Top Highlights

• done for him!” Then she asked herself: “How does that make me feel?” The answer was, “I’m not important enough for him to make the effort.” The shorthand for that was feeling clearly, “I’m not important.”
• Relax your body and take several long, slow breaths. If you find your mind wandering, take another deep breath and bring it back to the exercise. Focus on the future situation you’d like to deal with. Decide how you would like to be seeing, feeling, acting and believing in that situation. Use your Safe/Calm Place exercise to bring up the feeling yo...
• when negative reactions and behaviors in the present can be tracked directly back to an earlier memory, we define those memories as “unprocessed”—meaning that they are stored in the brain in a way that still holds the emotions, physical sensations and beliefs that were experienced earlier in life.
• EMDR therapy targets the unprocessed memories that contain the negative emotions, sensations and beliefs. By activating the brain’s information processing system (which will be explained in Chapter 2), the old memories can then be “digested.” Meaning what is useful is learned, what’s useless is discarded, and the memory is now stored in a way that ...
• The automatic reactions that control our emotions come from neural associations within our memory networks that are independent of our higher reasoning power.