"EMDR doesn't just treat PTSD. It treats symptoms that result from a loss of safety, whether that's physical safety, emotional safety, or social safety. And so much anxiety is exactly that."

"Anxiety is body first, thoughts second. And for some people, it never really gets to the cognitive level at all. They have the body response and that's where it stays."

"People would describe you as confident. You would not describe yourself as confident at all. What they're seeing is someone who gets everything done. What's actually happening is that you're dragging yourself through it."

"We've made an enemy of anxiety. But anxiety is just our system's response to a stressor. The problem isn't anxiety itself. The problem is when the system doesn't flip off when it should."

"By the time someone gets to me, they've asked themselves 'do I need therapy?' hundreds of times. If you're Googling it at 2:00 AM — probably yes. And that's not a bad thing."

"Before we've done work, we find relationships we're acclimated to — not relationships we necessarily want or need, but the ones that feel familiar. We live in the tundra and hate the cold, but familiarity has been safe when nothing else has."

"You know what it looks like to go to the dentist. You know what it looks like to get a physical. But therapy? That process is a lot less clear for most people. So let's change that."

"Anxiety is not a character flaw. It is a nervous system response and it is designed to keep you safe. The problem isn't anxiety itself. The problem is when the nervous system can't tell the difference between a grizzly bear and a work email."

"The bilateral stimulation is the vehicle. It is not the destination. The real work is what the brain does with it."

"It's almost abnormal for somebody to come in after working through targets and say nothing came up. Usually it's this middle ground — a couple of things came up and we're able to manage that. That's why this reevaluation phase is so important."

"You should expect to leave feeling tired. You should expect to leave with a lot on your mind. To leave feeling out of control is not the goal. If that's happening, you need more closure time."

"The client can tell me cognitively they're no longer distressed. They can tell me they're okay replacing this negative belief with a positive one. And then we do the body scan — and look at all the stuff showing up in the body."

"For someone with acute trauma, positive cognitions are like full-grown adults — capable, ready to sprint toward the void of this memory. For someone with chronic trauma, those cognitions might be more like five-year-olds. They're there. But they're not as capable, not as fast, and there aren't as many of them."

"The therapist's job is really to get out of the way as much as possible. The brain does most of the work when you just let it roll."

"Poor assessment is gonna result in wandering, ineffective sessions. You've got to put in the work here. And do it really, really well. Phase one, two, and three — they all go together beautifully. This is the final piece of really being ready to do some work."

“If you skip preparation, people get overwhelmed, and when people get overwhelmed, they stop coming.”

“The expectation when you first sit down and meet with someone should not be, I am going to get this person's entire trauma history and develop a completely thorough treatment plan the first time that I meet them, or even the second or third time.”

“EMDR phases are not linear. They’re circular. You cannot think of them as a completely linear process.”

“The answer to this question… is complicated. It is not straightforward. Does EMDR actually work and for how many people? My general answer to that would be, well, it depends.”

“This is a valid fear. I totally get it… we’re gonna resource, resource, resource… and we need a commitment from you to see EMDR through.”

“EMDR allows someone that has not previously been able to do so acknowledge that a trauma occurred in the past for them and that they exist in the present.”

You can learn more about Cassandra and her practice at: seentherapy.org. Get a taste for the episode below. If you enjoy your listen give us a follow, share, or five star review. Have a good one!

“Just about all of these are pauses, not stop signs. Most of the situations people worry about when it comes to EMDR aren’t reasons someone can’t do the therapy. They’re yield signs. They tell us we may need to slow down, stabilize, or prepare a little more before moving forward with trauma processing.”

“The same reason that EMDR sometimes feels intense is what makes EMDR so effective and what really helps us get to the root cause of things.”

“So I think probably the best thing that you can do as a couple when you're doing a check-in is approach one another with a curious stance. That is well over half the battle. Can I seek to understand you instead of assuming that I need to be defensive?”

“Parents can be really incredible resources during EMDR for families, really incredibly incredible resources to their children and they can really speed up EMDR and make the results just a lot more solid.”

Get a taste for the episode below. If you enjoy your listen give us a follow, share, or five star review. Have a good one!

“If you’re reacting to your partner at a nine out of ten, and they’ve only ever hurt you at a two out of ten, you’re bringing a lot of trauma into that reaction that has nothing to do with them.”

“The same system that creates anxiety as a result of trauma is the system that creates depressive symptoms as a result of trauma.”

“The problem is not the anxiety—the problem is your perception that you are not safe, even when you are.”

“My number one goal is that we establish safety, and that you’re able to take that out into the world and establish safety for yourself.”

Get a taste for the episode below. If you enjoy your listen, give us a follow, share, or leave a five-star review. Have a good one!

"They’re confronting some of the hardest things in their lives, even if they’re not talking about them out loud."

“EMDR is not magic. If you are coming for chronic childhood trauma, specifically caregiver trauma, attachment trauma, chronic relational trauma—this is going to take a minute. There might be a lot of what looks like just regular talk therapy at the beginning of your intensive in order to prepare for the EMDR work to come.”

“Relationships don’t require competence, they require vulnerability. And vulnerability scares you. And that’s unpredictable. You would rather solve a hundred business problems than sit in the discomfort of not knowing how to fix your relationship. You want to control outcomes. Relationships require you to surrender a little bit. Or a lot of bit.”

“High achievers are used to getting results. You do the work, you show up, you’re committed, and you get the results that you want. So when you’re engaging in therapy and those results aren’t happening, it’s maddening. And if you could think your way out of it, you would have already done it.”

