotizeMewithDrLiz

Winner of numerous awards including Top 100 Moms in Business, Dr. Liz provides psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, and hypnosis to people wanting a fast, easy way to transform all around the world. She has a PhD in Clinical Psychology, is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LMHC) and has special certification in Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy. Specialty areas include Anxiety, Insomnia, and Deeper Emotional Healing.

————–

Do you have Chronic Insomnia? Find out more about Dr. Liz’s Better Sleep Program at https://bit.ly/sleepbetterfeelbetter

Search episodes at the Podcast Page http://bit.ly/HM-podcast

Help yourself with Hypnosis Downloads by Dr. Liz! http://bit.ly/HypnosisMP3Downloads

———

A problem shared is a problem halved. In person and online hypnosis and CBT for healing and transformation. Schedule your free consultation at https://www.drlizhypnosis.com.

Listened to in over 140 countries, Hypnotize Me is the podcast about hypnosis, transformation, and healing. Certified hypnotherapist and Licensed Mental Health Counselor, Dr. Liz Bonet, discusses hypnosis and interviews professionals doing transformational work

Thank you for tuning in! Please subscribe to auto-download new episodes to your listening device.

Transcript

Hey everyone. Dr Liz here, I hope you’re doing well today. It is a pretty regular day here in Dr Liz Land. Today I thought I would talk about my own personal experience with EMDR. I’ve run three episodes before this exploring EMDR versus hypnosis. So if you haven’t heard those and you’re interested, you can go back and listen to them. They would be HM294, 295, and 296. So this is HM 297. Hypnotize Me 297. Coming up on 300 episodes here, that’s a lot.

So while I was doing these interviews about EMDR and hypnosis, I was seeing a therapist. I am seeing a therapist right now. I just recently did the interviews and I didn’t realize that she did EMDR. I’ve seen her for a couple of months actually, because I’m going through some big transitions. My youngest daughter graduated high school. She’s headed off to college. And I found myself really triggered and angry at my ex-husband. He would send me these nasty emails and they would just really upset me honestly.

So we’ve been divorced since 2009,. Well over 10 years. Some years have been better that we’ve gotten along and I actually thought we were getting along pretty well, but I realized that I think some of that was because he had cancer.

So he had throat cancer and he was pretty debilitated for almost a year and he didn’t really have the energy to attack me. Now my daughter was already living with me full-time during that year but I would take her over to see him.

She often did not want to go, but I was like you know, let’s just pick up some books of yours and say hi to your dad and, you know, ask if he wants some soup or whatever. He never wanted my soup people, but regardless I was like no, we gotta go visit your dad because he didn’t have the energy to come visit her or pick her up for dinner or anything like that. So what I am telling you right now a good mom story. I felt like this was a good mom thing to do to keep the relationship with her father, even though this is not someone I particularly like. Well, during that time he became very grateful for me, expressing what a wonderful mother I had been all these years, things he had not really said before.

He was seeing the contrast because he had a child with another woman. So he has my two girls, which are 18 and 22. And he has a younger son who’s like three now, but at the time this is a couple years ago. At the time, his son was a baby and he saw all kinds of differences in mothering between the new mom and me, the old mom, so he became very grateful for me. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. So I thought, great, there’s so many years that my prayer was like higher power, either take him or take these feelings away. Okay, like that was my prayer, I’m going to be very honest.

He was so awful to me in all kinds of ways like texts that he would send me emails that he would send me. He would try to gaslight me around things that I knew were not true, very just like classic narcissistic things that he would do. He’s a narcissist. So this was like a period of peace and when he got sick, I was like, oh, actually these feelings have been taken away. I don’t want this man to die. Like he needs to stick around, to be a dad to his girls, like they need him. So it felt like a miracle in my mind.

Eventually he is better and he goes back to his old tactics and starts attacking me again. Often it’s around financial stuff, taxes and who’s going to claim who and who’s paying for what, and stuff like that, but you know he’ll throw some like character assassinations in there as well.

Now it took me a long time to learn how not to respond to him, how not to text back, how to pause, how to ignore all kinds of strategies that I would use to not inflame the situation and to help myself calm down. I had to learn how to pause. I had to learn how to just get the information that I needed and not respond to anything else. So that was my strategy for years and years and years like we’re talking over five years and I think being in recovery really, really helped with that, because recovery can help you learn emotional regulation skills and that’s what those are.

I teach emotional regulation all the time in my practice through the DBT manual. But a great free way to learn emotional regulation is actually through any 12-step program, and there’s lots of them Under-Earners Anonymous I’ve done that one. Overeaters Anonymous I’ve done that one. There’s Al-Anon I’ve done that one. Various 12-step programs.

So this is a process that happened over years, but I found myself earlier this year just refusing to do that anymore, just very angry. I have a hard time accessing it even right now because I did do EMDR on it. Okay, this is what we’re getting to people. I found myself really reactive to him like I refuse. I refused to let him gaslight me and continue to ignore that and instead begin shooting emails back like these are the facts and don’t think that if you tell a lie long enough, that it’s going to become the truth. So it really upset me, which is another reason I started therapy again.

