Dr Jamie Marich is the Founder/Director of "The Institute for Creative Mindfulness”. She is a (EMDR) Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing specialist. And familiar with all things “trauma” and the healing of such. I could go on and on but just take a listen. She gives actionable tools to move through life's rough stuff :).
Dr Jamie Marich is the Founder/Director of "The Institute for Creative Mindfulness”. She is a (EMDR) Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing specialist. And familiar with all things “trauma” and the healing of such. I could go on and on but just take a listen. She gives actionable tools to move through life's rough stuff :).
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Transcript:
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0:00:05.8 Mischa Zvegintzov: Welcome back everybody, to the Tools For a Good Life summit. And right now, I would like to introduce to you, Dr. Jamie Marich. And hello, and I'll read your bio real quick, if that's okay?
0:00:20.6 Dr. Jamie Marich: Go for it.
0:00:23.1 MZ: Fantastic. So Dr. Jamie Marich travels internationally, speaking on topics related to EMDR, EMDR therapy, trauma, addiction, expressive arts, yoga and mindfulness, while maintaining a private practice and online education operations. I lost my place. [chuckle] The Institute for Creative Mindfulness in your home base of Warren, Ohio. You are the developer of the Dancing Mindfulness Approach to Expressive Arts Therapy and the developer of yoga for clinicians. You are the author of numerous books, including the popular EMDR Made Simple, Trauma Made Simple, and Process, Not Perfection. You are the co-author of EMDR Therapy and Mindfulness for Trauma-Focused Care, and Healing Addiction With EMDR Therapy: A Trauma-Focused Guide, out later this year from Springer publishing company. North Atlantic Books published a revised and expanded edition of Trauma and The 12 Steps, in the summer of 2020, and they are also publishing The Healing Power of Jujitsu: A Guide to Transforming Trauma and Facilitating Recovery, and Dissociation Made Simple, both due out in 2022. Jamie is a woman living unapologetically, with a dissociative, it's a tricky word, a dissociative disorder, and this forms the basis of your award-winning passion for advocacy in the mental health field. Welcome. So, I thought this would be fun. You're a PhD, yes?
0:02:19.3 DM: Yes.
0:02:21.0 MZ: So, how many hours do you have into that? Tell me, how many hours?
0:02:28.1 DM: That went into school? Well, I was in school all total from my bachelor's through my master's, for nine years. I finished my PhD in about three, three and a half years, so I don't know how many hours, I've spent a lot of time in school.
0:02:42.4 MZ: A lot of time in school. And then we've also got LPCC-S.
0:02:47.5 DM: Oh, those are just licenses that you see after my name. So LPCC-S is Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor. So those are my state licenses, and this is the whole big letter soup of the helping professionals, that in different states there are different licenses, and that's what that means.
0:03:04.1 MZ: Yeah, cool. And then the LICDC-CS, that's another...
0:03:08.8 DM: That's Licensed Independent Chemical Dependency Counselor. So, one is mental health, one is chemical dependency. I don't know why they're two separate licenses, but they are.
0:03:18.6 MZ: You know what? Lucky. You're lucky. And then we've got REAT.
0:03:26.0 DM: So that is Registered Expressive Arts Therapist.
0:03:28.4 MZ: Oh, okay, very cool. RYT 500, which I believe is...
0:03:32.6 DM: Registered Yoga Teacher.
0:03:33.9 MZ: Right, registered. And 500, that's like next level, I think entry level is 200 hours and then 500 hour's a whole another ballgame.
0:03:43.1 DM: Yeah, yeah. But I really feel any yoga teacher trainings about what you learn about yourself in the process. So it's nice to have the credential, but I wouldn't trade the experience for anything.
0:03:54.4 MZ: Absolutely. Did you jump into yoga teacher training more as a personal experience, and then you thought... Yeah, I think that happens a lot, doesn't it?
0:04:03.6 DM: Well, what's interesting is I had used it clinically, over the years, but having not taken a full teacher training, 'cause I've had a yoga practice most of my clinical life, it's been an essential part of my own self-nourishment and care. And so, I started taking just some trauma-informed yoga workshops and doing some reading and then implementing it into clinical life, and I actually didn't do the teacher training until not that long ago, just a few years ago, because I knew I wanted to take my personal study to the next level. And that was my main motivation, and I always feel that the best yoga teachers are people who simply share from their practice. And so yeah, I do some yoga teaching, but a lot of it is what I integrate into my clinical work and education courses that I offer for other therapists.
