You’re drawn to live a life marked by meaning, passion, and productivity. You’re highly creative and you want to express ideas – give them shape by creating something tangible. It’s not enough to allow your ideas to stay in your private fantasy world. Instead, you want to realize your dreams and goals.
And, you crave and seek connections that fill your heart – real connections that make life worth living.
Yes, you want to live with a feeling of being inspired and fulfilled. To be able to take on all the life challenges, messiness, and circumstances. You don’t want life to stay in your way.
But, despite your gifts and talents, you often find yourself feeling unhappy and unfulfilled. Maybe it’s your career or lack of financial fulfillment. Or, perhaps your family situation or your romantic life.
Many times you wonder: “Why, can’t I just be happy, creative, productive, and genuinely connected?”
You can’t pinpoint anything in particular. You find yourself asking: “Is it my childhood?” “My current circumstances?” “The stress?” ” The uncertainty?” “Or, Is there something wrong with me?” “Am I good enough?”
With so many questions and no clear answers, you feel alone and confused. It’s easy to lose your confidence in your goals and dreams when you don’t see the origins of your challenges.
What’s really going on? What’s underneath all these feelings?
Many times, these feelings of “I’m not good enough,” “confident enough,” “ accomplished enough,” “fulfilled enough,” or “loved enough” are signs of old, underlying emotional trauma.
The traumatic experiences may have happened so long ago that you don’t recall what hurt you. And yet, these past events left you feeling alone and unable to understand what’s happening to you. Or, how to help yourself. These forgotten experiences still live in your unconscious or your preconscious mind, leaving you stuck in the same old stories even as you try so hard to move forward.
Emotional trauma is deceiving and tricky. Those who live with emotional trauma find that it affects their creativity, performance, productivity, confidence, or relationships.
Many people misunderstand the concept of “trauma” and imagine something that you see in the news headlines. To the contrary, emotional trauma is anything that happened to you that keeps you from living, creating, performing, and establishing genuine connections.
Emotional trauma leaves an imprint on you. But, you probably don’t even know it’s there. Without realizing it, you can be controlled by trauma or remain stuck in its old patterns, including: feelings, beliefs, and ways of engaging with others and the world.
If you experience feelings of emptiness or anxiety or you struggle with addictions, depression, or unfulfilling relationships, or you can’t seem to attain your dreams or goals, you most likely live with repressed emotional trauma.
What can you do to help yourself? Are you doomed to live this way?
You feel “something is not right with you” and you don’t know how to change it. What can you do?
Fortunately, there is a specialized psychotherapy approach that can help you heal and overcome emotional trauma – so you can live, create, and connect with emotional freedom. It’s called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.
Why EMDR therapy? And, how does it work?
EMDR is a highly researched psychotherapy treatment. It is considered a “evidence – based” trauma treatment by the American Psychiatric Association, Dep. of Veterans Affairs, the World Health Organization and other national and international organizations.
People I worked with – using the EMDR approach – report: “It feels like I am out of the trauma box. I know what happened to me but I’m not there anymore.”
Or, they say things like “I wake up feeling clean and alive, as if the anxiety has lost its grip on me.”
“I don’t have to think so much about what I do, I just do and am happy to feel connected and present.”
“I moved out of my creative block into my creative flow. I’m not afraid to lose my creativity any more. I’m just riding its ebbs and flows.”
Trauma treatment is an art and a science at the same time.
EMDR is a highly effective trauma therapy that helps you process painful unconscious and preconscious memories – memories that you are largely unaware of but are loaded with emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and body sensations. EMDR targets and clears the unhealthy impact of past traumatic experiences – life moments that you couldn’t make sense of or protect yourself from at the time.
This form of therapy focuses on identifying the original memory and the sequence of similar traumatic memories that were built up on it. It’s designed to directly access memories that need to be processed – to integrate them into your mind in a healthy way. Thus, you can eliminate or significantly reduce old and unhealthy feelings, beliefs, and responses. In turn, you are empowered with healthier feelings and responses to life challenges.
A good EMDR therapist has the skill and ability to see, feel, understand your unique life experiences and their impact. Therefore, knows how to help you return to the memory lane and identify the significant, traumatic memories. A healing EMDR psychotherapy calls for a strong, loving, nurturing therapist – who is a diligent scientist and a passionate artist all at once!
People who have gone through EMDR therapy know the difference.
People who have gone through EMDR therapy know the difference. Only those that have experienced going back to the original memory, to “ground zero” and then came back to life can tell the impact of EMDR therapy. It gives you the ability to see, feel, and respond to the world from a place of emotional freedom. So, you can create your life with passion and inspiration.
This is great news! You’re not doomed to live feeling unhappy and unfulfilled! You don’t have to live stuck in old traumatic memories and repeat old stories. You can heal emotional trauma and overcome depression, anxiety, relationship issue, addictions, performance anxiety, or creative blocks.
Yes, you can live with emotional freedom – to experience the beauty of being alive. To create a life that feels right to you.
If you’re interested in learning more about how EMDR can improve your mental and emotional well-being and help you heal old wounds, please contact me for a free initial consultation.
I am Mihaela Ivan Holtz, Doctor in Clinical Psychology. I help creatives and performers with their life struggles, depression, anxiety, performance anxiety, creativity, relationships and love, PTSD, and addictions – to become their own best version. You can read more about Therapy for Creatives here.
