Why You Can’t Just Move On: EMDR, Trauma & Self-Worth

• 00:00 – Opening — When the Body Still Reacts: Sherridan introduces persistent physical and emotional activation around a past event as one possible reason to discuss trauma-focused work with a therapist.
• 00:37 – Meet Sherridan Green and Explore EMDR: Laura introduces Gestalt psychotherapist and EMDR practitioner Sherridan Green, acknowledges Country and outlines the episode’s focus on trauma, confidence and self-worth.
• 02:45 – Does EMDR Erase Memories?: Sherridan addresses a common misconception: EMDR does not aim to remove the memory of an event. The conversation explores the difference between remembering an experience and reacting as though it is happening now.
• 05:16 – Keeping the Lessons Without the Fear: Laura reflects on her concern that processing a traumatic memory might weaken her ability to protect herself. She describes retaining what she learned while feeling better able to assess present-day situations.
• 09:33 – When Might EMDR Complement Talk Therapy?: The discussion considers why intellectual understanding may coexist with a strong embodied response. Sherridan describes EMDR as part of a wider therapeutic process, with talk therapy contributing insight and preparation.
• 12:16 – Preparation, History Mapping and Negative Beliefs: Why processing is preceded by preparation. Sherridan describes mapping a person’s history and identifying beliefs such as “I’m not safe” or “I’m not enough” that are connected with distressing experiences.
• 14:00 – Eye Movements and Memory Processing: Sherridan uses a library analogy and a comparison with REM sleep to explain her account of memory processing. Laura then reflects on how a memory from 25 years earlier felt after her own session.
• 18:17 – Single Events, Repeated Trauma and Attachment: The conversation moves beyond isolated major events to repeated experiences, neglect and attachment-related wounds. Sherridan discusses how related memories can connect with a foundational negative belief and why further sessions may be needed.
• 21:25 – Trust, Protective Parts and Pausing the Process: Laura and Sherridan discuss their existing therapeutic relationship and the protective part that emerged in Laura’s session. Sherridan explains that processing can pause while a concern is addressed through Gestalt therapy or IFS work.
• 25:01 – Revisiting a Memory with Support: Laura asks what it means to return to a painful memory during EMDR. Sherridan describes the practitioner’s presence, ongoing check-ins, pauses between rounds and responding when someone feels stuck or numb.
• 27:40 – What Can Feel Different After EMDR?: Sherridan discusses changes people may notice in a memory’s vividness. Laura describes her own experience of a memory feeling more appropriately old and faded, while she could still recall the facts.
• 28:21 – Emotional Neglect and Unmet Developmental Needs: Can lasting wounds relate to what someone never received? The discussion explores safety, protection, validation and feeling loved, while distinguishing repeated deprivation from the idea that every unmet need is traumatic.
• 30:20 – Self-Worth, Loving Families and Adult Therapy: Laura connects the discussion with her earlier work on confidence and a stronger sense of self. They explore how people from loving families may still have wounds to understand and how adults can learn to validate and support themselves.
• 34:34 – Inner Strengths and Self-Validation: Sherridan describes helping women recognise their capabilities and contributions. The conversation considers confidence that comes from valuing one’s own strengths, with external approval becoming an addition rather than the main source of worth.
• 36:24 – Personal Values, Self-Trust and Moving Forward: Laura reflects on the shift from looking outward for approval to knowing her own needs and values. Sherridan discusses recognising the strengths that helped someone survive and building on what is already working.
• 39:35 – Rebuilding Confidence, Choice by Choice: Confidence can be worn away gradually and rebuilt through everyday choices. Laura and Sherridan discuss acting from personal values, noticing what works and making room for more of it.
• 40:48 – Closing Thanks: Laura thanks Sherridan for the conversation and the EMDR experience they have discussed.
• 41:02 – Subscribe and Explore Source: Laura invites listeners to subscribe to The Right Therapist and follow the link to download the Source app.

• 00:00 – Opening — When the Body Still Reacts

[00:00] Sheridan: Well, I suppose one way would be that if you understand when you feel anxious and your body keeps getting triggered or has a disturbance about something, so when you think back on an event and you still can feel it, in your body and the thoughts in your mind get activated in a sort of stressful way, then that’s often a clue. It’s not just talking about it that’s going to solve it. It’s more that you’ve embodied it. EMDR gets to the source of the embodiment of the trauma that the anxiety, stress, whatever it is, has created.