0:04:54.8 MZ: Yeah, I love it. And then my understanding as well is, once you get into the 500 hours of the yoga teacher training, you start heavily going into perhaps some eastern philosophy style stuff, perhaps Hindu teachings, all that fun stuff. Yeah?
0:05:15.6 DM: Yeah, and it depends on the program you do, and it depends on the lineage, but I was very fortunate to do a really strong lineage-based training, and I learned a lot with The Bhagavad Gita and Yoga Sutras and philosophy, and that's just so rich, and to me, more important than any pose you're gonna learn.
0:05:33.0 MZ: Absolutely, and I think that the Asana or the movement side of yoga is such a small piece of the bigger philosophy, and not to make this all about that, but it's fun to talk about. And then we've also got last one, RMT.
0:05:50.0 DM: Oh, Reiki Master Teacher.
0:05:53.5 MZ: Oh, Reiki Master Teacher? Awesome, and that's energy, right? Energy work.
0:05:57.0 DM: I love the energy.
0:05:58.4 MZ: Yeah, fantastic. And so, I just thought it'd be fun to read all that, because I think sometimes it gets lost, the expertise that somebody such as yourself has, in what we're gonna talk about. You have a lifetime of involvement in not only helping people, but literally learning. Yeah?
0:06:22.9 DM: Yeah.
0:06:23.5 MZ: Yeah, that's... Oh, go ahead.
0:06:25.3 DM: Yeah, on one hand, it is, as you present it that way, yeah, I do. And on the other hand, it's, "How could I not pursue the path of learning?" 'cause I've needed it for my own healing and tool for a better life, right?
0:06:41.8 MZ: Yeah, absolutely.
0:06:42.4 DM: That's why we're here.
0:06:44.1 MZ: Yeah. And then you have The Trauma and The 12 Steps. Do you have history in recovery, sobriety yourself?
0:06:53.7 DM: I do. Yeah, I've been clean and sober almost 19 years, and that was really what was the impetus for my healing journey. And I initially came in through a very 12-step path. I still have a lot of respect for the 12 steps, but I've needed to bring in a lot of other healing modalities too, which is how EMDR came into my life, which is, I think, the main thing we're gonna be talking about today.
0:07:16.9 MZ: Yeah, absolutely. And then I wanted to just quick... Two things. One, I think trauma. So when we say Trauma and The 12 Steps, we perhaps are gonna throw the word trauma around. As a white male, six foot two, I'm speaking for me, pull myself up by my bootstraps. Somebody tells me trauma, I tend to, not so much anymore, but get a little bit of contemptuous, like, "I've never been through any trauma." But I think it's a lot broader spectrum than we would care to admit, perhaps someone like me. So go ahead, I'll let you speak to that for a sec.
0:07:58.7 DM: So here is my working definition. Trauma is any unhealed human wound. The English word, trauma, is a direct translation from the Greek word that means wound. It is a simple direct translation, trauma is a wound, so it's any unhealed human wound. And just like with physical wounds, that can come in all shapes and sizes. If the wound is not given a chance to heal, it can cause complications. And so, we could think of physical wounding as this process of, "Oh, somebody has it bad." But if they're given a chance to heal it and they get treatment, it may go on not being such a big issue in their life, but it could be something that on the surface, seems just like a scrape or a rash, but if the person is immuno-compromised or they're not getting the nutrition they need, if they're not getting the care they need, if they keep picking at it, it's going to continue to be an issue. So we can look at a lot of these parallels with physical wounding, and what we know about physical wounding and translate it to the mental, emotional, spiritual. That wounds are wounds, and yes, some are big, some are small, but individuals can experience them subjectively, and if wounds are not given a chance to heal, if they're not given the treatment or care that they need, regardless of how big or small they are, they could go on to create problems.
0:09:20.7 DM: So yeah, I think you're bringing up a good point, that a lot of cultural association with trauma is still things that are at the level of what we might call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or having gone to war, or having survived a natural disaster. And even in diagnostic codes, we've expanded our definition of that a little bit, that there's a lot of different ways people can go through life or injury-threatening experiences, and even witnessing someone else go through it, eventually qualify you for PTSD. But there's a lot of these kind of human wounds we're talking about, of all kinds, that won't necessarily give you a diagnosis, but that doesn't mean they are any less of an issue.
