When Memories Shape Your Life

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Dear listeners, you know like there are moments in our lives that don't just pass, they lodge themselves deep inside and shape how we see the world, how we trust, how we breathe. For some of us, those moments come from I'd say growing up in homes where safety felt uncertain, where love and fear lived side by side, and for a long time we might think that's just how it is that we carry those imprints forever. But what if there was a way to process those memories not by talking endlessly in circles, but by actually changing how they live in your body and mind, right? So today we are exploring a therapy that's been quietly transforming lives, one that works with brain's own capacity to heal. Yeah.

Meet Molly And Define EMDR

SPEAKER_00 1:07

So dearest friends, I'm your host, Abik, and you are listening Healthy Mind Healthy Life. This is where we talk about mental health in real practical terms, no jargon, no quick fixes, just honest conversations about what it takes to feel a little more whole. And today I am sitting down with someone who knows firsthand like what it means to grow up in a turbulent household and find a path toward healing that. So, today we have a very lovely guest with us today. Please welcome Molly Orkett. So, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_03 1:45

Thank you so much for having me, Avik. It's great to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:49

Amazing, amazing, Molly. I mean, uh dear listeners, before we delve deep into the discussion, I'll quickly love to introduce it. Molly, Molly Orchard. So she she's here to talk about the EMDR therapy, what it is, how it works, and why she believes that it has the power to change lives in ways traditional talk therapy sometimes cannot. So I do not want to take much time off yours, dear listeners. Let's get started. And we have with us Molly, so I would love to have a deep conversation with her. So so Molly, like, I mean, you know, like a lot of people have heard that letters EMDR thrown around, but there's this I mean, there's still so much confusion about what exactly it is. I mean, I believe Umbi, if we can share, like, what is the biggest misconception here that you have come across when people first hear about EMDR?

Clearing Up EMDR Misconceptions

SPEAKER_03 2:52

That's such a great question. And it's actually why I released this podcast that we're going to talk a little bit about today. EMDR stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy, which is a mouthful. It's actually a lot more simple than it sounds. It really, this type of therapy integrates both physical eye movements or tapping, bilateral stimulation, and discussing or thinking about traumatic memories. And it's been designed to really mimic REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep. So it's something that our body already naturally does every night.

SPEAKER_00 3:42

That's interesting. Yeah. And yeah, and and so also here I would love to ask about like when so suppose when someone hears that it involves eye movements and or maybe the bilateral stimulations. So what is actually or I mean their first reaction. I mean, what's their first reaction? Like, how do you help them understand that this is not something strange, but uh it's actually rooted in how the brain processes trauma.

SPEAKER_03 4:19

Yeah, so what's so great and interesting about EMDR is that it's not a painful experience. Your eyes should never hurt, and or the tapping, it should never hurt. And a lot of times when somebody is experiencing EMDR doing this type of therapy, they're so surprised actually by how quickly memories become less distressing. So, really, I mean, first off, it's important that you have a really good therapist, a good EMDR therapist. You have to have the foundation of trust and safety with the person that you're working with. But when it comes to EMDR, the reason that I love it as a clinician is it actually keeps me from burning out helping people utilizing EMDR because, sort of like what you were saying in that perfect intro, it's not talking in circles. You come, you come to therapy to do EMDR in a very focused way. We take something, it can be with EMDR, it can be a memory, it can be a theme, it can be a person. It really can be anything that you want to process that day. And it takes, we take that individual thing and just focus on that. And usually from the beginning of the session until the end of the session, most of the time that person leaves their therapy session and they don't feel distressed around the target anymore. So I I explained this to a friend the other day. I said, EMDR is the closest scientific thing we have to magic. That's the way that I describe it because it's such a powerful and influential type of therapy.

SPEAKER_00 6:23

Exactly. Yeah. I mean, it's really, and I think it's so important because when something sounds unfamiliar, we tend to kind of assume that it's not for us. Right. Right, right, and uh but but if you can understand that EMDR is really about helping the brain like I mean the brain do what it's already trying to do, process and pile away difficult memories, it actually starts to make a lot of more lot more sense. So Yes. Yeah, I agree. I agree with that. So and so you also mentioned that growing up in a turbulent household, like

Growing Up In Survival Mode

SPEAKER_00 7:06

without going into more than like than you are comfortable with. And so if you can share like what that environment does to you as a young mind, and how those early experiences actually shape the patterns that you found yourself stuck in later.

