Zero Disturbance

Latest Episodes:

65: EMDR as Standard Practice [Why EMDR Works Series] Oct 10, 2023

Show notes

EMDR works. It’s well-known that it works for those who want to heal trauma, but you don’t have to be a trauma survivor to benefit from EMDR. In fact, I believe that it works for nearly every human on the planet.

This week, I’m starting a new series that I think will convince you that EMDR is for children, athletes, executives, parents, empty nesters, those going through a divorce, and more. And one of the reasons why it isn’t already a standard of practice for all therapists (as I think it should be) is because our therapy education hasn’t caught up with brain science.

I’m on a mission to raise awareness of EMDR so that grad schools make it part of their standard curriculum, it becomes more affordable, and it’s the default treatment option people get when they walk into a therapy office.

Listen in this week as I open the conversation around why EMDR is helpful to nearly everyone and should be available to anyone.

When something traumatic happens to us, it can be healing to have a therapist listen to and/or validate our horrible experience, especially if no one else has before. However, rehashing the details of that traumatic event can be retraumatizing. Brain-based therapies like EMDR teach us that we don't have to talk about the trauma or the details if we don't want to because the real healing doesn't focus on the traumatic event itself.

The Zero Disturbance podcast is for educational purposes and is not a replacement for a therapeutic relationship or individualized mental health or medical care.

Come learn with us at Zero Disturbance:

Want to learn more about empowering yourself to experience therapy on your terms? Sign up for our mailing list, get the Client Resource Library, and never miss a conversation.

Therapists, access our favorite free resources in The Zero Disturbance Welcome Bundle, full of free videos and downloads to help you develop your clinical reasoning skills, as well as ways to feel like an intentional designer of high-value offerings like intensives and passive income. Use these free resources to make the seemingly impossible feel absolutely accessible!

With a Masters in Education from Vanderbilt, Kambria has been creating trainings and teaching adult learners for over 20 years. As the Director of Education and Quality Improvement at Stanford Medical School, she created ease in complex systems, thereby giving medical trainees successful learning experiences. Now, as a dedicated mom, therapist, and EMDR Consultant, Kambria knows what it means to do things efficiently, effectively, and in a learner-centered way. When she isn't podcasting or creating online courses, you can find Kambria playing with her twins on a beach in California.

7 Myths About Intensives Oct 04, 2023

Show notes

Want to learn more about offering intensives in your practice? My Intensive Kit can help! Find out more here.

I've been offering intensive therapy programs for my EMDR clients for 5 years now and I've learned a lot about about how to design successful intensive models. And I've made it my mission to share my experience so that other clinicians may benefit in their own private practices.

And, now, because I've now had the opportunity to support clinicians as they launch their own intensive models, I've been able to learn more about what helps and hinders clinicians when it comes to designing their intensive models. And, as always, I want to share that with you.

Today, I explore the 7 most common myths that I hear in consultation about why clinicians feel stuck when it comes to offering intensive therapy in their private practices. And the good news? I'm here to encourage you (with data of course) on how we can shift our mindset to better understand how possible it is to design an intensive model of therapy.

Learn about why you're already trained and set up to do this, how intensive therapy actually takes less energy, that intensive therapy doesn't mean 6-8 hours of therapy, and much more in today's podcast episode.

You are a precious resource who has the ability to offer high-value services to their clients. And it's my mission to help you understand that.

The Zero Disturbance podcast is for educational purposes and is not a replacement for a therapeutic relationship or individualized mental health or medical care.

Come learn with us at Zero Disturbance:

Want to learn more about empowering yourself to experience therapy on your terms? Sign up for our mailing list and never miss a conversation.

64: Identifying Red & Green Flag Therapists [Rebranding Trauma Therapy Series] Sep 26, 2023

Show notes

Have you struggled with finding the right therapy for your needs? Maybe you’ve had a few appointments with several different therapists but never found someone you felt was on the same page as you for your treatment.

The client-therapist relationship is so important and it’s not something that anyone should enter lightly. For clients, it might be one of the most important relationships they build. Understanding your specific needs and finding a therapist who can meet those needs is pivotal.

