Targeting Anxiety and Body Sensations
EMDR for Kids and TeensKids experiencing anxiety can impact all facets of their life, and it's really heartbreaking to watch kids that really, really have strong anxiety disorders. This is their formative years. It can impact how they interact socially. It can impact how they're doing academically because they can't focus on things. It just has a profound effect across all phases of their life.
So addressing this now, addressing this early in their life is so helpful, and it really can alter the rest of their life. So it's a gift for you as an EMDR therapist to be able to address their anxiety. Traditionally, what you're wanting to do is to go back to the original event and reprocess through that. Sometimes that's not feasible with kids. As you remember, kids are often current, present oriented, and will really want to work on the current anxieties.
And if that's the case, that's what you're going to do. You're gonna respect your client, keeping in mind that there may be earlier incidents that you really do need to return to if you get stuck. And when I'm working with a client that has anxiety, I'm definitely gonna have a psychoeducational piece on anxiety and talking to them about what happens in their body, the physiological reactions, and also what's happening on a psychological level. So I'm talking about how people with anxiety disorders are frequently thinking about things in the future. It's always about, well, what if this happens? What if that happens?
Catastrophic thinking. And that is what triggers people to have anxiety and encouraging them to live in the present, think about what is, what's happening now, and also teaching them some skills and abilities like grounding skills, mindfulness exercises, and relaxation exercises as a form of preparation before we're even moving into reprocessing. And when working with anxiety disorders, the body sensation is a really, really important aspect to focus on. Not only do you wanna educate them to that facet of anxiety, but you want to identify what's happening in their body when they're anxious. Do they have tightness in the chest? Are they having shortness of breath?
Do they have heart palpitations? And this causes dread for the client where they have that fear of the fear. They don't wanna experience those feelings and sensations. And then that can be if it doesn't process out in those touchstone events or those current triggers that you're processing, you can target the body sensations specifically and separately.