[SPEAKER_01]: Therapy Chat Podcast Episode 504 This is the Therapy Chat Podcast with Laura Regan, LCSWC.
[SPEAKER_01]: The information shared in this podcast is not a substitute for seeking help from a licensed mental health professional.
[SPEAKER_01]: And now, here's your host, Laura Regan, LCSWC.
[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome back to Therapy Chat.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm your host, Laura Reagan.
[SPEAKER_02]: And this week, continuing our theme of addressing childhood trauma, and developmental trauma and attachment wounds.
[SPEAKER_02]: During childhood, I'm replaying for you in episode where I interviewed Dr. Kurt Widthom about how he uses EMDR with adolescence.
[SPEAKER_02]: So last week, we were talking about play therapy,
[SPEAKER_02]: which is often used with younger kids.
[SPEAKER_02]: Of course, it could be used with adolescents too.
[SPEAKER_02]: And this week, we're talking about working with the adolescents and teens using EMDR.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I hope you will find this conversation to be useful, helpful, and let's get right into it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Hi, welcome back to Therapy Chat.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm your host, Laura Reagan, and today with me is Kurt Widhelm, LMFT, who is a group practice owner and Los Angeles focusing on trauma and adolescence, and he's also the co-host of the Modern Therapist Survival Guide Podcast.
[SPEAKER_02]: and a co-founder of the Therapy Reimagined Conference.
[SPEAKER_02]: Kurt, thank you so much for being my guest on Therapy Chat today.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks, glad to be here.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I'm so excited.
[SPEAKER_02]: And this topic of EMDR with adolescence is something that I've been really excited to dive into.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we'll get started with that, but before we even go there, will you just start off by telling our audience a little bit about yourself and your work?
[SPEAKER_00]: Sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Kurt Whitel.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm a emergent family therapist.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am certified in EMDR through MDR and currently a consultant in training.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for people in the EMDR worlds, they know that this makes me an EMDR nerd.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I have been working with adolescents for pretty much all of my career.
[SPEAKER_00]: I got started when I was in my 20s, straight out of grad school.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there wasn't a lot of adults at the time that were like, hey, you've got the world figured out.
[SPEAKER_00]: So naturally, most of my clients at the time ended up being teenagers.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that would have been practicing for,
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, come and close to 15 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: I describe myself now to most parents as I'm kind of like a recycled teenager.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I spend a lot of time in talking of the teenage things out of the day, but really being able to relate to a lot of kids going through a time of their life of development.
[SPEAKER_00]: Individuation and just trying to figure out who they are and especially when they've got trauma going on in their lives, they've really got reasons to not want to trust or talk to adults and creating spaces for them to be able to sort things out.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is really a lot of the energy that I like to bring to my work is being able to help create a space where these
[SPEAKER_00]: adolescents can move on with their lives and be in a much happier place.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, that's so important.
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, I'm always thrilled when I talk to someone who specializes in trauma and especially, you know, really understanding that adolescents teens need trauma-focused support.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, they, so many things that kids go through are traumatic just by virtue of the powerlessness and lack of control that kids and teenagers
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, I wish when I was a teenager that I had been like a youthful therapist who I could have talked to that I would have felt was relatable because I can remember one time trying therapy as a teen and it was like an older man.
[SPEAKER_02]: He could have been 30 but it seemed like he was like 75 to me and I was just like, no way, this person can't relate to me.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, not to say that an older person can't relate to young people but that misperception
[SPEAKER_02]: down to earth and for them to feel like you get them even if they think what a nerd.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I guess it's kind of cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I mean, that's like I tell a lot of parents that if at the end of the first session, their kids are coming back with, all right, that wasn't bad.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is an absolute win for a first session.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we were talking a little bit before we started about how you got involved with doing MDR.
[SPEAKER_02]: Can can you share a bit of that story with our audience?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so I was already a licensed mental health professional and when I was writing my bicycle home from my office and I was feeling a car coming up behind me, I moved over to the side of the road to kind of let them buy and my tires cut stuck in a drainage groove in the road.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I could not stop my bike and time I hit a curb, I went up over my handlebars and I went face first into a fire hydrant.