0:10:02.3 MZ: Absolutely, and I love that or don't love it, whichever way you wanna look at it. But it could be going through parental divorce as a child, or perhaps the way we were brought up, which was acceptable 50 years ago, now might be like, "Yeah, that actually might have encouraged some trauma in your life, for example. Yeah? Yeah. Perfect. Alright, so we are here to talk about EMDR. Thank you for indulging me with...
0:10:31.8 DM: It's a great set up question, to be talking about EMDR.
0:10:35.0 MZ: Yeah, perfect. So I'm gonna give you a scenario, and then I'm gonna ask you a question. Okay?
0:10:41.6 DM: Perfect.
0:10:42.2 MZ: Fantastic, so if we think of life as a three-legged stool of relationships, finance and health, and then we think of someone who is or was successful and has two of those legs fall out from under them, and I'm basically just talking about me 10 years ago, honestly. But anyway, this could be a combination of divorce. So I went through a divorce 10 years ago, it was heavy, a couple of kids, career upheaval. So my career was on track, all I'd really known for a good 15 years was success, and then all of a sudden that blew up. One of my children was not acting like I wanted, and then I went through another failed relationship, and it was pretty heavy. And I was lucky, at the time, I didn't have any physical health challenges, but for some people, it can be physical health challenges. That coupled with some divorce or something, that can be very heavy, or for me, both my parents died really quick at that time too, so I was shellacked, I've been in recovery for a long time as well.
0:11:55.0 MZ: But up until that point, it was like, "Pick yourself up from your bootstraps, Mischa. You can fix it, you can work your way through it, you can success yourself through it." And then at that point, I don't know if chaos is the right word, but it was so heavy for me, that it was like, "Man, I need new tools, I need new tools, I need to be open-minded because push-ups are not gonna do it," [chuckle] whatever. So my question to you, thinking of EMDR, what are the exact next steps you would offer this person, or me, so I knew I would be headed in the new right direction, that I'll have positive momentum towards getting my life back on track?
0:12:43.4 DM: Well, 'cause I feel, to properly answer that question, I need to explain a little bit of what EMDR is, because a lot of people may not have a frame of reference. So EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. So it's a mouthful, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. And it's been around now, for over 30 years. A psychologist had formally tapped into the process of it, when she was in recovery from her own journey with cancer and she was very interested in mind-body medicine. And when she was taking a walk in a park one day, she noticed that her eyes began to move rapidly as she was engaging with some disturbing thoughts. And so, she sat down and she tested out the eye movement process deliberately, of moving the eyes back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, to see if it would have any impact on her mental wellness. And yeah, she noticed that some of the disturbing thoughts she brought up later that night, were just not as valid, they were just not as charged. And then she got a group of her other psychologist friends together and said, "Well, let's see what happens when we do this deliberately. And is there some kind of impact on these rapid successive eye movements on how kind of the brain processes trauma?"
0:14:00.1 DM: And so, that's the crux of how EMDR was founded, and then it is now one of the most research therapies for post-traumatic stress disorder specifically. But a lot of other related conditions that have trauma at its base can be helped by such a method. And the method has been developed because you don't, for instance, have to use just eye movements anymore. We can put audio headsets on people, we can do kind of successive tapping back and forth, whether the person is tapping themself. And so, it really is more about the back and forth, bilateral engagement of the brain that can create these shifts in how memory is stored. So to get to your question, if a person was coming in, let's say clinically, we would look at, "Well, what are the stock areas in your life?" and it could be like with that three-legged stool, they're stuck areas in all three of those areas, and part of what the EMDR method and approach really looks at is, "What are... There's an understanding that trauma is more than just PTSD, kind of coming to your core question, and that trauma is really any unhealed human wound that can get in the way of us living a more adaptive or fulfilling life.
0:15:22.2 DM: And so, if there is, let's say, a stuck point in one of those life areas that you mentioned, something that we might do is, have you identify, "Well, what's a core negative belief that you might be carrying?" So it could be something like, "I'm a failure, I'm not good enough, I'm ugly." There's any variety of ways they can be worded.
0:15:46.9 MZ: Can I ask you a question? Could it be along the lines of too, let's say it's relationships, where you could get stuck in this loop of, "I should have done this, I should have done that, if this would have happened?".