• 00:37 – Meet Sherridan Green and Explore EMDR

[00:37] Laura: Today, I’m joined by Sherridan Green. Sherridan is a Gestalt psychotherapist and an EMDR practitioner. Today we’re talking about EMDR and Sherridan’s work in general, where a big part of that is working with women to help them find their solid core and centre.

You’re listening to the Right Therapist, where we demystify therapy. We’d like to begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which we live and work. We pay our respects to elders, past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples listening today. Welcome, Sherridan.

Sheridan: Thank you, Laura.

Laura: We might start by talking about EMDR, and I’m just going to read a bit of a definition and background of EMDR for anyone who is a little bit unfamiliar. So, EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing. It’s an evidence-based psychotherapy approach that was originally developed to treat trauma, but is now used for a wide range of issues, including anxiety, panic, phobias, grief, and low self-worth. Rather than simply talking about difficult experiences, EMDR helps the brain reprocess memories that continue to to trigger distress in the present. So today we’ll be unpacking how EMDR actually works and who it’s for.

So, people may have heard of EMDR, and I know before experiencing it, I actually experienced it with Sherridan yesterday. Before experiencing it with you, I had some idea that it was a way to help the brain reprocess traumatic memories and help the brain store them in a way that meant they were somehow complete and didn’t need to be continually brought up again, as the brain can do with traumatic memories. But I maybe had some misconceptions about it, or some question marks about how exactly it would work and what that would mean for me. What are some of the common misconceptions that people have about EMDR?

• 02:45 – Does EMDR Erase Memories?

[02:45] Sheridan: I think one of the most common is that people imagine EMDR erases memory, but it doesn’t. You still have that memory; that event still existed. What changes is the desensitisation of the impact on the nervous system, so you stop reacting as though it’s happening right now. Most people think that EMDR erases memories. It doesn’t. It puts that event that happened in the past where it belongs.

You still remember that it happened. It just doesn’t impact the nervous system anymore. It desensitises the disturbance that that event has created and that you continue to carry. In the desensitisation and then reprocessing, you’re able to see that that’s not happening now.


[03:39] Laura: It’s really interesting because I know myself with traumatic memories, and obviously people I work with and speak to, that when we recall a traumatic memory, our body starts to react as though we are in that here and now, and that’s where we find that we want to move away from traumatic memories, that we want to distract ourselves. That it’s like, oh no, I don’t want to talk about that. We don’t want to engage with a traumatic memory because it then activates our body as though we are in the trauma here and now, and we kind of relive it in a way.

So what you’re saying is that EMDR helps us to file that memory away in the past, correct, and leave it there so it’s not coming alive for us in the present all the time.

[04:24] Sheridan: Yeah, and I think people are really familiar with the word “trigger”, being triggered. What you’re often being triggered by is the nervous system remembering how you felt in that event. When a similar thing happens, it takes you back. There’s no thought in that, just the feeling of the nervous system being impacted.

[04:51] Laura: Yeah, I think a lot of people that I speak to, they have experienced a traumatic event in the past, and then something happens. in their present that has some kind of similar flavor, though it is a completely separate new event, and their response is disproportionate because it’s a reawakening of the old reaction.

[05:15] Sheridan: Well said.

• 05:16 – Keeping the Lessons Without the Fear

[05:16] Laura: One of the questions I kind of had in my mind going into EMDR was a little bit of a worry: I had that traumatic event, and I was changed by it. One of the ways I was changed by it is that I’m more protective of myself now. If I do EMDR, am I not going to be able to protect myself anymore? If I really put that to bed, I had this kind of fear that that might leave me wide open, without the lessons I learned from that traumatic event.

Having experienced it yesterday, I feel really confident that I was able to not only retain what I learnt from that traumatic event, but let go of the fear and activation, so that it’s filed away in the past. Actually, I’m more solid, more able to make decisions that aren’t from a place of activation and fear — more grounded, better able to keep myself safe.

[06:29] Sheridan: Exactly. That’s to do with the fact that we have parts that have created adjustments to protect ourselves. We know that from doing Gestalt psychotherapy or IFS, Internal Family Systems work, that there are parts working very hard to look after us.

In the work that we do, we’re desensitising traumas around beliefs that we have. You can call them core themes, negative beliefs, whatever name you want to give that. Therefore, we desensitise the negative beliefs. You have a protective part, and you’re telling that protective part that it doesn’t need to concern itself about that anymore. It is safe.

