Interview with Cristina Cortes, author of the book Como puedo salir de aqui?

This psychologist explains in her illustrated book how EMDR is used to treat trauma in children

One of the most characteristic aspects of psychological trauma is that the effect it has on the mind goes beyond words: it is based on emotions, which cannot be fully described through language.

EMDR therapy is aimed precisely at intervening on the experience of trauma and its associated anxiety without having to rely exclusively on language. This type of intervention is especially useful for children, who often have more problems understanding the type of emotional distress they experience after a traumatic event.

On this occasion we interviewed the psychologist Cristina Cortés, from the psychology center Vitaliza in Pamplona.He talks about the use of EMDR therapy with children and about his picture book How can I get out of here?which explains how this process of psychological intervention works.

Interview with Cristina Cortes, author of "Como puedo salir de aqui?"

Cristina Cortes is a psychologist specialized in child and adolescent psychotherapy and perinatal psychology, and co-founder of the Vitaliza psychology center, in operation since 2004.

In this center, she and her team have been working for more than a decade with EMDR therapy as part of their approach to the treatment of psychological trauma. In the following lines she explains what EMDR therapy consists of and how she disseminates how it works applied to children through the illustrated book through the illustrated book How can I get out of here?.

What does EMDR therapy consist of? How is it carried out?

When an event overtakes us, the lived experiences are stored in specific networks of memories, disconnected from the rest of the experiences.

In a way, it is as if these memories remain frozen, isolated from the rest of the memories and experiences. At a given moment, they are activated by triggers that resonate with those memories, dragging us to re-experience the past in the present without being aware of it.

EMDR intervention allows access to the constituent elements of these memories, images, sensations and beliefs, both positive and negative.

In one of the phases of the intervention, bilateral stimulation is used, which facilitates the maintenance of a state of dual attention between the present and the past and allows the connection and access to broader and healthier memories of our neural network. In this way, we change the perspective regarding the traumatic event and how it was stored.

What is the link between traumatic experiences and painful emotions and what is done through an EMDR session?

The experiences are stored in the memories along with the emotions, sensations and beliefs that were activated at the time of the event. If the event is traumatic, it is stored with the emotional charge of that moment and the negative beliefs that accompany it.

When in EMDR therapy, in phase 3, we seek a memory to be processed, we access all the elements that constitute that memory and they are activated again with the emotional Pain they carry.

This contact is made in a safe therapeutic environment and provides a double focus of awareness, which allows you to be aware of the pain of the past and the safety of that moment in the present.

From there, we will proceed to desensitize the emotional charge and reprocess the traumatic memory, so that it will be associated with more adaptive and healthy memory networks.

Your book "How can I get out of here?" is dedicated to explaining this type of therapeutic intervention. Has it been difficult to adapt these explanations to a narrative format, a children's story?

Explaining any therapeutic process to a child implies connecting with their maturational states and adapting to them. My goal was to tell a simple story in which the parents play a leading role, since they are essential for the child to feel secure.

What are the main ideas that you wanted to capture in this story?

That it is possible to get out of suffering, and that you can deal with it without talking about it. It is very difficult for a child to put words to his pain. That is an advantage of EMDR, it allows you to approach the wound from the body, from the sensory and emotional and from there, focusing on the sensory and emotional, begin to integrate the pain.

Children are wonderful and they know that something is happening and that their pain, their memory, changes. When they tell you "that's it, it's gone", "I look at it and it's gone", that's it, the transformation has taken place. It is difficult for adults to understand, we have many more defenses and the process is more costly.

The book also talks about the Emotional Garden. What exactly is it about?

One of the things we observe in the consultation is the difficulty that many children have in identifying their emotions. We adults focus on actions and take little care of their emotional world and they, currently, live very focused on screens and are unaware of the nuances of many emotions.

Through the Emotional Garden I have tried to help families to cultivate the emotional world of their children. That parents become aware that they are the gardeners who take care of this emotional world.

And for this they have to take care of it and they have to be specialists in pulling out the bad weeds, calming the disturbing emotions (this is the opposite of not taking care of them and wanting them not to experience) and fertilizing the positive emotions.

Does EMDR therapy work for all types of patients regardless of gender and age?

EMDR therapy is designed to treat trauma, and its protocol has been adapted to the different characteristics of the patients or different maturational stages of the child.

The preparation and stabilization phase is very important to prepare the patient until they are ready to process their traumatic memories.

The patient and his/her idiosyncrasies must always be respected. EMDR therapy itself is eclectic and brings together elements of different approaches. A good psychotherapist must be open-minded and bring together different approaches that best suit the needs of his or her patient. The mind is complex and wonderful.