EMDR, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing has been widely used for trauma and PTSD, PTSD.
EMDR can also be used to help release negative beliefs you may have about yourself. The way negative beliefs work is that they are held in the body by a strong emotion, primarily fear. EMDR reduces the emotion of the memories and then the negative belief changes to a more positive belief.
Children are more in touch with their fears than adults. I worked with a 13-year-old boy, using EMDR to desensitize the fears he had acquired from hearing his father yell at him.
The father tried to intimidate the boy into doing his homework by criticizing and calling him nicknames like “lazy and” stupid “until the son began to believe that he was those things. He was trying to be successful in any of his school subjects.
The father did not realize at first that the insults are abusive. This was how he had been raised and he thought this would help motivate his son. I think people always do the best they can, given what they know at the time. He had not yet learned how to effectively motivate a person.
I told the father that if he wanted his son to be successful, he should stop using labeling words like “lazy” and “stupid” immediately.
By using EMDR with the boy to desensitize the incidents when his father verbally assaulted him, his beliefs about himself began to change. Through processing, a person can view worrying events from a different perspective. In this case, the boy could see that his father was out of control and was an extremely anxious person who had not learned to communicate effectively. He no longer took those criticisms personally. Then he could finally feel some relief because maybe there was nothing wrong with him except the fear of failure. The constant criticism of the father had made him not try things for fear of more criticism if he did not succeed.
There was a ref = construction therapy phase in which we divided his tasks into small steps so that he could feel confident in accomplishing them and reinforced his successes. His grades improved so now the father was motivated to stick with these changes and was able to stop swearing altogether.
One thing the boy had always wanted to do was play soccer, but he was afraid of criticism from his father if he didn’t make it to the first team. We changed the intention of playing soccer to having the experience of learning the game instead of being part of the first team. So now enjoy learning the game and communing with the team members. With a little training in a family session, the father was able to express his pride in his son’s accomplishments. She was also able to identify some of her son’s positive qualities, such as perseverance and strength.