SPEAKER_03 7:26

Absolutely. I think that you know, something that's really important to me is humility. It's just showing up with real honesty. And I'm not, I always describe myself as like the people's therapist. I'm not like an armchair therapist that asks you over and over again how you feel about something. I'm I'm somebody whose life, I really credit EMDR to profoundly changing my life. So as I as I have told you, I did I grew up in a turbulent household. I there were drugs around me, physical violence, emotional violence, you name it. And what it did to me was it put me in this constant state of survival mode. It was like this hypervigilance that I didn't even know I was walking around with. It was like sort of if it felt like I was always looking for the next thing. I was always trying to make sure that I was gonna have safety for the future. It was like my mind was not only living 10 years in the past, but it was also constantly living 10 years in the future. And the way that that impacted me was a ton of broken relationships. That was romantic relationships, friendships, work relationships. And I couldn't understand why that was happening. I really, it was like I couldn't see through my trauma. I had rose-colored glasses on, but they they weren't rosy. They were, they I was just living my life through my trauma. So the way that I actually learned about EMDR, well, not learned about it, but realized I needed it, was I read a book that was very inspirational around trauma, which I'm sure many people have heard, the body keeps the score. And I decided to get trained in it as a clinician. And during the training, the person who was training us actually pulled me aside at the end of the training because we were practicing on each other. And she said, I'm not sure what's going on with you, but you seem to be dissociating. It was like she was seeing I was like floating. It looked like apparently I was like floating above my body. And she said, You should probably get some help. You should probably have an EMDR therapist. And that's how this journey began of me really actually starting to heal myself so that I could help other people.

SPEAKER_01 10:18

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 10:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:21

So when you look back now, after doing the work, can you identify like what some of those root patterns were, or maybe the ways your nervous system learned to respond that you did not even realize were connected to your childhood?

SPEAKER_03 10:41

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I I think that I have I've I've dealt with chronic health issues for a very long time. And there is a study that I believe it was ran by Kaiser Permanente, that you you look at all of these factors of your life, and it tells you how likely you are to develop an autoimmune disease or die of a heart attack or all of these things because of how I mean, we're just kind of catching up to the science of psychology and the way that it's impacting our physical health system. And so when about a year ago, I have I've been doing this for a long time now. And so consistently when people would talk to me about EMDR, they would ask me, oh, is it hypnosis? And it was like, no, no, no, it's it's not hypnosis. It's but I but I understand why people would think it was, but it's really a science, it's it's truly an empirically studied modality of therapy with a lot of research behind it. And I had a moment

Why She Built A Live EMDR Podcast

SPEAKER_03 12:00

where I thought, wow, people keep asking me these questions, really trying to understand what EMDR is, how EMDR works. And that's when it came to me that no one had ever recorded a podcast or anything like that of EMDR. And so that's when the fabric of being my podcast was born was to really teach people and show people that there's a different form of healing that can happen. And it really following live sessions, it's the first ever live session EMDR podcast. And being able to follow people as they undergo three months of EMDR therapy, I think is not only allowing people to understand the process, but it's also giving people hope to see wow, in three months, these two participants, Danny and Louise, walk in as certain types of people and they end up leaving completely different.

SPEAKER_01 13:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:14

So here I mean, obviously, I mean that's the that's a tricky part that uh we don't always see like how the past is running the show in the present. And and with this, we we always I mean we we just think that that's we are anxious, hypervision, and unable to trust, also, like so yeah, exactly.

What A Session Feels Like

SPEAKER_00 13:40

So for someone who's never done EMPR, I mean it can be hard to picture what it actually looks like in practice, right? So if you can just focus through what a session feels like, not the clinical terms, but in the human ways, like what's what's happening in the room and all. So if you can share.