[SPEAKER_02]: know my gosh.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was quote unquote fortunate enough that somebody stopped right away called an ambulance and I was able to go to the hospital that I had broken several bones in my face knocked out a bunch of teeth.
[SPEAKER_00]: I ended up having my jaw wired for about six weeks.
[SPEAKER_00]: and it was time where just do some personal things in my life, I had kind of very much just shut in, tried to go through my treatments, get back to my life as soon as possible, and it did not work out for me emotionally.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so eventually I decided I want to get back into writing a bike, I went into CBT therapy and after about five sessions, I kind of just told the therapist like, I know what you're doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not working for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're not very good at what you're doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: This just isn't a great treatment for me and I stop my therapy.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it took a while longer, but so many recommended going to EMDRs.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hey, you know, here's this other treatment.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I went and after the first session, I was ready to get a brand new bicycle that I had such a great and different experience that I felt relieved.
[SPEAKER_00]: I felt the ability to just be able to leave my past behind me and to be able to really start taking the world back in the moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it felt so much more
[SPEAKER_00]: And I thought this is me needing to bring this kind of of a treatment to my clients as well.
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow, yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's, you know, we talked before that someone I love was recently in a bicycle accident as well.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's, it's so, it's such a hopeful story because you had really serious injuries to your face and jaw.
[SPEAKER_02]: And here you are, recovered and also, it sounds like from the emotional aspects of it as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's a story that I proudly tell and especially with introducing EMDR to my clients because it is something where a lot of clients resonate with that lived experience of, oh, this is something that can help.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know somebody, there's somebody sitting right in front of me that has experienced this and being able to just trust that, oh, this is somebody who's straightforward and being honest about what they're going through.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a beginning of middle and an end to this and gives hope of being able to get through whatever it is that they're going through.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, definitely.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, it's interesting with something that causes physical injuries like this, you know, I focus on trauma, but it's definitely around family of origin trauma childhood trauma childhood abuse and something like this where no one really did something to you to harm you on purpose.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's, you know, one of those shock trauma, single incident trauma situations that we don't always think about the emotional aspect as much, or I don't.
[SPEAKER_00]: But, you know, that's very important.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm very clear with my clients on this too, because for a lot of my clients that come in, who have more of that complex trauma history,
[SPEAKER_00]: And it can be very easy for them to dismiss some of these single incident trauma, that this is where really building that trusting relationship in the early stages of our work is, yeah, I don't have the exact same experience as you and trauma can still impact a lot of people in very similar ways, even with very different kinds of trauma and
[SPEAKER_00]: It's being able to take some of that really intentional time at the beginning of treatments to help clients understand the trauma process that trauma looks different for everybody, but we can still have very similar internal experiences.
[SPEAKER_00]: that helps to ease into the therapy process.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what I like about being able to share my story is that it's one that because it is single incident and it's contained, it's not one that clients end up leaving those sessions being like, well, I gotta take care of my therapist now too, but it's able to show like, this is a very compartmentalized part of my life.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm through it, I receive my treatment.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this allows for me to come in as somebody who's been through trauma who has gotten through trauma and can now talk about trauma in a way that, oh, here's just another part of my history.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is what helps to really build that therapeutic relationship with a lot of clients even with a really different trauma history is because, oh, here's somebody who's, who's through it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, definitely because of course one of the things about trauma is that feeling of nobody's going to understand what I've been through, you know, you don't know my story, that type of thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: But you're also touching on a really important aspect of EMDR.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think this is a good opportunity just kind of move into talking about how does the process of doing EMDR work?
[SPEAKER_00]: So EMDR is a relatively, call it relatively, nowhere if therapy.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's developed in the 80s and 90s by French, France and Shapiro.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is looking at the ways that our body holds on to trauma and really particularly that even emotional trauma is stored in our nervous system.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so some of those top-down talking therapies are talking to our prefrontal cortex.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not the brain or our nervous system where traumas are believed to be stored.
