Interview with Cristina Cortés, author of the book How can I get out of here?

One of the most characteristic aspects of psychological trauma is that the effect it has on the mind goes beyond of words: it is based on emotions, which cannot be fully described by means of 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 in boys and girls, who tend to have more problems understanding the type of emotional discomfort they experience after going through an event traumatic.

on this occasion We interviewed the psychologist Cristina Cortés, from the Vitaliza Psychology Center in Pamplona, for which she tells us about the use of EMDR therapy in children and about her picture book How can I get out of here?, in which the operation of this process of psychological intervention is explained.

Interview with Cristina Cortés, author of "How can I get out of here?"

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

At this center, both she and her team have been working with EMDR therapy used within their approach to treating psychological trauma for more than a decade. in the following lines explains what EMDR therapy consists of and how it discloses its operation applied to boys and girls through the picture book How can I get out of here?.

What is EMDR therapy? How is it done?

When an event overwhelms us, the lived experiences are stored in specific memory networks, 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 any 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.

The intervention with EMDR 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, use is made of bilateral stimulation, 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 network neural. 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 accomplished through an EMDR session?

The experiences remain in the memories stored together 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 look for a memory to be processed, we access all the elements that make up that memory and become activated together with the emotional pain that they entail.

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

From there, the desensitization of the emotional load and the reprocessing of that traumatic memory, so that it is associated with more adaptive memory networks and healthy.

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 the narrative format, a story for children?

Explaining any therapeutic process to a child implies connecting with his maturational states and adapting to him. My goal was to tell something simple where the parents had a leading role, since they are essential for the child to feel safe.

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

That you can get out of suffering, and that you can also approach 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 aspects, and from there, focusing on the sensory and emotional aspects, 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 "it's done, it's gone", "I look at it and it's not there", it's like that, the transformation has taken place. Adults have a hard time understanding it, we have many more defenses and the process is more expensive.

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

One of the things we observed in the consultation is the difficulty that many children have in identifying their emotions. 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 cultivate the emotional world of their children. That parents become aware that they are the gardeners who take care of that emotional world.

And for this you have to attend to it and they have to be specialists pulling up the weeds, calming the emotions disturbing (this is the opposite of not paying attention to them and wanting them not to experience) and fertilizing the emotions positive.

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 states of the child.

The preparation and stabilization phase is very important to prepare the patient until he is ready to process his traumatic memories.

You always have to respect the patient and his idiosyncrasy. EMDR therapy itself is eclectic, drawing elements from different approaches. A good psychotherapist must have an open mind and combine different approaches that best suit the needs of their patient. The mind is complex and wonderful.