Say you were working with a theme of “I’m not safe in the world, and this is the event that told me I’m not safe.” Once you’re in the processing of that event, you’re able to see that it wasn’t my fault that I wasn’t safe. That was the situation I was in. That was the circumstances. In the reprocessing, we reprocess it to a positive affirmation which says, “I am now safe,” because, as an adult, that situation is not happening anymore.

[07:58] Laura: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and that it’s I think something that was in my mind beforehand is that oh you know I don’t want to I don’t want to be thinking I’m safe if I’m not really, but the thing that was making me feel unsafe was the past experience, which is not actually happening in the here and now. So I think after doing that EMDR session, I’m more able to be in the here and now, assessing each situation on its actual merits, not based on my past experience, which is very fragmenting and very discombobulating. And I, I think I’m much better able to assess present day situation without that activation and fear.

It’s much clearer. I think I’ve got an actual picture of what’s happening.

[08:49] Sheridan: Because in that, you are correct. You may not be safe in the situation you are right now, but that’s in present time, not from the past. So you will be able to differentiate between now how I am not safe in the present that excludes your past experience.

[09:09] Laura: And that yeah I will know like oh it’s very clear to me in the present that I’m not safe. I don’t have to doubt and go oh is this just because I’m I’m traumatised that I think I’m not safe? No, no, I’m very clear. I, I can assess this situation. Say no, not for me.

[09:25] Sheridan: Yeah.

[09:25] Laura: This doesn’t feel right. Rather than wondering, oh, maybe it’s me because I’m traumatised.

[09:31] Sheridan: And I’m being triggered. Yeah, yeah.

• 09:33 – When Might EMDR Complement Talk Therapy?

[09:33] Laura: Yeah. It’s quite liberating, actually. How do people know when they might need something like EMDR rather than just regular talk therapy.

[09:45] Sheridan: Well, I suppose one way would be that if you understand when you feel anxious and your body keeps getting triggered or has a disturbance about something, so when you think back on an event and you still can feel it, in your body, and the thoughts in your mind get activated in a sort of stressful way. Then that’s often a clue that you know it’s not just talking about it that’s going to solve it. It’s more that you’ve embodied it, and so this gets EMDR gets to the source of the embodiment of the trauma that the that the anxiety, stress, whatever it is, has created.

[10:33] Laura: Yeah, it’s not just a cognitive process, is it?

[10:37] Sheridan: No.

[10:39] Laura: It’s a nervous system. It works on quite a few levels: a cognitive level, the actual function of the brain, the nervous system.

[10:53] Sheridan: Well, as we know, it is all connected. What EMDR does, it sort of links up the neural pathways. So it’s now with this new information. It’s telling the mind that is old information and it’s not relevant anymore. And of course, then the mind is communicating that to the body. So it’s a process of back and forth between mind and body, working together, so that now the body is understanding that it doesn’t need to be so reactive.

[11:27] Laura: It makes a lot of sense. I think one of the things that we can do in therapy is have a very good intellectual understanding of what we have experienced and how it’s shaped us and what our attachment styles are and all of these different theories and how they apply to us, we can understand that intellectually, and that’s certainly part of the picture. But it only goes so far towards helping us be free of that. And I think what is necessary is this deeper embodied nervous system work, be it EMDR or somatic work, but that needs to be included in therapy for lasting change?

• 12:16 – Preparation, History Mapping and Negative Beliefs

[12:16] Sheridan: Laura, I think the important thing you’ve said there is “included”. It’s very important to do talk therapy for understanding how your mind is processing things, to get an insight into what is needed. The first session in EMDR is a mapping, and that can take one, two or three sessions.

If you go to a therapist and just say, “I just want to come for EMDR,” there’s still a lot of preparation work to do to get there. We do a mapping of the person’s history, looking at all the events that have given them the negative beliefs they now believe about themselves and that are stopping them in their life. There is a lot of work to do. You don’t come in and just have an EMDR session.

That is really important because, to process any traumatic event, you need to know what the negative belief is that sits behind it. That’s what the EMDR work works on — the negative belief. You’re desensitising the negative belief. Something like “I’m not safe” or “I’m not enough”. Pick your beast, basically. To find that, you need to do quite a bit of preparation work.