[SPEAKER_00]: And through this model, we theorize that what is happening is that our working memories are actively keeping back our trauma in our nervous system.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's where we get a lot of this feeling of our feelings are different than our thoughts.
[SPEAKER_00]: you hear a lot of, you know, I know I should feel different, but that's just that over this, but exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we look at that as the thoughts being up in that prefrontal cortex, the emotions are really being trapped in the limbic system and they need help getting out.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so what EMDR does, it stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, is eye movements are a form of what we call bilateral stimulation, moves left and right, activates alternately or left and right hemispheres of the brain.
[SPEAKER_00]: this helps to activate what is happening in the lip existence.
[SPEAKER_00]: So those emotions that are there end up coming up up into the prefrontal cortex.
[SPEAKER_00]: That way we can work on the thoughts that we have about our traumatic experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: In that prefrontal cortex, the feelings and the thoughts end up working together that allows our clients to be able to experience those feelings to be able to get through
[SPEAKER_00]: And the therapist role there is really to provide the EMDR structure and allow the clients naturally working brain to be able to work on healing itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is a big part of Francine Shapiro's adaptive information processing model.
[SPEAKER_00]: as far as how we understand the way that the brain works and that it becomes adaptive responseing in a healthy way for our clients to be able to change the way that they're the way that those thoughts come up in the moment as they're experiencing those feelings.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's a great explanation, thank you.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so how does the therapeutic relationship play into the EMDR process in the way you work?
[SPEAKER_00]: So for a lot of people that I've heard who've had bad EMDR experiences for other clinicians talking about EMDR being too flooding for clients.
[SPEAKER_00]: To me, all of that sounds like bad EMDR.
[SPEAKER_00]: I really focus is that we still need to build a very trusting relationship with clients, and that there's a lot of people who think that the finger waving, let's get our clients activated, and through those feelings, there's a lot of preparation work that needs to happen before clients are ready for that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And a lot of that still is building a good therapeutic relationship and helping our clients to stand how EMDR is different from other
[SPEAKER_00]: understanding how the process works of EMDR, we're going to look at not only the traumatic experience, but we're going to look at how we're thinking about that experience now, what are negative cognitions are now about that experience, what kinds of emotional reactions and body reactions that we're having now about that experience, not just back then.
[SPEAKER_00]: And really helping our clients to understand that this is helping to put the past and the past and that we have a now experience that is different from the past.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is why EMDR is so great at working at PTSD is because for a lot of people who have experienced those post traumatic symptoms, it's the camp really tell what's happening in the past versus what's happening right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a mechanism that really helps to separate those out.
[SPEAKER_00]: Once clients understand kind of this process, we also spend a lot of time focusing on building really good grounding resources.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is both for use in session, oftentimes with some of these bilateral simulation, we use eye movements, we can use tapping, we can use little buzzers that people who holds that help people to just move back to feeling more regulated.
[SPEAKER_00]: We also talk about the ways that they can use any sort of healthy and adaptive
[SPEAKER_00]: ground and resources in between sessions.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that way if they're getting dysregulated with other things that are happening in their life, other triggers, remember friends, even things that remind them of their trauma, ground themselves as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so a lot of times working through the first couple of phases of EMDR is about preparation for the EMDR process before we really get into the stronger trauma work.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, so now when you say the phases of EMDR, I know like the three phase approach to trauma therapy, but that's a different.
[SPEAKER_02]: So what are the, I mean, you don't have to, you can explain them all or just kind of describe it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, I'll give some broader descriptions here, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: The first couple of phases of EMDR are about relation, getting our clients ready for EMDR.
[SPEAKER_00]: The middle phases, which is what most people are going to associate with it, is the reprocessing phase.
[SPEAKER_00]: Going through what their memories of the trauma are, how they're feeling about it now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Once that part is successful, we move into an installation phase.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is where rather than looking at our past traumas with negative cognitions, it's looking at it with a positive cognition.