If you’ve never worked with a therapist before, have worked with a therapist who didn’t feel like a good fit, or are looking for someone who offers different modalities than your current therapist offers, you need to do your research.

You can find a lot of information about therapists on their websites, but you’ll also want to have a conversation before you start working with them.

This episode is your guide for what to ask, how to understand the therapist’s responses, and what to look for in your conversation. It will also help you to check in with your therapist, if you’re already in a therapeutic relationship.

And if you’re a therapist, this is a great episode for helping you to show up in the way you want to show up. It will give you some parameters for setting up your own guide for how you work with clients.

This isn’t about ranking or rating therapists based on arbitrary criteria, but rather about seeking out a professional whose values, availability, and working style align with yours.

The Zero Disturbance podcast is for educational purposes and is not a replacement for a therapeutic relationship or individualized mental health or medical care.

Come learn with us at Zero Disturbance:

Clients in therapy, want to learn more about empowering yourself to experience therapy on your terms? Sign up for our mailing list to get the free Client Resource library and never miss a conversation.

63: Who is a Candidate for EMDR? [Rebranding Trauma Therapy Series] Sep 19, 2023

Show notes

EMDR is a fantastic brain-based modality for trauma therapy, but there are so many other uses that we don’t talk about enough because of the focus on trauma. What gets lost the most is that EMDR supports anyone who wants to rewrite the curriculum they learned as a result of experiences from their past.

When we talk about EMDR being good for trauma victims, we essentially close the door of possibility of healing through this modality for those who don’t identify as trauma victims. This does a disservice to the majority of the population.

Everyone, at some point or another, suffers from anxiety, depression, sleeplessness, incongruence of messages in their bodies. This includes incongruence of women’s curriculum around their bodies and behaviors, messages from society around race and socioeconomic levels, and so much more. These experiences cause disturbance in lives in the past, present, and future. All of these are a natural part of being human. And EMDR can support people in rewriting their curriculum from the past so they can focus on the present and future.

That means that every person is a candidate for EMDR.

This week on the podcast, I’m sharing why EMDR is so valuable for people who want to create congruence in their curriculum in the present and future, how EMDR can be used for people looking for performance enhancement, and how therapy clients can become more empowered in their therapy treatment.

The Zero Disturbance podcast is for educational purposes and is not a replacement for a therapeutic relationship or individualized mental health or medical care.

Come learn with us at Zero Disturbance:

62: Identifying and Installing Positive Resources [Rebranding Trauma Therapy Series] Sep 12, 2023

Show notes

Identifying and pulling on positive resources is essential to processing trauma, but it’s also something you can do when you want to change your mindset around specific feelings and events. Even better, it’s something you can do on your own with a little bit of work and reflection.

Resourcing is a biologically natural process your body already has to create adaptive material. It’s what your body did to create adaptations after a traumatic event. But you can also resource yourself in a customized way to create positive resources using all the EMDR clinical reasoning available to us. You just need to know how to do it. The good news is that it’s incredibly simple. I’ll show you how.

We all have bundles of elements we use when we process trauma, including emotions, body sensations, images, and cognition. This week on the podcast, I’m sharing how to use this bundle of feelings and sensations around a positive event or relationship so you can pull on them, expand them, and make those resources accessible so you can feel better.

We can use bilateral stimulation to neutralize negative emotions, but we can also use it to expand positive relationships, experiences, and emotions. It works both ways.

Listen in as I share how and offer some real world and personal examples of how you can do this intentionally.

The Zero Disturbance podcast is for educational purposes and is not a replacement for a therapeutic relationship or individualized mental health or medical care.

Mentioned in this episode:

Tapping In: A Step-by-Step Guide to Activating Your Healing Resources Through Bilateral Stimulation by Laurel Parnell, PhD

Come learn with us at Zero Disturbance:

Therapists, access our favorite free resources in The Zero Disturbance Welcome Bundle, full of free videos and downloads to help you develop your clinical reasoning skills, as well as ways to feel like an intentional designer of high-value offerings like intensives and passive income. Use these free resources to make the seemingly impossible feel absolutely accessible!