So I did some work in therapy around my daughter leaving and graduating, some of the fears I have for her for college, some things around my current marriage, and we also got to my ex-husband. Now we had talked about him before in session. It’s pretty impossible not to, because he does all kinds of bullshit. But again I found myself really, really angry one day and so my therapist said I think we need to do EMDR around this and I was like what you do EMDR? She’s like, yeah, I do. I was like fantastic, great, great, like everything is aligning here. Okay, I just done these interviews about EMDR and I thought, yeah, let’s give it a try. Now in the interviews I say, I had EMDR around, an incident with an ex-boyfriend like many, many years ago I will say like 2014, so like 10 years ago actually and found it very, very helpful.

And my biggest concern back then was if we do this, can I still tell this story in a very funny way, and the therapist response was like, yes, I think you’ll be able to. I said, okay, great, let’s do it. And it was very helpful.  I found the prep session pretty emotional, so that was a change. I really felt like I could get to the sadness and frustration around what was going on. And then the EMDR session I found extremely helpful.

Now my therapist used little buzzers in your hands so you don’t have to like stare at someone’s fingers or a light bar going back and forth.  She used these buzzers that would go left and right. They buzz in my left and right hands, you know, going back and forth. That’s a bilateral stimulation of EMDR that happens. I liked that process better than using my eyes to go back and forth.

We started with a memory and then she would run the buzzers and then I would talk about what came up, and so it was like these series of memories that came up that felt like stream of consciousness to me. So some of the memories were going back to the beginning of our relationship when I met him, when I was 25, and some of the things happening around then. I was in grad school and lots of changes were happening. I had such high hopes for being a mother At that point I had actually decided that if I didn’t get married or find someone that wanted to be a father with me, that I would have children on my own, because I was working with severely abused children and I was like I can be a better mother by myself than most people are with two parents. So that was important to me to eventually be a mother. But he wanted children and I thought he’d make a great dad, and you know all the dreams you have when you first meet someone when you’re young.

So a lot of these memories came up and they would sometimes bounce around from the past to the present, but they seemed to be all related to what was going on and then we would check in with the intensity of the original thought or belief that I started with. And where was it Now? I didn’t change the belief. I don’t mean to hold out on you guys, but there are some things that are more private, so I’m not going to tell you what the original belief was that we’re working with. So that didn’t change, but the intensity around it changed.

So I can say it today, just sort of like it’s a fact, instead of having sadness, frustration, a whole body wash come up when I say it. So it’s sort of like saying, yeah, it’s going to rain today in south Florida. It feels like that, like there’s nothing around it to me. So that is a huge change. And when I think about him in the past week this was just a week ago or so about there’s nothing there, there’s no like anger, frustration, there’s not even like negative thoughts, really sort of like he’s a non-entity. He is someone I still have to deal with. I have to manage some financial things with him around our daughters, and that’s about it. Other than that, I can avoid him, that’s it. So that feels very, very different. That is the direct result of EMDR and I really wish I had done it years ago actually. Well, years ago he was being nice to me, so that doesn’t make any sense.

Right, you do it when you need to do it. You find the therapist that you need at the time and the technique. I’ve always believed that when you need hypnosis, you’ll find it. When you need EMDR, you’ll find it.  You need CBT cognitive behavioral therapy, or DBT or internal family system whatever it is that you need, maybe plant medicine, a shaman, who knows you will find it when you need it. That feels much better than saying, oh, I should have done this years ago.

I think the feeling behind that is remembering how awful it’s felt with him and wanting that to go away, wanting that to not be the case, wanting to feel like I feel now, like neutral, that’s it. Neutral,

I’m going to finish up this podcast, go about my day, that’s it. I don’t have to be filled with feelings of hatred or anger or shame or anything like that when I think about him. So that’s my experience with EMDR. I am not trained in EMDR right now. Who knows if in the future I will be. I would give it about a year from this podcast to check in to see if I’m trained in it, because chances are I may be next year. Sometimes I’ll do a technique myself and then want to get trained in it. So check on me in about a year if you want EMDR.

Otherwise, if you’d like to do the technique yourself to process trauma, then definitely seek someone out that does it. There’s Jacquelyn Haley, who I just interviewed. There’s Jamie Weatherholt, who I just interviewed and, believe me, there’s all kinds of EMDR practitioners around who are excellent. So look on the EMDR website or Google it up in your area or ask in a group or a friend. Whatever you need to do.

Or if you feel led more towards hypnosis, then of course I’m your person. You can always reach out to me and we’ll talk about what your goals are. What do you want to accomplish with it? What do you want to heal? What do you want to feel better about? So you can always reach out to me, drliz@drlizhypnosis.com. All right, everyone, I hope you’re healthy and safe. Peace.

Transcribed by https://podium.page