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, back when I was in my cycling accident, my negative cognition about it is, I don't have any control and that's a very understandable thing for a lot of people who experience trauma.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now looking at that very same image, the installation phase is working on making it believable that as I look back at the same trauma, I did the best that I could.
[SPEAKER_00]: And having that as a strength is something that really not only on a thought level, but on an emotional level feels differently in being able to evaluate the exact same image that I went to therapy in the first place for.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the last phase of EMDR is about future template, which is looking at identifiable times in the future, where I might also be running into that same negative cognition.
[SPEAKER_00]: So imagine a time in the future where you might feel I don't have any control.
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you want to handle that?
[SPEAKER_00]: And being able to work through a future template of how am I going to ground myself, react in that situation, believe in myself.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that way it
[SPEAKER_00]: in this future scenario where I might run into the same idea at the same negative cognition.
[SPEAKER_00]: How can I operate on the strength that I've just developed for myself?
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, thank you for explaining that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's, I don't know any of that.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm really grateful since I'm not an EMDR therapist that you explained that.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I want to talk about how using EMDR with adolescents is different, but I also wonder if you could talk just a little bit
[SPEAKER_02]: I know that there must be a different way of doing EMDR that the process may look different when someone has complex trauma, dissociation, versus they've had a single incident accident like this, like what happened to you.
[SPEAKER_02]: Am I right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Or,
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so I hear two separate questions here.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm going to answer the single incident trauma versus the complex trauma question first.
[SPEAKER_00]: In either case, during that preparation phase, what we're looking for is clients to feel that they're ready to start addressing their targets.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you're right, it is easier to address single incident trauma that it's because it's contained, because it's one time, because it's not repetitive.
[SPEAKER_00]: we're still going to develop internal resources for those clients to be able to work through the reprocessing phase when that activating material is coming up.
[SPEAKER_00]: The difference between single incident trauma and complex trauma is that we're going to really spend a lot more time in that
[SPEAKER_00]: have a number of different resources to really be able to expand that emotional zone of tolerance, to handle more material, to understand from the therapist side of things, how all of those complex traumas assessing phase if we're jumping from one target to a next, that it's fairly predictable from the therapist's end of, okay, this makes sense because,
[SPEAKER_00]: This makes sense because we're going from one trauma to an ex.
[SPEAKER_00]: These are clients identified things that might be related to each other because they share a negative cognition or because they share a similar portion in a client's life that the therapist is able to follow along and continue to provide the EMDR structure for the client to work through their material and not try and just force them back into working on one trauma at a time.
[SPEAKER_00]: The major difference is really spending a lot more time in that preparation phase.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that way the client feels that they can handle more material and that the therapist understands the relationship between the different traumas and can help the client make sense of that as treatment progresses.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, so one more little question that's specific about that is it doing EMDR therapy when you are in the preparation phase and you're not necessarily doing the eye movements or maybe you are doing them in the preparation phase.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the group that I train with the Institute for Creative Mindfulness Jamie marriage and Dr Steve Danviger are two wonderful people who've led me through a lot of my training and my experience on this.
[SPEAKER_00]: We believe that EMDR is a complete therapeutic theory that from the beginning of our intake through the end of termination, all of this can be EMDR therapy, that it's not just the eye waving, you know, fingers waving in somebody's face that this is all conceptualized through that adaptive information processing model.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that brain structures can change.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have 20, 30 years of FMRI studies now that show before and after effects of people who've undergone EMDR treatment and have better blood flow in their brains.
[SPEAKER_00]: And part of conceptualizing the way that people's maladaptive behaviors are happening through this model.
[SPEAKER_00]: is, all right, where is the trauma or the stress in their life, causing them to have this anxiety, where is it causing them to have this anger outburst, where is it causing them to potentially be, you know, using a substance or a behavioral addiction in order to cope and going through that kind of conceptualization.
[SPEAKER_00]: as part of an EMDR model, whether or not we move into reprocessing to us is still EMDR therapy because we're still looking at the ways that maladaptive things can turn into adaptive things.
