EMDR for Confidence: My Story

I have been and EMDR therapist for a few years now and one of the important things about being a therapist is doing my own therapy, getting on the other side of all my own roadblocks. When I went to my therapist one of the questions she asked me is, “What is one of the things you would like to feel differently about in your life?” This is a great therapy question and such a helpful measure for success. My response, “I want to feel confident.”

Confidence is something I’ve struggled with most of my life. It’s manifested in difficulty making decisions, feeling small inside, doubting my skills and cowering in relationships with people who have big personalities. But since doing my own EMDR therapy and rewiring some old thought patterns, my outlook on myself and my felt sense of self has greatly shifted. It didn’t happen overnight. It happened over several sessions and required going back to certain events in my life and re-wiring my brains experience of them. It required looking at my belief about myself in relation to those event and seeing it in a new light.

Things like childhood bullying, conflicts with parents, elementary school classroom trauma. All these things are still part of my story, the experiences still happened, but my felt sense of myself in relationship to them has changed. As a result of that shift I have changed. I’m more brave, I make decisions with more ease and don’t feel small anymore. I still have stuff to work on because I want to be a better human and brighter version of myself, but I can honestly say, due to my personal EMDR therapy certain integral parts of myself have shifted.