Otherwise, doing EMDR without the correct negative belief attached to that traumatic event is still effective in some way, because you will be addressing something, but it mightn’t get to the depth or the root of the cause — the belief to be evaporated, basically.

• 14:00 – Eye Movements and Memory Processing

[14:00] Laura: What actually happens in the brain during EMDR?

[14:04] Sheridan: So we know REM sleep. People think of it as seeing the eyes moving back and forth. What happens in that is undirected processing. Events of the day get processed, but they only get processed from the information that you know. If you have been able to sort something in the past, your mind goes, “I know what that is,” and it can file it away.

There’s a really great analogy from the EMDR work about a library. There are all these books on the trolley, and at night the books that know where they need to go get filed back on the shelves. The books that don’t stay on the trolley, and that’s basically your trauma. You don’t know how to process it. That can come from very simple things, like you grew up in a family where you didn’t feel loved or safe. It’s confusing because our world, our society tells us that our home should be safe and our family should love us. Therefore, you can’t reconcile how or why that is.

What happens when you do directed REM, which is basically EMDR? You sit in front of somebody, they’re doing an eye movement, and you’re following it. You’re recreating REM. You’re giving directed information, with the theme you’ve decided to work on — the negative belief.

What happens is the processing takes 24 to 48 hours. Your neural pathways link up, so the old information where you believe that you were not safe in the world now links up with, “I know I’m safe in the world. I’m an adult. I’ve created a life where I am safe as much as I can be.” That links up and tells the old information that it’s not true anymore.

You process that in the mind, and the mind gives that information to the body that it doesn’t actually need to react.

[16:20] Laura: And can finally file that memory away.

[16:25] Sheridan: Yeah.

[16:26] Laura: In the archives.

[16:27] Sheridan: Correct.

[16:28] Laura: Where it belongs.

[16:29] Sheridan: Yeah, correct. So after an EMDR experience, is that you find that memory you worked on becomes blurred? it’s potentially like you’re sitting on a train, and now you’re looking out the window, and there it is, as like a landscape that you’re seeing miles and miles away.

[16:48] Laura: As you say that, I kind of realise that the traumatic event that we worked on yesterday, I can I still remember it, but it’s not as vivid, and it feels appropriately blurred because it happened 25 years ago. Correct. It feels as blurry as all my other memories from 25 years ago. When just yesterday, it was incredibly vivid, as though it happened a year ago, and my body reacted as I remembered it. Now I’m I’m thinking about it. I’m like, yeah, yeah, I know that happened. I remember all of the facts about it still, but the image of it is much older, and my body isn’t reacting as it used to when I remembered it.

[17:42] Sheridan: yeah. So it’s put it where it belongs in the past.

[17:47] Laura: It’s absolutely fascinating. Yeah, it’s really really interesting. So essentially, somebody has realised what the eyes are doing during REM sleep, and that’s how the brain is processing memories in a just in its natural way, undirected, as you say, and they’ve taken that process and made it very intentional so that the brain can process traumatic memories that it otherwise didn’t didn’t know what to do with.

[18:16] Sheridan: Correct.

• 18:17 – Single Events, Repeated Trauma and Attachment

[18:17] Laura: Is EMDR only for people with major trauma, like those big capital T traumas, like being attacked or huge events in their life.

[18:28] Sheridan: No, it certainly processes those very well, but also you can actually work on repeated traumas. So growing up in a household, a violent household where there was domestic abuse, violence, sexual abuse, or repeated neglect, even. So with that, that’s a that’s a little bit more processing because there’s probably a few negative beliefs that you’ve now taken on as being your own, but usually in that, when a repeated event has happened many times, what we do is actually pick the worst of them, and you work on the worst.

And then what happens is all of the other events that actually are in alignment with that negative belief, like I am not safe, or I’m not worthy, or I’m not loved. I’m not lovable. all any you know. There’s a plethora of negative beliefs that you can have from repeated events. So what happens in the processing is they all get linked up. So in that next 24 to 48 hours, when your mind’s working on this, it’s actually now seeing every event that was similar to that, and is saying, Oh, I know how to process that. Can put that book back on the shelf.

[19:50] Laura: So processing one part of our trauma, whether it’s that capital T big trauma or the more ongoing lesser, if you. Traumas processing one of those can have a domino effect on other traumas that the brain didn’t know how to process before. It suddenly has the pathway to process other things too.