[SPEAKER_02]: Beautiful, thank you and that's a nice context to have that because it's not just like only the eye movements, only the protocol, although I guess that's part of the protocol is the preparation but I think people think of it in terms of like the nuts and bolts
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's really where MDRs marketing department could probably do a little bit better of helping to say, you know, it's not just finger waving, that as I mentioned earlier, the therapist for the client's stories where I hear like, they're going into reprocessing in that first session.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's bad EMDR because good EMDR is taking that step back and really looking at that preparation phase as being the most important part of the EMDR treatment.
[SPEAKER_00]: That way, the clients know what's happening.
[SPEAKER_00]: It feels like it's something that the clients can continue to show up to sessions and feel prepared for, and that's where good EMDR really comes in.
[SPEAKER_02]: Wonderful.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you again for explaining that.
[SPEAKER_02]: So let's talk about how you kind of adapt EMDR to working with adolescents because that was something that I don't know anybody who does that besides you, but I'm sure there are many people so I think this is a great thing for our audience to hear about.
[SPEAKER_00]: So functionally, EMDR with a lot of adolescents is the same as it's going to be for adults, that there are a lot of child EMDR specific trainings that have really different conceptualization, but for a lot of people, a lot of adolescents that they're able to process the information and very much the same way that adults do.
[SPEAKER_00]: And therefore the standard EMDR protocol typically works pretty well for them.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's caveats, you know, the clients develop mentally disabled or has some other particular individual issues that you might need to look at a blend between childhood and adult models.
[SPEAKER_00]: But for the most part, most adolescents can follow the standard EMDR protocol looks pretty much like it is working with an adult.
[SPEAKER_00]: The difference comes in.
[SPEAKER_00]: in case conceptualization and the ways that we prepare clients for EMDR.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you think of the usual differences between adolescent and adult, adolescents don't have quite as much freedom in their lives to be able to make decisions.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not able to engage in as many of the usual resources that adults can do.
[SPEAKER_00]: Most teenagers can't afford to go out to a spa if that's what it is that's taking care of them and the way that an adult might be able to.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so what we need to look at is more adolescent focused resources, and this gets a little bit confusing sometimes because, you know, sometimes talking with adult clients as far as, you know, you can turn your friends like I had a really tough therapy session stay and I'm still feeling most adolescents friends are not capable of really being in a good space or developmental maturity to handle those kinds of conversations.
[SPEAKER_00]: The other thing is, is most adolescents, if where their trauma is coming from is in their house, is that their parents might be the ones who are the cause of a lot of the stressors or the traumas that they're coming in for.
[SPEAKER_00]: is being able to provide a way to break out of some of those family stories or really be able to individuate from their parents while they're working through the traumas with those traumatic things still very, very pleasant in their lives.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so,
[SPEAKER_00]: It's being able to work with your clients in ways of all right what are good resources that you can use that allow for you to Another thing that comes up with a lot of adolescent clients is a lot of adolescents are really unsure of themselves in the first place, so might not really resonate with Negative cognitions about themselves that it's just easier to distance themselves from a lot of
[SPEAKER_00]: those negative thoughts.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the way that we frame some of the questions might look quite a bit different.
[SPEAKER_00]: For a lot of adults, we might pull out, you know, here's a list of negative cognitions when you think about your trauma resonates with you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Out of adults can, you know, go down a list and a lot of adolescents can too, but sometimes in helping to help identify targets with some of our adolescent clients, it's great asking, how do the people at school think about you?
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you get this really great and rich, projective, negative cognition sort of idea that popular kids see me this way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you resonate with that?
[SPEAKER_00]: And that creates a much easier bridge into being able to identify some of these negative cognitions in looking at some of the other times in their lives when they might have felt this way.
[SPEAKER_00]: How can you tell me about any time that you felt this way?
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's the earliest in your life that you felt this way that, you know, these popular kids are talking about you that helps us to do the float back part of EMDR that helps to look for Are there other related traumas that identifies potential targets or potential blocks to any ways that we might be working with our clients in this situation.
