Why Your Brain Gets "Stuck" and How to Finally Move Forward

Ever feel like a past experience is "stuck," haunting your thoughts no matter how much you talk about it? On this episode of Tracks for the Journey, psychologist Dr. Sharla Boyd explains that trauma isn't a character flaw—it’s a neurological hurdle.

What’s inside:

• Learn how EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) helps the brain "digest" painful memories that have been stuck for years.
• Understand the "weed" analogy: why we need to stop just mowing over our symptoms and start pulling trauma out by the root.

The Benefit: You’ll walk away with a new perspective on your own resilience and a roadmap for how to finally find peace. Listen now! 🎧

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Tracks for the Journey, the podcast dedicated to your well-being. I'm Larry Payne, your host. Today I'm discussing how a person can deal with trauma from an adverse experience. Sometimes a person just can't put that experience in the past. It keeps haunting their thoughts and actions. My guest today is Dr. Charla Boyd, psychologist from Lubbock, Texas. I think you'll find some helpful ideas about mental health in this episode.

SPEAKER_01 0:33

A lot of my work, uh kind of specialty, is trauma. Um, EMDR therapy is something that I got trained in a few years ago that I have loved that has really been.

SPEAKER_00 0:43

Yeah. What is EMDR for a person who doesn't have any kind of background with that?

SPEAKER_01 0:49

Yeah. It's gaining some awareness. Uh, some celebrities have come out and talked about their experiences. Sandra Bullock, Miley Cyrus, Prince Harry, some different uh celebrities have come up to talk about how beneficial EMDR therapy has been for them. So that's been nice to get it into people's awareness to start looking into it. But it stands for eye movement, desensitization, and reprocessing. And so it's using bilateral stimulation, which could be eye movement, which would be a therapist um kind of moving their fingers in front of a client to have their eyes go back and forth. Another way of having bilateral stimulation might be tapping. Some people use a light board where their eyes would be following a light that's going back and forth. Some therapists use like little paddles that somebody's holding on to and the vibrations go back and forth between the hand. So there's different ways of creating this bilateral stimulation, but it is helping the client to pay attention to the present in that bilateral stimulation of what they're attending to. It's accessing both parts of the brain going across with both sides and being able to process past painful experiences in short segments. So that helps it be in kind of more digestible pieces, shorter spurts of it while having one foot in the past and one foot in the present. And it's just been remarkable for my clients. I have worked with trauma survivors, abuse survivors for many, many years. And once I got trained in EMDR therapy, I just saw a remarkable change for how much more quickly it could help clients to heal and how the change is lasting. You know, it can be an easier way than staying and talking about details of the trauma. That may still be part of what you do, but that isn't required in doing the EMDR process.

SPEAKER_00 2:44

So neurologically, how does the bilateral stimulation allow that greater freedom or deepen the impact of what's happening?

SPEAKER_01 2:54

Yeah, it's able to help with the processing of negative experiences. It also helps strengthen positive experiences. So there's eight different phases in the EMDR process. Part of it is starting to assess what's going on for the person, the areas that you might want to focus on, helping them look at and change. So, for example, if somebody's coming in, really having trouble with self-confidence and really doubting themselves, then you're going to go back to early experiences that were tied to that, that helped send the message that they were not good enough in some way. So EMDR is getting at kind of the root of the issue. You know, you think about mowing over a weed over and over. It'll go away for a little while, but the root cause hasn't really been addressed. And so it's going to keep coming up in different ways. So EMDR is getting to those early formational experiences that started to lay down these negative messages about yourself or negative messages about relationships with other people, things that have really harmed the nervous system, that kind of thing. So the next part of the process is starting to do some emotional coping skills that helps people be able to kind of have a wider window of tolerance so that when we get to the reprocessing of the painful material, they have ways of being able to cope with that. And that bilateral stimulation is introduced during that time to kind of get used to paying attention to somebody's fingers and trying to imagine a calm, safe place in your mind, you know, getting used to doing both of those at once and getting used to noticing what's coming up for you. What are you feeling in your body? What are you feeling emotionally? And what thoughts are you having? So all of that helps prepare you for when you get to reprocessing the trauma. So back to your question about what's happening neurologically, when we experience a trauma, our brains naturally know how to process and digest things all the time that we're going through. Sometimes very hard experiences that it's able to kind of make meaning of, store the memories, be able to move past so you don't feel so activated by it anymore. But with some trauma experiences based on age when you have it, where the trauma is coming from, the intensity of the trauma, there's a variety of factors that might cause that trauma to get stuck and it's not properly digested in the brain. So there's different parts of the brain that are all involved. We have the amygdala, the emotional part of the brain, uh the hippocampus that has to do with memories and memory storage, and then we have a prefrontal cortex that's addressing kind of judgment and planning and behaviors, all these different parts of the brain where things get stuck. So you hear about people having a flashback. So, say on 4th of July, a veteran might hear a firework go off, and that sound reminds them of being in a battle situation. And so without conscious thought about it, very automatically they are activated to feel like they're in an unsafe, terrifying environment again. So their heart starts beating faster, they're breathing rapidly, they're maybe shaking, adrenaline's going, your body's getting ready for fight, flight, or freeze. And so those things get stuck and people feel like they're back in that situation as if it's happening again. You don't have the ability to recognize that you're in a different environment and you're safe right now. It feels like you're right back there again. And your body, your brain is just reacting. It's not a failure in the person, it's not a weakness of them not being able to handle it. It is a neurological problem with being able to process something that was so damaging and harmful.

SPEAKER_00 6:33

And so our brain has an amazing insight for the person that they aren't flawed in some way, broken or morally deficient, but instead need to learn new skills.

SPEAKER_01 6:45

Yes. They're having normal reactions to very abnormal, harmful situations. And people can feel like, why can't I just get over this? And I I have people tell me that often, you know, I experienced this abuse as a child, and that was decades ago. Why is this still bothering me? And it's not a matter of you haven't been strong enough or you haven't tried hard enough. There was damage done to you. And that stays in the brain of messages about when you're safe, what your worth is, who you can trust, needing to be hyper-vigilant, you know, all kinds of different things. So it's it's remarkable to watch in the EMDR process that our brains know where to go. And really, when I get to the reprocessing piece, I'm supposed to talk less and let the person's brain go where it needs to go. And people will be surprised by what comes up, or surprised that something is still bothering them as much as it is, or that this memory was really attached to this. And it's fascinating to see that a person's brain has that natural healing capacity. You just need a safe place and guidance to be able to go through that healing process.

SPEAKER_00 8:00

Thank you for sharing this episode on the Tracks for the Journey Network. Please rate and review the episode on your provider. That will help me spread the message of well-being. The hub of the Tracks for the Journey Network is my website, TracksFortheJourney.com. From there, you can subscribe to the Substrat newsletter and blog, find links to listen or watch dozens of episodes, or become a paid subscriber to receive bonus material each month. Your comments or questions can be sent directly to me at the address connectfj at yahoo.com. Tracks for the journey is produced at the Bright Star Studio All Rights Reserved. Hosting is by BuzzSprout.com. Keep exploring on your journey to well being.