Mental Health Awareness Month: EMDR Therapy With Steve

Hi Idiots.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and we wanted to take a minute to shine a little light on it. As a show, we've unintentionally become pretty big endorsers of taking care of your mental health. Aside from putting up with each other for hours a day every day (gulp), we all have things about ourselves outside of work that it never hurts to work on.

That goes for all of you, too. As many of you are probably aware, our show is sponsored by Better Help, an online therapy service that matches you with a licensed therapist suited to your needs. If any of you have ever considered looking into therapy or just want to see what it's all about, you can use our code FREEBEER to get a discount on your first session. This is not a sponsored post, we're just mentioning it.

This month we will be doing a mini-series about each show member's experience with therapy and how it helped them. Each member has done therapy in some capacity and believes that being open about their mental health is the best way to remove the stigma around it. Last week, Maitlynn opened up about her experience with therapy and you can read about that here.

Today, we'll need to do a little research to explain what this form of unique therapy is, but it's one that Steve stands by; EMDR Therapy. 

What is EMDR Therapy?

According to the Cleveland Clinic, EMDR is a type of therapy that involves moving your eyes in a specific while you process traumatic memories. The therapy works by "combining eye movements and guided instructions to help reprocess what you remember about the negative event", leading you to become desensitized to the trauma associated with the memory. The video below demonstrates how the therapy works and explains the process better.

Here is Steve's experience with this form of therapy:

EMDR has been amazing! I’ve done a bunch of sessions over the last few months and it has really helped with a lot of different things I was struggling with. Basically, it’s a way to take past trauma, bad experiences, etc. and reprogram your brain to process the memories differently. The memories are still there, but the hurt/pain/trauma associated with them is greatly reduced and in some cases, completely eliminated. I was a little hesitant going into it, but it’s definitely been worth it.

We have also had lots of people text into the show with positive experiences doing EMDR therapy. If this is something you are interested in exploring, speak to a licensed professional.