Very often this feeling of always waiting for the other shoe to drop comes in the aftermath of an experience where you felt blindsided. If you survived an event in which you felt intensely overwhelmed or frighteningly out of control, your survival instinct clicks into place to protect you. Sometimes this is a significant single event trauma, and sometimes this is a more subtle experience like growing up in a home with longstanding patterns of unpredictability over time.

Processing and releasing past pain and trauma can have profound and life changing effects. One of the most impactful things about EMDR is how processing certain memories or beliefs can generalize out to other memories and beliefs, creating lasting healing on a very deep level. And this can happen in days or months, instead of years of therapy.

A lot of my Christian clients come to me frustrated and disillusioned because they have been praying and applying Scripture to their anxiety faithfully for months, or even years, without any real change. Well meaning Christian friends have told them that anxiety is a problem of faith, and that if they would pray more, or trust more, or surrender more, then they would be healed. So they've tried and tried, but still come up short.

I work with a lot of highly successful professional men and women, many of whom have worked their way up to high level positions or established very successful businesses. Many of these people, in spite of their success, struggle with feelings of inadequacy or fears of being a fraud. Most people would never know. On the outside they look like they have it all together. But on the inside high anxiety is derailing them.

What a lot of people don't know is that anxiety is a physiological response in your brain and body to a trigger that feels upsetting or threatening. It's not a mindset problem that you can just think your way out of, it's an automatic nervous system response that's part of your hard wired survival instinct. You reduce anxiety by creating a sense of calm and safety in your nervous system so that you can get out of survival mode.

Your brain and body just automatically did what they could to try and keep you safe. You didn't have time or capacity to think, the primitive part of your brain just took over and kicked you into survival mode. Sometimes that automatic survival response is different than a decision you would have made with your rational mind. But your rational mind, by design, isn't always available in those moments and so your primitive survival instinct switches on and takes over.

Knowing that intrusive thoughts get bigger and more anxiety provoking when you pay more attention to them, it makes sense that finding ways to give them less focus and attention can greatly reduce anxiety and disturbance. There are 3 simple steps you can take to start reducing anxiety from intrusive thoughts.

Imposter Syndrome is a pervasive fear that you're not competent or not good enough, that your success is fragile or a mistake, and that you'll be found out and something terrible will happen. It's more common than you would think among highly successful and high achieving people, in spite of evidence that they've actually earned their success through competence, hard work, and being well respected.

One thing I try to keep in mind is that these teens are pretty much going through life with half a brain at this time. They just don't have that prefrontal cortex development that gives them the ability to reason with logic, control impulses, and problem solve consistently. Also, there's hormones. Everything is changing so much, their inner world can be a roller coaster... so it's no wonder we're often left feeling like we're on an absolute ride of ups and downs.

EMDR is immensely helpful for healing early childhood experiences that may not have been overtly abusive, but that you know were impactful to your sense of safety, security, or identity. Through EMDR processing, you can neutralize pain from the past and restore a sense of who you are with confidence in the present.

My first thought was, it’s so common and human to automatically assume something is wrong with us when we're sitting in uncomfortable feelings - but having feelings in response to life events is normal. My next thought, and what I said to her, was...