[20:13] Sheridan: Yeah, correct. And in that though, with repeated trauma events, you’re possibly going to have to do a few sessions because there will be several negative beliefs that have come from that. So really, in a way, with each EMDR session, you are processing one negative belief mostly.

[20:35] Laura: I know yesterday when we were in our EMDR session together, there were quite a few negative beliefs, but we kind of got to the one that felt like it was at the root of all of them. So this this belief, I’m not safe, sitting above that were a few other negative beliefs that kind of came from that. I’m imagining and feeling that processing that really foundational belief of I’m not safe then helps to process some of those other beliefs as well. Though I know I’m already excited to do some more EMDR on some other beliefs that I know I have, and particularly around attachment trauma.

Can EMDR be used for attachment trauma or like misattunement from parents, emotional neglect.

• 21:25 – Trust, Protective Parts and Pausing the Process

[21:25] Sheridan: Absolutely. I’ll also say that that’s not your first session with me, so we have a long history. For us to be able to work through and find what that base, root negative belief was, that also comes from our history of working together and you trusting me.

That’s why, in beginning with talk therapy, we need to build that trust with the person we’re working with, so that you allow yourself to be completely in their hands for the processing.

[22:04] Laura: Yeah.

[22:05] Sheridan: Because as we know, that part way through the work that we were doing, you had a protective part come in, and so if you hadn’t have built such a strong relationship with me previously, that part may not have been able to be soothed to step back and allow the processing to continue.

[22:24] Laura: Yeah, that’s a really good point. Sherridan was actually my therapist when I was studying psychotherapy many years ago, and so yeah, we have a really, although it was a long time ago, we do have that really solid foundation where I am very happy to be in your hands, and I mean it just speaks to how important that relationship is with your therapist in any type of therapy, whether it’s EMDR or talk therapy or somatics. That we need to feel held, and we need to feel confident in the person that we’re working with, because if we don’t, there will be parts of us that come up and say, I’m not really sure about this.

And those are to be honoured and trusted. It’s just an indication that there needs to be a little bit more groundwork and a little bit more safety. And yeah, when that protective part came up for me yesterday, it was it was around that misconception I had of, oh, but wait, if I if I deal with this trauma, am I going to lose that ability? Am I going to lose that hypervigilance that I believe has been protecting me all these years? And you were able to explain that really beautifully, and because I know you so well and trust you, that protective part could go. Oh, okay, got it. Yeah, I’m happy to continue.

[23:50] Sheridan: Yeah, and I think if we want to add that in, if you feel this is important: if people have a strong inner critic that is now scared of this process, what might need to happen is for the processing to stop. We would put the event in a container and then perhaps do some Gestalt or IFS work on that protective part, so that we connect with it, soothe it, and then we can continue.

That may be in the same session, or it might have to be in a next session, because it’s important.

[24:35] Laura: Absolutely, and that yeah, EMDR isn’t. And this might be another misconception that we don’t just barrel in and resolve a trauma. We look at what’s happening in the system and notice what comes up and pay attention and respond in the moment. It’s not just oh we go in and we do this process and it’s one size fits all. Correct. That’s not the approach. Right.

[25:00] Sheridan: Yeah. Correct.

• 25:01 – Revisiting a Memory with Support

[25:01] Laura: When we’ve experienced something traumatic, we generally consciously or unconsciously spend a lot of time and energy not going there, not bringing it up, not reliving it. Does EMDR require people to go there and relive a traumatic a traumatic memory?

[25:20] Sheridan: Yes, it does. Whilst exposure therapy is a very different type of therapy, with EMDR you do need to relive the event. In picking an event and going back to the worst moment of it, and it being processed, desensitised, you are able to get through it with someone. You have someone who’s holding and supporting you in the processing with EMDR and the eye movement.

On every round of eye movement, you’re moving a step on. If you get stuck or numb, there’s pausing between each round. You’re asking, “What are you noticing now? What’s happening now?” It’s a check-in the whole time. You’re not just there alone in it. You feel the practitioner being very present with you, so you actually can move through it quite quickly. You might only be in that for moments, seconds, maybe a minute. For that time of actually feeling retraumatised by it, it’s momentarily there and it’s moving.

I love EMDR in the way that an awareness also opens up about what else was happening around, and you often have a really amazing insight: “I did have someone else there that was supporting me,” or “I was able to stay strong, protect myself or run away.”