0:15:54.0 DM: Oh, yeah. Definite negative cognition. Yeah, yeah. And so, what we do is this process of tracing it back or floating it back to say, "Well, what's the origin story of you carrying that negative belief? I should have done something, yeah, I should have done something," and you may think it's about your relationship, like your current romantic relationship, but when you get to the origin story of it, it could be about something that happened as a child, when you felt or believed you should have done something, but you were only a child, yet you've kind of carried the burden of it. And so, what a trained EMDR therapist will do is, kind of help you set up that scene of the origin story, and really invite you to feel and to sense into where it's at in the body and what you're feeling emotionally, what that cognitive statement is, what maybe some of the energetic sensations are. And then at that point, the back and forth eye movements are applied or the back and forth tapping, and it becomes very much a meditation process at that point, where it's not just like, "Okay, presto chango, it's done," but you're invited to really sit with the feeling, sit with the experience.
0:17:08.7 DM: And I like to say this about EMDR, you don't have to tell a lot of detail about what happened, it's not about you re-living it, but it is inviting you to feel what it is you maybe didn't allow yourself to feel at the time. And so, while you're inviting your client into going... We say that all the time, in EMDR, "Go with that, go with those feelings." Then we apply the bilateral and notice how shifts can happen. And for some people who come in with maybe a little bit of a simpler issue or it's more kind of singular incident trauma, it often doesn't take very long, maybe just a few sessions, but many of our clients who we work with, do have complex issues, like your three-legged stool, there's issues in all three areas. So you may need any number of sessions to address each of the three legs and how they interplay with each other.
0:18:05.3 MZ: Yeah, and let me ask you a question too. I get the impression and really, what I'm hoping to bring together with the summit and everybody speaking, and people such as yourself, is that just the action of going in, like session one can provide enough relief that it's like, "Yeah, I'm headed in the right direction." I don't need 100% transformation when I walk through the door, like I just want 1% change, so I feel like there's hope. Like there's something... Yeah.
0:18:40.7 DM: And that's something I try to impart to anybody I work with, is to give them one actionable thing they can do between session one and session two, and sometimes laying the relational foundation is an important part of those first couple of sessions, you're working with someone. So that, like you mentioned, there can be an imparting that, "Wow, there is hope."
0:19:03.4 MZ: Yeah, and so tell me about some of the actionable things, like Where you could say, "Hey, here's... Anybody listening, you could go, "Here's some actionable things to show you... Yeah, go ahead.
0:19:18.3 DM: What I might do is show somebody, like in a first session, this whole idea of shaking it off, inviting you to notice where you're most likely to feel stress in the body, "And can you imagine that stress kind of, let's say it's in your stomach, "Can you imagine it kind of moving from your stomach out through your hands and shaking the stress off, and sending it down to the ground and then may be stomping at it?" So that's one. I like to do another little skill called tension release, which is a short express version of progressive muscle relaxation, where you really super exaggerate the tension, so that in very slow motion you can notice the release. Another good kind of instance strategy is palming the face. This is used a lot in yoga nidra and meditation, and it's also working with this idea of engaging the body, and then maybe you bring those hands to your forehead, to your face, to your temples, just some area where you're, "Ooh," and then you go into it. And then you could always work with people on basic breathing, working with grounding objects.
0:20:32.1 DM: There's another meditation we'll do, like a five senses scan of your space, where you start looking around and noticing what you see, noticing what you feel, sensation-wise. And that's why I often hold on to a stone, it just gives me this little sense of, "Yes, I'm here, I'm now, I'm present," and it could be, "Is there something pleasant to smell?" And another little grounding exercise I'll do with folks, and I do this with yoga students, I do this with EMDR students, and it's this practice of looking down at your feet. And anybody listening, look down at your feet wherever they're at right now, and really deliberately press them into the ground, so you feel a little sensation and then let them go a little bit, take a breath, and then press them into the ground again. And maybe you even move them back and forth kind of in this bilateral rotating way, just very slowly, very gently, almost as if you're taking a walk, right in place. And so, as you do that, I'd like you to look at your feet and think about this, that your feet will not lie to you. Your mind may pull you far into the past, may project you into the present, and that's normal when you have unhealed trauma and it can make you feel overwhelmed and not sure where you're at, but if you're ever unclear on where you're at, look down at your feet. Your feet will always tell you that you're here and now and present and connected.
