Revital Goodman
Psychotherapy
Expertise
EMDR
Through EMDR therapy we safely and calmly address unresolved memories and experiences that may be at the core of your current struggles. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is the cutting-edge therapy in the treatment of trauma, PTSD, phobias, and past negative experiences. EMDR has a formidable body or research asserting its efficacy. People throughout the world experience life-changing outcomes through EMDR.
In EMDR therapy, we explore your past experiences in order to understand how they shaped your worldview and programmed you to pre-determined beliefs about yourself and your value as a person. These pre-determined beliefs may no longer work for you – or worse, may hurt you.
Often, people who seek EMDR therapy identify a gap between what they know is true and what they feel is true. For example, “I know that I am worthy of love, but I feel worthless” or, “I know that I am safe, but I feel in danger”.
EMDR therapy allows you to leave the past in the past, live in the present, and determine your future. EMDR therapy directly affects the brain, “unfreezes” traumatic memories, and allows you to think about past traumatic or disturbing experiences without feeling distress, without reliving them, and without being scripted by them. The negative and painful emotions, images, and body-stored trauma will be reduced or completely dissolved, and will give way to positive, self-chosen, and empowered beliefs about yourself and the world.
Trauma & Toxic Stress
Unresolved trauma can manifest in symptoms associated with myriad mental health problems, often leading to incorrect diagnoses, failing or inadequate treatment, and lingering emotional pain. Trauma is defined as the result of any physical or emotional event you experience as hurtful, threatening, or dangerous that overwhelms your physical and emotional abilities and that has lasting negative effects on your functioning.
At the time of a traumatic event, powerful emotions – fear, panic, despair – flood your brain and can diminish your ability to process the experience; your brain defaults into healthy survival mechanisms and responses: fight, flight, freeze, or collapse.
But because the brain may be unable to process the experience during the event, the trauma becomes “frozen” in the memory network -- essentially frozen in time. The images, smells, sounds, and feelings associated with the traumatic event are stored in their raw, unprocessed form.
While the brain responds out of survival at the time of trauma, when triggered in the present, you may find yourself responding in ways that are not necessary, healthy, appropriate nor adaptive.
Such responses create more stress in your life -- leading to more conflicts, more anger, guilt and shame, and more stress.
You are trapped. And you start to believe that something is wrong with you.
As such, while trauma is a normal reaction to an abnormal life experience, unresolved trauma can have devastating impact on your daily functioning and interferes with the ways you see yourself and the world and how you relate to others.
EMDR therapy is the gold-standard in the treatment of unresolved trauma. EMDR therapy is aimed at re-examining default responses and replacing them with healthy, adaptive, and desired abilities.
Abuse & Neglect
Many people were raised in households that appeared to be functioning and normative; however, they were exposed to chronic damaging and hurtful messages or treatment by their caregivers. Forms of abuse include inappropriate sexual behavior or touch, physical hurt or physical punishment, and hurtful verbal-emotional messages. Neglect can be physical or emotional.
While sexual or physical abuse or physical neglect are relatively easy to identify as damaging, we are now aware of the severe, long-lasting hurt caused by emotional abuse and emotional neglect. Emotional abuse and emotional neglect can be covert and may be prevalent even in households that appear to be functioning, “good”, or “normal”.
The results of emotional abuse and emotional neglect may be damaging to the person’s worldview and view of self. A child that was exposed to chronic abuse or neglect may become an adult that internalizes and adopts hurtful beliefs or views of self. Common core beliefs may include: I am not safe; I am not wanted; I am not worthy of love; I am bad; I am a burden; I am unseen; I don’t matter; I am abandoned; I am defective or bad.
Untreated neglect or abuse may result in life-long emotional pain, dysfunctional relationships, struggles with intimacy, poor parenting skills, sadness, shame, and fear. EMDR therapy is highly effective in assisting my clients in understanding how their life circumstances led them to internalize negative and irrational views of themselves and can replace these negative perceptions with adaptive, preferred, and reality-based views of self.
