Unlocking the Power of Adjunct Therapy to Heal Early Childhood Trauma
Adjunct Therapy is a powerful tool to help our clients heal especially when it comes to addressing wounds that occurred early in someone’s life. I have found that when a client struggles have resulted from attachment wounds or childhood trauma it can be difficult to help the client heal without creating a strong foundation first. This is because the negative experiences early on have made it difficult to consider new possibilities, insights, and associations.
Working collaboratively with a therapist that is able to address pre-verbal trauma and attachment wounds can help your clients build a strong foundation for their therapeutic journey with you. In this video I discuss the power of the collaborative process and how Adjunct EMDR Therapy can help clients heal with the support of a treatment team. Below you will find the transcript of the video.
Are you a therapist that struggled to make progress with a client that was originally a good fit? And as you dove into the work with them, you've realized that there's some underlying trauma issues that are getting in the way of the progress, and you're realizing that.
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Without addressing these issues, it's really going to be difficult for them to be able to accomplish their goals, but you're hesitant to transfer them out because of the fact that you have such strong rapport with them.
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And it really would be more detrimental to them to transfer them out to another therapist completely.
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If that's the case, then you're in the right place, because today we're going to talk about how adjunct EMDR therapy can help your clients thrive by bringing in a secondary therapist to help process early trauma, abuse and neglect.
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Before we jump into the content of today's video, I just want to take the time to introduce myself.
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My name is Amber Creamer and I'm a licensed therapist and certified EMDR therapist, and I specialize in helping women who have experienced negative childhood experiences heal their inner child, learn to quiet their inner critic, and live their life boldly without second guessing.
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So let's go ahead and jump into the content for today's video.
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So what is adjunct therapy? Adjunct therapy is one of primary therapists and a secondary therapist come together and support the work that the client is doing within therapy.
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And each therapist works within their own clinical area of expertise to help the client work towards their overarching goals.
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And it's not the goal of the secondary therapist to replace the role of the primary therapist, but it's just their role to supplement that work.
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So a lot of times as a secondary therapist will come in when there's processing that's been blocked.
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And they'll come in and support that work so that the primary therapist is able to continue that work.
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That they've already been doing with the client.
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And so oftentimes both therapists will work concurrently with the client to be able to help them maintain that rapport that has already been established with the primary therapist and then also address those underlying blocks that are impacting their progress and so
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With adjunct work, the client really is able to get the highest level of care because each therapist is working within their clinical level of expertise, and they're able to do their best work because they're not being stretched in ways that are outside of their scope of competence and their scope of genius.
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And and so this really does provide the best results for clients and because at the end of the day that's our goal, right, is to be able to help our clients thrive and adjunct therapy really can enhance that and help that happen more quickly.
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So when we think about adjunct EMDR therapy, it's especially beneficial when we think about bringing it in to address those early childhood trauma abuse and neglect concerns.
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So when we talk about early childhood trauma, we're talking about that zero to three-year old time frame of somebody's life sometimes before that.
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But I'll go ahead and focus on that early childhood trauma, abuse and neglect in another video.
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So if you're interested in that, stay tuned and go ahead and check out the next video.
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And the thing that is tricky with it is that with those early concerns, we're not able to address them with traditional EMDR orE talk therapy because those things are held in implicit memory.
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We need to address them differently.
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And so being able to address these concerns at their root can really help clients resolve those those.
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Blocks to processing.
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Because oftentimes when we're working with clients, it's like we'll continue to see the same themes show up within the work.
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And a lot of times they're they're rooted and held in that early time period of life.
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And so through going to that space and addressing that, it really helps to move the processing along and it helps the later processing move much quicker because of early childhood trauma, abuse and neglect work.
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We're really creating a strong foundation for the client to be able to.
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Shift their perspective and have those strong relationships strong.
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Concept of self of their value, of their worth and that starts there and so by addressing that it allows the processing to move quicker.
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So I'm sure you're wondering what does adjunct EMDR therapy look like in practice? And So what I found is it really just depends on how quickly the client is wanting to move through the processing.
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So there is a weekly 90 minute option where the client would attend sessions weekly until we're able to process through.
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What needs to be processed through and then you know they're able to work concurrently with their primary therapist.
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Or there's the option of doing an EMDR intensive where we would work together for three hours a day from one to three days, and this is best for people that are looking to really feel better faster and are wanting to accelerate the work in a condensed format.
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So it really just depends on.
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You know how quickly the client is wanting to dive into these issues.
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How much time they have to set aside, whether it be better to condense the work into, you know, a week time frame or they want to extend the work over a longer period of time and you know either way they're able to to get that healing, but it just depends on what they're looking for.
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So let me know what you think about adjunct and your therapy in the chat.
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If you have a client that you're thinking about right now that you've been struggling to, to help them see progress.
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And you're thinking about, you know, hm there may be some some early childhood stuff that's going on in there that that you haven't really been able to address.
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And your client lives in Florida, Georgia or California.
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Reach out and I can schedule a consultation with you and learn a little bit more about the work that you're doing and see whether.
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This early childhood trauma work is what's best for your client.
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Take care.