Yes, you will experience the trauma of the event again, but only for that short time during the processing. The important thing is that it’s now desensitising it so that it doesn’t come up randomly in everyday life.

• 27:40 – What Can Feel Different After EMDR?

[27:40] Laura: What surprises people about their experience of EMDR?

[27:44] Sheridan: Well, I think one of the things that surprises people is that they can’t see the event clearly anymore, and they’ll keep looking for it, but it’s not there anymore. Yes, they have a vague memory of that thing happening to them, but it’s like a story that’s being told that’s about someone else.

[28:04] Laura: It’s almost like, my experience of it is that the memory is now not in vivid HD. It’s appropriately old and faded.

[28:16] Sheridan: Correct. Yeah, I know it’s very cool..

• 28:21 – Emotional Neglect and Unmet Developmental Needs

[28:21] Laura: Very cool. Actually, I can’t believe it. It’s really can trauma come from things that never happened.

[28:27] Sheridan: Absolutely, trauma isn’t only what happened to you; it can also be what you never received. Basic needs like safety, protection, validation, and feeling loved.

[28:44] Laura: I mean, they’re yeah, they’re really integral needs that we have as we develop as children, and the absence of those can leave us with experiences and feelings that we don’t know what to do with, and we don’t know where to file those away.

[29:00] Sheridan: Well, is that filing away or just seeing that perhaps you did get it in some places, but not the ones you expected to? Another point to make is to be careful not to imply that every absence is traumatic. A more accurate framing is that repeated deprivation of important developmental needs can have lasting psychological effects.

[29:35] Laura: Yeah, that it’s not just that our needs weren’t met, or we were missed in certain moments. It’s that needs that we had were fairly consistently not met.

[29:50] Sheridan: Correct.

[29:51] Laura: Yeah.


[29:51] Sheridan: Absolutely correct. Here we are as an adult, and that might have been the case when we were a child. As an adult, this is why I think a lot of people come to therapy: to understand how they can love themselves, how they can trust themselves, how they can validate themselves in the world. You actually become the force for yourself.

• 30:20 – Self-Worth, Loving Families and Adult Therapy

[30:20] Laura: I feel like that leads really nicely into the work that you do, particularly with women around helping them to develop their sense of self, sense of self worth and confidence, their solidity, and that’s something I really experienced in my early 30s in my work with you. That I went from being a very anxious woman who was feeling kind of buffeted by the winds of life, and constantly kind of reacting to things that were happening to me, that in my work with you, I found myself more and more solid, more and more knowing who I am, more and more aligned with my own values, and feeling more capable of creating the life that I want.

Very glad about that. It was so formative for me, and when I’m talking to clients who are looking for a therapist, yeah, sometimes I just hear my own self and own story and what they’re saying, and I know exactly who they need to see. Can someone come from a loving family and still carry wounds?

[31:46] Sheridan: Yes, absolutely. And in most cases, parents are just trying to do the best with what they’ve got. If we have the understanding that our parents came from, you know two different sets of parents and have got together, so therefore there’s all those different types of you know events, things that they’ve gone through. So they’re bringing into their setting up a family, either they’re going to repeat what’s happened to them, or they’re going to try and make it better. So potentially doing the opposite, or a combination of both.

[32:26] Laura: Yeah, I think it’s unrealistic to think that any child can have their needs met in such a way that they don’t reach adulthood with some wounds that need to be looked at and resolved that no parent can be so wonderful and so perfect that the child doesn’t reach adulthood unscathed.

Even though I’m a therapist and I’ve done a lot of therapy and you know all of these reasons that I have why I should be this great, perfect parent, I know that my child is going to grow up and is going to air some grievances at some point about the way that I parented and the life that I’ve provided for her, even though I’m doing my absolute best, and that she’ll have things that she goes to therapy and works through, and I think that’s okay, and that’s just part of life.

And it’s actually really healthy to have some adversity and to find your way through it the best you can as a child with as much support as you can get from your parents, but then at some point you go and do that work yourself in adulthood as well, and so you don’t have to have come from a very traumatic, abusive, neglectful home in order to require self work and some therapy.

I think there’s an invitation there to just have a look at okay where did I come from what was happening for my parents what are the patterns that I experienced how are they showing up in my life now how are they how is what I received supporting me how is what I received limiting me in some way in the life that I want to create and can I understand all of that maybe heal some old wounds and then create the life that I actually want to have. You work with a lot of women who have lost confidence. What do you normally see in them?