[SPEAKER_00]: One more thing of working with adolescents is especially the role of being able to look at like family projection processes onto the client.
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of identified patient aspects can be rich for targets of the things that helping adolescents at a time in their life when they're trying to individuate.
[SPEAKER_00]: of really being able to not just continue to take on the aspects of their parents, multi-generational sort of aspects that their children and really being able to help normalize the changes that can happen to adolescents or anybody who's going through trauma treatments, that we're going to see some changes of how they operate in the world, not so anxious, not so angry.
[SPEAKER_00]: some of the family process around them that's used to them serving in those roles in the household, of being able to normalize that to the parents and help to provide the structure and the referrals to family therapy so that way they can redefine their relationships with each other too.
[SPEAKER_02]: beautiful.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's so important.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, one thing we don't talk about with child therapy.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I think all therapists realize and we don't like always talk about this out in the world is that, you know, the child who's in therapy is showing that there's something that needs to be addressed a lot of times within the family system.
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, I mean, sometimes, yes, the child
[SPEAKER_02]: that's impacting them, that isn't really related to the whole family, but most of the time that identified patient thing is like, you know, fix my kid and, you know, not as much awareness around how the dynamics of the way the family communicates and the boundaries are contributing to the reasons why the child is acting out.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm glad you said that and it's beautifully compassionate to help the parents understand that, you know, this is these changes that you're seeing, you know, are now kind of exposing that there's some other dynamics that could be helped by getting some family therapy.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that's very beautiful.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this exists in both single incident trauma, especially more prolonged sort of things where, you know, parent might really move into, you know, their full-time role being a caretaker and helping to have them continue to focus and try to keep your role.
[SPEAKER_00]: for children who've gone through complex traumas that are working on the oftentimes parental roles of having gears of frustrated responses to kids who are acting out aggressively or anxiously or directing a lot of
[SPEAKER_00]: very natural trauma responses at family members because they're because they're there because they're the safe ones to take out this frustration on that can really shape an entire family system.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is work that with doing EMDR with adolescents and what's children is really necessary to sustain a lot of the individual growth that can happen through this healing process.
[SPEAKER_02]: Sounds like you're doing so much great work out there.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I'm glad that you are your practices there to serve people in your community who need this help.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I hope that more and more people begin to offer EMDR and other trauma therapies with younger clients.
[SPEAKER_02]: But tell everybody to about what is the modern therapist survival guide podcast
[SPEAKER_00]: So our podcast serves a very similar purpose.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's free podcast that we put out weekly.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is really looking at a lot of therapist issues and being able to support therapists.
[SPEAKER_00]: We come out with episodes weekly about things like running your practice more efficiently.
[SPEAKER_00]: We talk about big issues that are going on in the therapist world, talking about the role that therapy apps are having on our profession and the impact that it's having on clients and clinicians as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're also currently in the process of about once a month, part of our special podcast series on fixing mental health care in America where we're talking
[SPEAKER_00]: emergency rooms and politicians and police officers who work with people with mental illness and the ways that these really large systemic changes can happen but it takes the buy-in of several, often separate systems that end up interacting with the very, very same people and so we're really proud of the work that we're doing on that as well.
[SPEAKER_02]: That sounds amazing.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have to get caught up.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've been so busy with my own stuff that I haven't really been able to listen much lately.
[SPEAKER_02]: So thank you for that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then lastly, if someone is in LA and wants to work with you or tell us your your practice area if it's outside of LA to where can they find you.
[SPEAKER_00]: So my practice can serve anybody in California and we do telehealth and in-person sessions, both on the west side of Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, but virtually anywhere in California.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you can find my website at KurtWidhelm.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you are T W I D H A L M dot com.
[SPEAKER_00]: And check out our
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'll put links to all of the websites and the show notes, and just thank you so much for this great explanation of your work and the services that you're offering.
[SPEAKER_00]: So glad to share.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for listening to Therapy Chat with your host, Laura Reagan, LCSWC.
[SPEAKER_01]: For more information, please visit Therapy ChatPodcast.com