New Hope

I had my 2nd session with my new therapist today.  Despite it only being the second session, I can already tell a huge difference between her and my old therapist and I'm so grateful.  Like I mentioned last time, my old therapist never sat down with me to set goals or a treatment plan.  For the most part, it was just me talking, not that that was necessarily a bad thing, but it was definitely missing a lot.

So today my therapist introduced me to some trauma therapy techniques she wants to do with me.  She wants to try both and then see which one seems to have more effect and go with that one.

So the first one is EMDR- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing"  It has to do with bilateral sensory input and our brains ability to work through things and cope with things.  The therapy involves the therapist doing something to initiate the bilateral input, such as moving her fingers back and forth in front of my face, using musical tones, foot or hand tapping etc etc.  The device she uses stimulates vibration in these little devices that I hold in my hand and the vibration goes back and forth between each hand.  Then I recall a distressing event while my therapist acts as a guide and slowly guides me to more positive thinking.  It's supposed to help lessen my emotional response to triggers and better cope with things.

The other therapy is called "Parts" and from what I understand it's close to cognitive behavior therapy.  It will retrain my brain to change how I think/feel about myself.  Just because other people have made me a certain way, doesn't mean it's true, so the goal is to teach my brain to see this.

I'm not saying that my depression will ever COMPLETELY go away, but for probably the first time ever, I have a teeny, tiny, minuscule amount of hope that maybe it won't be as unbearable as it is now, and this feeling is very new to me.


http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/emdr-what-is-it