• 34:34 – Inner Strengths and Self-Validation

[34:34] Sheridan: That’s an interesting way of putting it, because that’s saying women had confidence in the first place. Confidence building is again looking at those developmental years, what you did and didn’t get, and being able to draw out the parts where you did feel confident, where you did feel validated, that have potentially been overwhelmed by all the times you didn’t.

It’s creating a different dynamic within yourself: seeing where you did believe in yourself, and when you didn’t, and being able to draw those out to be at the forefront. I have worked with a lot of women between 20 and 50, being able to regain their confidence by seeing their inner strengths. I would work mainly on what their inner strengths are, how they can validate themselves, and what they know they can do.

[35:36] Laura: Sounds like what you some of the work that you do with women in terms of confidence and self worth is helping them see and value their own skills and contributions.

[35:51] Sheridan: Yeah, so it’s about self-validation, not looking for validation from others. The validation from others should be the icing on the cake, because you know you’re doing that job, that you’ve done it well. You don’t really need anyone else to tell you you have.

If you only need validation from others, then there’s not going to be satisfaction in it, because there’s never going to be enough validation from anybody to make you feel worthy.

• 36:24 – Personal Values, Self-Trust and Moving Forward

[36:24] Laura: It also puts all of our power onto someone else. Like, will they or won’t they validate us? It puts us in a very vulnerable position when we’re relying on someone else giving us what we need. So it sounds like, yeah, you’re helping women locate it in themselves first, and expanding that, and then whatever comes from other people is going to be like a nice bonus. Something I think you really helped me develop was an understanding of my own values and the ability to follow them, and that centre my own needs and my own values in a way that I hadn’t really learned to do before. I was always looking outwards.

What did other people want me to do? What did other people think? How could I be perceived by different people, and it left me feeling pretty shaky. And I mean, that’s very-it’s very inconsistent looking to all of these different other people for how I should be. You really helped me locate who who I am, and to move from that place rather than looking outward. This kind of outward focus, trying to be what it’s like. If I can be what others want me to be, then I’ll feel safe.

Versus what I learned with you was, if I can understand who I am and what my values are, and live from that place, I am safe, and then I can relate to the world around me.

[38:09] Sheridan: I think that’s a really good point you make, because knowing the values of what is important to me gives us a strength to be able to exist in the world as we are. We all have strength, because if you’ve made it to a certain point in your life, you know what’s got you there. How did you get there?

You’ve survived an abusive family. You survived bullying at school. You survived being thrown into the workplace. You’ve survived traumatic relationships. Looking at how you did that and how you got through that, you see yourself as being a survivor. You actually have survived.

[39:13] Laura: And I feel like, yeah, then the next understanding all of that and taking all of those strengths and really valuing how we have been able to survive, and then kind of turning that to yeah, what we want to create next, and that we hopefully thrive in the next era of our life.

• 39:35 – Rebuilding Confidence, Choice by Choice

[39:35] Sheridan: Well, confidence isn’t something we lose overnight. It’s something that gets gradually worn away.

[39:42] Laura: Yeah, it seems like we kind of trade it away in tiny moments when we have this outward focus on other people, or we make decisions based on what other people might want, rather than feeling our own truth. And acting on that.

[40:01] Sheridan: Yeah, yeah, correct.

[40:03] Laura: And it makes me think that it could be rebuilt in the same way.

[40:08] Sheridan: Yes, perfectly said. Yeah.

[40:10] Laura: That moment by moment or choice by choice, we can locate what we want and who we are, and act based on that, and that is kind of self feeding. That the more we can do that, the easier that would get.

[40:27] Sheridan: Yeah, absolutely, I totally agree. And you know that definitely you can see that in your life if you just have that moment of just stepping back instead of just seeing what isn’t working. You can actually see what is working and building confidence, and focus on that more.

[40:45] Laura: Yeah, do more of that.

[40:46] Sheridan: Yeah.

• 40:48 – Closing Thanks

[40:48] Laura: Thanks so much for joining me. Thanks so much for the EMDR experience that I’m keen to do more of as well.

[40:56] Sheridan: Yeah, you’re welcome. Thank you.

• 41:02 – Subscribe and Explore Source

[41:02] Laura: If this conversation resonated with you, hit subscribe and click the link below to download the Source app. It’s free to get started and helps you find a therapist who truly fits fast.