Mark Baxter

Yeah.

But we also know now that all of these things exist in the body as well, especially PTSD.

It's stuck in the nervous system.

There's an incomplete trauma response process that hasn't finished in the nervous system.

So a person got stuck in freeze mode at the time of, say, a car crash, and that freeze mode is still inside them.

And in that frozenness in their nervous system, the re-experiencing keeps happening.

It's as if there's a frozenness in time.

So we actually need to unfrost that.

And one of the ways we can do that in EMDR is that we find the target of what a person, you know, where they got stuck, the images that come with that, the feeling in the body that came with that, the belief system that gets aligned with that.

And we have them go through this kind of mindful process of having dual attention of the here and now in the therapy room of safety, but also constantly

of the moment.

So it's almost like they're in the past and the present at the same time.

They've got the support of the therapist there.

And we use eye movements to move their eyes left and right, left and right, left and right, left and right, as they're processing this.

That works the working memory in a sense that, and also creates this kind of

kind of like a mild altered state of consciousness where a person is able to unfreeze what happened to complete what happened and to have a different perspective of and then also a different belief system of what happened so rather than some sense of like i was responsible for that car accident

What is wrong with me?

It's like I survived and I made it.

And so a perspective shift around what happened and how they relate to what happened and the story they tell themselves about what happened makes a big difference.

And also you'll see people expressing the leftover kind of trauma content in their nervous system.