High achievers often don’t realize that the drive shaping their success began as a childhood survival pattern. Those same patterns helped them climb ladders and solve problems, but now they’re the very things confusing, overwhelming, and sabotaging the parts of life that matter most.

“Personal patterns aren’t problems to solve—they’re roots to understand. High achievers try to fix the flare-up, but if you don’t heal what created the pattern in the first place, it will keep resurfacing no matter how hard you work.”

You can learn more about Cassandra and her practice at: seentherapy.org.

Get a taste for the episode below. If you enjoy your listen give us a follow, share, or five-star review. Have a good one!
"The holidays can stir up complicated emotions, even when there’s joy in the mix. Many people walk into this season with a mix of anticipation and anxiety, especially when family dynamics have been historically difficult. The body remembers old patterns, roles get reactivated, and expectations can feel impossibly high. Even so, this season can hold both: the challenging pieces and the beautiful moments that help carry us through the cold, dark winter. Healing often means learning how to make space for both realities at once."

Get a taste for the episode below. If you enjoy your listen, give us a follow, share, or five-star review. Have a good one!

“Watching clients move from an anxious, avoidant, or disorganized attachment style into a secure attachment style is one of the honors of my life. Like next to being a wife and being a parent. It is an incredible privilege.”

“If you're responding to a situation at a 9 out of 10, but the person in front of you has only ever harmed you at a 2 or 3… that’s a sign the reaction belongs to something older, something deeper.”

“When you grow up without healthy models of boundaries, setting them as an adult feels like rejection—not protection. Especially if you’ve learned that people leave when you don’t bend.”

“Someone who's walking through the world thinking, 'I'm responsible for everybody's feelings'—that might seem like a small thing. But that belief shows up everywhere: in college friendships, in marriages, in how we carry stress. EMDR helps you go back to those early relational experiences and desensitize the patterns that no longer serve you.”

Get a taste for the episode below. If you enjoy your listen, give us a follow, share, or five-star review. Have a good one!

“Attachment styles aren’t labels—they’re roadmaps. They show us where we’ve been and give us clues for where healing can begin.”

Get a taste for the episode below. If you enjoy your listen, give us a follow, share, or five-star review. Have a good one!

“Here’s the thing. I think that we have the ability to work really, really, really hard, and then we need to rest and relax. And for someone who has been chronically traumatized, that rest and relax piece is probably not happening… What I’m not for is hard work with no reprieve. Hard work, with no reprieve—we are headed straight into burnout.”

“EMDR stops the destruction—but it can’t rebuild. That’s where chiropractic care steps in. Trauma affects the body as much as the mind, and sometimes, healing requires both.”

“I don’t know what our HVAC guy is talking about when he’s explaining our system—and that’s okay. We just hire someone reputable and let them do what they’re trained to do. It’s the same with EMDR. You don’t need to know all eight phases or understand the light bar. You just need a therapist who does.”

"Write down the first action your anger wants to take—even if it’s wildly unhelpful. Then cross it out. Beneath it, write the action that actually aligns with your values. That’s the moment you move from reaction to intention. That’s where the shift happens."

"August is a strange transition. It is this in-between space. It's not quite the slowness of summer—if any of us actually slowed down—and it's not the crisp of fall. And for a lot of us, it's a moment to look around and ask: what do we actually want for the next school year?

If you're finding yourself snappy, irritable, overwhelmed, I want you to quiet your mind for a moment. Maybe this season stirs up a lot of memories and patterns we're not even clocking. Sometimes we need to just pause and ask: am I reacting to my child's stress… or my old stuff that's waking up as I'm seeing them walk into what my system thinks might be my old stuff?"

 "Somebody with PTSD has a flash burn. And so like, um, it's like fires jumping out at you, right? And you get burned and everyone's really concerned about you. So this may be the person that like has had a really great childhood, um, relatively free from, you know, huge distressing events.

And in early adulthood, they have a car accident. Everybody's worried about that person. You know, it's a serious car accident. Um, they're worried about how they're going to recover from it. C PTSD is more like a sunburn. It's like you, um, have been out at the beach and you haven't put enough sunscreen on and, um, you get into your hotel and you realize you are burnt to a crisp, right?

So that's the kid that like for years has been exposed to chronic trauma. And, um, they weren't necessarily realizing it at the time. And then, you know, whatever happens, um, they go to college or, you know, different life event. And all of a sudden it's like, oh, this is, this is really, really bad. Right? So, you can imagine, like I said, those two treatments are gonna look really different."

In this discussion, we explore Cecily’s deep interest in attachment and developmental trauma, a focus that began during her graduate studies and solidified through her work at a residential treatment center for teenagers. Her hands-on experience with adolescents facing early developmental trauma shaped her career and inspired her dedication to supporting these individuals and their families.

As you were listening to this podcast if you felt Cecily would be a good fit as a therapist for your family, you can find Cecily at Seeds of Hope Counseling: https://www.seedsofhope417.com/cecily-mitchell-lpc/

EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, has gained significant attention over the past few years as an effective treatment for trauma. As more therapists become trained in this approach, it’s important to understand not just the basics of EMDR but also the depth of its mechanisms, applications, and the nuances of how it works in therapy.

Sometimes it's going to be a question specific to my area of practice. Sometimes it's going to be something that I'm not nearly as familiar with and I will maybe need to do some research in order to answer it. Today we're covering something really general: "What is the purpose of therapy?"