Episode 32: How EMDR Can Help You Heal with Melissa Parks, LCSW

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy can sound overwhelming at first, but Melissa Parks, LCSW, breaks everything down on this week's episode. She talks about the benefits of EMDR, expectations during the treatment process, and why she has developed such a passion for this type of therapy.

Find out more about Melissa:

Melissa on Instagram and TikTok

Website: Melissa Parks Therapy - Counseling Couples, Counseling Women



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Transcript:

Alyssa Scolari: [00:00:23]

Hey all what's up. Welcome to another episode of the Light After Trauma podcast. I'm your host, Alyssa Scolari. And we have here with us today, Melissa Parks. So you have Melissa and Alyssa, so it's going to be a good time. Melissa is an EMDR therapist, as well as a couples therapist. She is devoted to helping you stop the cycle of conflict in your relationships and to understand your nervous system in order to experience more joy, she has been using her expertise and her humor on social media to de-stigmatize mental health, you will often hear her use the phrase you make sense.

So just a quick side note, I found Melissa on Tik-Tok. She is a bomb Tik-Tok maker. I thoroughly enjoy watching all of your Tik-Tok. So when she says that she uses humor as part of her therapy, she is not kidding.

Her Tik-Toks are really funny and I really appreciate them. So, hi, Melissa. Welcome. And thank you for all that you do.

Melissa Parks: [00:01:56]

Hey, I'm so glad to be here. Thank you so much for having me. It's a true honor. I'm excited.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:02:01]

I'm so excited for you to be here and to talk about a topic that quite honestly, I don't really know a whole lot about. So this is going to be a major learning experience for me as well as a lot of the listeners. So would you be able to share a little bit more on like what you do, who you are and could you break down that like gigantic acronym?

That is EMDR.

Melissa Parks: [00:02:26]

Yes. Yes, absolutely. Well, like you so beautifully said, I am a therapist, a couples therapists, EMDR therapist. I do coaching. I do consultation. I do lots of things, but I treat clients in the state of South Carolina and I am so passionate about that. I came into the field and have been licensed for 17 years, and I still feel just as passionate, if not, even more passionate than I was when I first started, I really am on fire for all this stuff.

In terms of EMDR trauma-focused stuff, attachment focused stuff. It's just my favorite. It's just one of my favorite things. So I'm excited to be able to talk about this today to maybe help bridge the understanding for folks because you know, it can be kind of, you know, intimidating when you just, the acronym, like you said, is a little intimidating: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.

That's a mouthful.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:03:26]

Yes, it is.

Melissa Parks: [00:03:27]

It's like what is Well I'd love to take some time to explain some about it and then. Open up for questions. Definitely. But Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing is an evidence-based treatment model, which just means that it has extensive research and it's been proven .It has proven outcomes and way back when it was only used to treat trauma, but now we know that it can treat trauma, it can treat complex trauma, it can treat a myriad of issues, including distressing symptoms, like chronic depression, anxiety, just a whole host of things. So it's not just trauma.

And it's based on a model that theorizes that our current symptoms are a result of unprocessed memories from our past that are showing up in our present. So for example, the brain may have had an experience from the past and it was unable to integrate all the components of that experience. And so what happens is our amazing nervous system comes up for us to protect us, to keep us sane and it fragments that experience into pieces.

And that's what we see in our current day are those fragments of the experience as our symptoms. Overwhelming feelings, body sensations, whatever they are. That's what our symptoms are. That's what this EMDR model is based on. It's basically saying our past is in our present.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:05:04]

I gotcha. And when you say just to, and I don't mean to interrupt, I just had a quick thought, when you say unprocessed memories, do you mean repressed memories that are stored in our...