SPEAKER_03 14:01

Yeah. And and just so you know, my part of my whole spiel about not being an armchair therapist is this doesn't have to be complicated. I don't need to explain this as if I'm a doctor or in some clinical way that makes me seem smarter than everyone else in the room. This is a this this is for the people. This is a human therapy that every human is is available to understand and really wrap their heads around. It's not that complicated. So I'm glad you're asking this question because the it's a little complicated. And I'm gonna try to explain in very simple terms why that is. With EMDR therapy, you can utilize eye movements going from left to right, you can also utilize sound left to right, excuse me, and you can utilize tapping left to right. So the whole point of EMDR is stimulating the left and right part of your brain in whatever way seems possible, or however, however, your therapist is utilizing it. So for me, I love eye movements. It's just it it also is how the way Francine Shapiro is the person who invented EMDR and she was working with veterans and also moving through a divorce herself. And she actually realized she was taking these walks, I believe, through Central Park, and she was noticing that the left and right stimulation of her feet and look looking left and right on her walk towards the end of her walks, she was feeling less bothered by her separation or her divorce that she was moving through at the time. And she decided actually to put that into practice because she was working with these veterans and she said, Well, something's working on these walks for me, whether it's the left-right stimulation of my feet or the left-right of my eyes, looking back and forth as I think about this thing that's distressing me. And that's how EMDR was created. So, back to your question, you can mimic left and right stimulation in a lot of different ways. I mean, you can even, if you're feeling bothered in the car, for example, you can tap left and right on your steering wheel and it will help you process through things quicker. So for me, I utilize typically eye movements. And if somebody is really heightened, really stressed out, I will also have them tap on their thighs with the left and right movement of their eyes just to try to keep them in their body. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_00 17:18

Makes sense.

SPEAKER_03 17:19

Yeah. So the way that a session happens, and again, you can hear this on my podcast. You can hear these sessions happen live, is I ask a series of questions and then I use a rating scale, zero to 10. How much does this thing bother you? And that's really the gauge for me to know as we're moving through the eye movements if what we're doing is working. Cause I will ask, I will have somebody go back to what was bothering them and ask them again, zero to ten, how much does this bother you? And 98% of the time, everyone responds that it's gone down. So someone can come in with something at a nine of how much it's bothering them. And even just halfway through the session, oftentimes that can be cut down into a four. It can go, it can it can really, really lose its distressing nature. It can, it can the it diminishes the vividness of the emotional charge, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 18:27

Makes sense, definitely. Wow. Thank you so much. Powerful stuff. Yeah. Exactly. I mean, it's really, really helpful for the listeners, I believe, today. So Molly, like I know time is constrained, but still I'd quickly love to ask you if if you have to give one advice to the listeners today, what that would be.

Never Stop Being Curious

SPEAKER_02 18:53

Oh, that's such a hard question. Advice for the listeners never stop being curious. Because the moment you stop being curious, you stop believing that things can get better.

SPEAKER_00 19:25

And if the listeners want to connect with you, how they can connect.

SPEAKER_03 19:31

You can find me on Instagram. You can find my podcast on Instagram. It's at the it's Fabric of Being podcast, or my personal therapy account, which is Molly Orchard O-R-C-H-A-R-D underscore. And that is also on TikTok, that one. And you can listen to the Fabric of Being wherever you get your podcasts. Spotify, Apple, YouTube, all of the above.

SPEAKER_00 20:03

Amazing. Amazing.

Closing Thoughts And Support

SPEAKER_00 20:05

So dear listeners, like what I'll do is I'll put all the links, details, everything into the show notes for your easy reference so that you can easily reach out to Molly. And I have to say that you know sometimes the most powerful healing happens not by talking about what hurt us, but by letting our brains and bodies process it in a way that actually changes how it's I mean, how it is stored. Right. So Molly, thank you so much for sharing your story and for helping us understand what EMDR really is and what it can do.

SPEAKER_03 20:48

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me, Avik. It was great chatting with you today.

SPEAKER_00 20:53

Lovely. And dear listeners, like if today's conversation actually helped you something in you, then and and if you have been carrying memories that feel too heavy or uh the patterns that won't uh uh budge, then just know that there are ways forward. You but you might not have tried it. So healing takes time and it takes courage as well, but you don't have to do it alone, that is for sure. So I'll just say this that you don't have to be alone, and uh thank you so much for being here. I'm your host, Avik, and this is Hadiman Hadilight. I'll say take care of yourselves and see you in the next one. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_03 21:37

Thank you.