61: What’s Wrong with Mindset Work [Rebranding Trauma Therapy Series] Sep 05, 2023

Show notes

Doing mindset work isn’t always the answer. We’re inundated with messages from coaches and therapists on Instagram telling us that if we just worked on our mindset, we could get past so many of our limiting beliefs and roadblocks.

And while maybe mindset works for some, for many therapy clients it’s actually harmful.

When therapy clients don’t yet have the ability to protect themselves from negative cognitions around the mindset work, they can experience trauma. They can feel like a failure. And in cases like this, mindset work is now creating more harm.

We all have positive intentions with mindset work. But when we try and it doesn’t work, we start to believe it’s not even worth trying.

Instead, therapists and their clients need to have a good understanding of the client’s negative and positive beliefs so that we can create customized resources for that person, building on the positive beliefs that do exist.

This week, I’m sharing more about what this looks like in the therapy room and on social media and why we need to spend more time looking at individual adaptations, rather than blanket mindset work as a solution.

The Zero Disturbance podcast is for educational purposes and is not a replacement for a therapeutic relationship or individualized mental health or medical care.

Come learn with us at Zero Disturbance:

60: Creating Interdependence with Boundaries [Rebranding Trauma Therapy Series] Aug 29, 2023

Show notes

Most of us know how to behave appropriately in society, which is helpful in navigating the world. We follow the laws of our community, pay our bills, wait in the grocery lines, treat animals with kindness, etc. But sometimes, society (or our culture) teaches us a set of rules that don’t align with what is best for us.

If you’re a woman, you’ve likely felt this. We’ve been given this curriculum around boundaries and being available to others. We’re expected to act a certain way and be available to our partners, children, colleagues, even strangers whenever they have a want or need. And if we don’t jump to someone else’s needs immediately, we fall back on the negative messages that we’ve been taught: that we’re bad. This creates relational trauma and disturbance and we can sit in this for decades.

The reality is that society’s rulebook, this curriculum we’ve inherited and passed along for generations, isn’t our problem. And when we start creating and upholding our own rules, or boundaries, we can teach others that our rules matter too.

This week, I’m sharing more about how we’ve grown up with this curriculum in our hands that isn’t serving us or the people around us and how we can start noticing this so we can make changes. I share a three-step process to walk through when you receive inputs from others that will help you start to implement your own rulebook.

You don’t have to chameleon someone else’s experiences and you don’t have to change how you respond to someone based on their rulebook. Give yourself permission to not abandon yourself and take care of your own emotional experience first.

When something traumatic happens to us, it can be healing to have a therapist listen to and/or validate our horrible experience, especially if no one else has before. However, rehashing the details of that traumatic event can be retraumatizing. Brain-based therapies like EMDR teach us that we don't have to talk about the trauma or the details if we don't want because the real healing doesn't focus on the traumatic event itself.

The Zero Disturbance podcast is for educational purposes and is not a replacement for a therapeutic relationship or individualized mental health or medical care.

Come learn with us at Zero Disturbance:

Get access to our free resource library, which includes a growing bundle of tools to help empower yourself to experience therapy on your terms. Sign up here.

59: Expanding the Definition of “Doing the Work” [Rebranding Trauma Therapy Series] Aug 22, 2023

Show notes

Too often I hear therapists share that a client “isn’t doing the work.” They’re not progressing or working through their trauma because in session they talk about what’s going on in their life today, rather than talking about what happened in the past.

I believe that when a client hears from their therapist that they’re not “doing the work,” it’s a red flag. Therapists need to put on their clinical reasoning hats and really think about what they’re saying.

The reality is that we’re always doing the work.

Therapy clients don’t always need to talk about trauma to be working on their trauma. As I’ve shared in previous videos, your brain doesn’t care what time it is because it’s always linking experiences. The work can happen in the past, present, and future and it’s all important in trauma work.