0:22:13.3 DM: And you can do that just as a simple meditation, maybe even kind of pumping the feet back and forth, and I tell my people all the time, "I don't expect a little exercise like that to fix all your ails, 'cause no instant thing can. But is this kind of a meditation or an exercise that you might be willing to practice doing every day, so that you can work on this idea of presence."
0:22:38.5 MZ: Yeah, and oftentimes, coming back to the moment with those simple tricks, can be enough to get me over the hump of the moment, shall we say, or as those emotions ebb and flow or... I know, when all that was going on in my life, a lot of times, it was trying to survive the moment until the tide went back out, [chuckle] and then the tide would come back in, and I don't know if that makes any sense or not?
0:23:16.9 DM: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
0:23:18.9 MZ: Yeah, yeah. Perfect, fantastic. That's awesome, thank you. And then I'm curious, I think you've been involved in, obviously, your training and schooling and active, and you're prolific in your teaching, I would say. Yes, with your writing and speaking and all these sorts of things. Yes?
0:23:40.6 DM: I've been so accused. So, yes. I am, I know.
[laughter]
0:23:46.8 MZ: You've seen it help a lot of people. I guess that's my question, and I'm curious about that. The sense of how powerful, the right word is, or healing, again, I'm thinking of the guy like me, I'm not 40 anymore, but in my 40s, coming out of a successful period of my life, where... How do you explain to someone in my terms, so I can be like, "Oh yeah, this is powerful, this is good, this is something I should potentially tap into, if I'm struggling."?
0:24:25.9 DM: Well, I personally feel it's always a good idea to heal your wounds. And whether you're doing that with EMDR or any other healing practices that are being discussed here, it's important to not keep putting a band-aid on them, which is what we often do in a variety of ways. For some of us, it is drugs and alcohol and acting out. For some of us, it can be kind of getting so physically engaged in yoga, that we don't really there with letting ourselves feel.
0:25:03.0 MZ: It almost becomes a distraction.
0:25:05.0 DM: Yeah, yeah. So if ever I have a client that's like, "Why should I try this EMDR, why should I do any of these healing practices you're talking about?" I really try to look at it as, "Well, usually, people who end up in my office, are there because something's not right, something just doesn't feel right in their life, and I use this language a lot of, "Would you consider that because there's something that isn't healed, this is why you're stuck where you're at in your life." So, "Yeah, there may be risks in going there, but are there also risks in not going there?"
0:25:43.3 MZ: I love that. That's such a powerful thought. It's almost like risk reward, like you have literally nothing to lose and everything to gain by taking a stab at it, versus continue suffering. [chuckle] I don't mean to laugh about it, but yeah, perfect. I think that this is a great place to end, Jamie. I love the description of it, and the grounding techniques that you gave, and everyone watching, if this interview with Jamie was fantastic and you want to get even more content from Jamie, upgrade to the all access pass, for the bonus interview, 'cause we're gonna do a bonus interview here next, and I know that there's gonna be even more amazing content like the little trick, that feet thing, I was thinking about, which was awesome in the moment, but What was the Bruce Willis movie? Die Hard. Did you see Die Hard?
0:26:52.3 DM: Years ago.
[chuckle]
0:26:53.3 MZ: Yeah. Remember that he took his shoes off and rubbed his feet in the carpet. Anyway.
0:27:02.9 DM: Glad it linked up.
0:27:03.8 MZ: Yes, sorry, yes. Yeah. So upgrade to the all access pass, for the bonus interview. And are there any final thoughts to share, that we did not get a chance to cover?
0:27:15.8 DM: I just want to encourage your listeners, you can also visit me, traumamadesimple.com, traumamadesimple.com. That's where you can access a lot of just things I have out there. Yep.
0:27:27.8 MZ: Alright, alright, fantastic. Yeah, thank you for that. And then, they can find you on your business pages, instituteforcreativemindfulness.com?
0:27:38.9 DM: That's right, yep.
0:27:40.6 MZ: Awesome. And then your general page is jamiemarich.com. J-A-M-I-E M-A-R-I-C-H.com. Correct?
0:27:52.7 DM: Yeah.
0:27:53.7 MZ: Fantastic. Again, everybody, click the button to this on this page, it's either gonna be down there or over there or over there, I'm not sure where yet, to get unlimited access to all of these interviews in the all-access pass. And I'm gonna hit stop, and let's hang on for round two.
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