This week, I’m sharing why therapists hold the common view that clients must talk about trauma to work on their trauma, and how both therapy clients and therapists can shift the conversation and learn how to go from dipping toes into the pool to feeling comfortable in the deep end. I’m also sharing what therapists can do to support clients in practicing to be able to do the hard work, collecting data along the way.

This episode is part of the Rebranding Trauma Therapy series. Watch the whole series here.

When something traumatic happens to us, it can be healing to have a therapist listen to and/or validate our horrible experience, especially if no one else has before. However, rehashing the details of that traumatic event can be retraumatizing. Brain-based therapies like EMDR teach us that we don't have to talk about the trauma or the details if we don't want because the real healing doesn't focus on the traumatic event itself.

The Zero Disturbance podcast is for educational purposes and is not a replacement for a therapeutic relationship or individualized mental health or medical care.

Come learn with us at Zero Disturbance:

Want to learn more about empowering yourself to experience therapy on your terms? Sign up for our mailing list and never miss a conversation.

Ep 58: Choosing the Triggers We Use [Rebranding Trauma Therapy Series] Aug 15, 2023

Show notes

The way we’ve been talking about triggers is an incomplete conversation and it’s time to change that. The more information you have about what triggers you will help inside trauma therapy and help create adaptive material to help with trauma.

Here’s where we need to rethink what we’ve learned about triggers: A trigger is a stimulus that elicits a reaction. Any stimulus; any reaction. But our culture has added qualifiers to our definition of triggers, turning them into something that’s negative. Triggers can also be positive (think: you smell cookies baking and you suddenly want to eat a cookie) or even neutral.

And this is where branding of EMDR, Brainspotting, and ART can fall short, by only focusing on disturbances and negative triggers and not looking deeper into positive triggers.

This is important because the more you know yourself, the more powerful you’ll be in the world. Our job as therapy clients and therapists is to get curious so when you’re doing the hard work in therapy, you can learn to use linkages and triggers with intention, control, and choice.

It’s pretty amazing stuff and this week, I’m walking you through what this looks like and talking more about how we can rethink triggers so they work for us, not against us.

The Zero Disturbance podcast is for educational purposes and is not a replacement for a therapeutic relationship or individualized mental health or medical care.

Come learn with us at Zero Disturbance:

Want to learn more about empowering yourself to experience therapy on your terms? Sign up for our mailing list and never miss a conversation and get your free guide to create your own trigger roadmap.

Ep 57: A Different Perspective on Phobias [Rebranding Trauma Therapy Series] Aug 08, 2023

Show notes

Curiosity should always be the default for therapists working with clients, and clients should know this and look for it in session. This is especially true when we’re talking about phobias.

There’s often a lot of shame around phobias because they’re characterized by a disproportionate response to a feeling or fear. At the surface level, it might not seem logical. But if a therapist responds in this way, they could create or feed a toxic relationship between the client and the feelings the client is having.

Instead, a better response is curiosity. It’s important for both therapist and client to get curious about clinical reasoning when it comes to phobias and adaptations.

In this week’s video, I’m sharing how therapists can be curious about the function of the phobia to help clients look deeper into how their bodies, emotions, and thoughts react to experiences that are triggering a response.

It’s not necessarily straightforward. Content doesn’t necessarily transfer when our brain develops alarm systems and links that lead to adaptations. This makes it difficult to identify and, as I’ve talked about in previous episodes, digging into traumatic experiences isn’t always the answer.

Listen in as I provide tools and insights for both therapists and clients. This is such an important conversation in our journey of rebranding trauma therapy into something that can help and heal.

Listen in and be sure to watch the whole series on rebranding trauma therapy.

When something traumatic happens to us, it can be healing to have a therapist listen to and/or validate our horrible experience, especially if no one else has before. However, rehashing details of traumatic events can be retraumatizing. Brain-based therapies like EMDR teach us that we don't have to talk about the trauma or the details if we don't want because the real healing doesn't focus on the traumatic event itself.

The Zero Disturbance podcast is for educational purposes and is not a replacement for a therapeutic relationship or individualized mental health or medical care.