Latest / The Trauma Therapist / Ep 716: Educating The EMDR Community with Rebecca Kase

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Ep 716: Educating The EMDR Community with Rebecca Kase · The Trauma Therapist

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Or welcome back to the Trauma Therapist Podcast. My name is Gaming Person.
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My mission is to help trauma therapist be their incredible selves, to be human,
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to be real, not just a clinician. I'm a big believer in
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who we are is more important than what we know, and this requires cultivating
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authenticity, genuineness, and vulnerability, and that requires intention. Can learn more
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about my courses and workshops by going to the Trauma Therapist project dot com.
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That's the Trauma Therapist Project dot com. Let's get started. So five four
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three two one, our folks, Welcome back to the Trauma Therapist Podcast.
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I am very excited to have as my guest today. Rebecca Case. Rebecca,
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Welcome to the podcast. Hello, hey, so. Rebecca founded her
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Training in Consultation practice in twenty seventeen. A long time practitioner of MDR therapy
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and professional educator, Rebecca recognized that there was room to improve on training and
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continuing education for therapists. Through her business, she shot out to create thorough
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and thoughtfully designed educational experiences and a welcome, inclusive community for MDR learners and
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trainers. Rebecca, welcome once again, Hello, thanks so much, let's
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to be here he said, before we get going, share where the listeners,
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where you're from originally and where you are currently. Yeah. Where I'm
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from originally is a little rural town outside of Saint Louis, Missouri. And
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then I moved to Denver. I lived in Denver for sixteen years, and
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I now live on Fox Island, Washington, which is a part of gig
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Harbor, Washington, outside of Tacoma. Oh wow, cool, All right,
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well let's get going here. How the heck did you get into this
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field? How did all this start for you? Yeah? I feel a
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little bit like some of it's in my blood, in my dna. My
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great grandfather was a psychiatrist and was supposedly pen pals with Freud. And when
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he passed away, he left his house to my mom, and so all
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of his old journals and psychotherapy and psychiatry books and his writings, his research,
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all of that was there. And so I grew up with these really
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interesting, kind of strange books on my library shelves in my living room,
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you know, things like hysterical Women and how simphilist impacts our mental health.
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And he did a lot of research on how carbon monoxide impacts our mental health.
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Carbon dioxide and also on how lyme disease impacts our mental health. Really
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strange stuff, right, So I was kind of exploring these books on my
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shelf as I was growing up, and it always kind of piqued my interest.
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And then I went to grad school. I went to undergrad rather and
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the first time I took a psychology that psych one on one class, I
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was just like, this is it. Oh my gosh, this is fascinating.
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You know, something inside just really lit up. So I got my
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undergrad in psych went on to get my masters in social work, and while
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I was in my MSW program, I got really interested in trauma work because
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of my own trauma history and also just really learning and recognizing the power of
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the human spirit to overcome the resiliency that our nervous system offers us. It's
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really inspiring, right, So I went on to get my masters with the
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focus and trauma therapy. And when I was in grad school. I went
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to grad school two thousand and five to two thousand and seven, I learned
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a little bit about EMDR, although back then it was not evidence based.
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It was considered pretty controversial and a strange therapy at the time. But I
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had a supervisor who was trained in it and just raved about it. So
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I actually started my EMDR trading when I was still in grad school. It's
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just very impressionable and was open to trying anything new and that would help my
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clients and fell in love with EMDR then and have been practicing ever since.
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Let me it's just something you mentioned your trauma history. Obviously you don't have
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to go in detail, Well what was it if you don't mind me asking?
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Yeah, and I don't mind sharing some of this. I recently did
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an article with US News and World Report in which I did share some of
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this because I think that it's important for therapists to recognize it's it's okay to
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have your own stuff, and most of us are because of that, right,
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Like, that's why we're here, that's why we do this. But
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yeah, we're kind of taught that needs to be compartmentalized and we don't talk
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about that. But my own trauma history I won't include all of it,
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but I was sexually assaulted when I was in college. When I was in
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undergrad and had kind of the stereotypical textbook response to that, were you drinking?
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What were you wearing? You know nobody's going to believe you, and
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tried to prosecute my perpetrator, but was really talked out of it by the
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legal system and recognized was told, you're going to have to drop out of
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school, your name's going to be drug through court, You're probably not going
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to win, and so I dropped it and I went on to develop a
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lot of physical health issues from that. I had a couple of surgeries,
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I had a number of ovarian cysts. I ended up having to have one
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of my ovaries removed, got pneumonia, I just got really, really sick
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after I kind of gave up on being able to pursue that and kind of
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shut that down and held out my body, as we know as trauma therapists
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we do. And then one of my biggest traumas actually happened a couple of
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years ago when some really terrible stuff happened with my father, who I was
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very close to. I had a very close knit family growing up. My
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parents were married for forty years, and I caught my father and doing something
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very very harmful to someone else. I won't go into all of those details
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here to respect other people's privacy, but I caught him and confronted it,
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reported what he what I found to the police, and that led to what
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turned out to be the most traumatic experience of my life, where my family
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of origin completely fell apart. My mom divorced my father and it was huge
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betrayal trauma, and he was facing fifteen years in prison as an outcome of
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all of that, and he ended his life by suicide the day of his
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sentencing in twenty nineteen. So all of my knowledge of trauma work served me
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significantly as I navigated that. It felt like a lifetime kind of movie.
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Honestly, first of all, thank you appreciate sharing that. How cognizant of
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you, of you rather of your mamma were you when you moved into studying
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psychology and seeing yourself as a therapist. I was not fully cognizant of my
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trauma when I started my pursuit of this degree. I think a lot of
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us are not, Like, that's kind of what a lot of trauma is,
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right Like, oh wait, that's me, Oh wait, that's that.
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Oh this this diagnosis completely explains me. So I didn't. I didn't
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put all that together. I mean, I don't even think while I was
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getting my masters and social work. Did I even recognize that. I don't
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think I put all of that together until much later after I was licensed,
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And I mean, the piece has still kind of come together for me.
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And it's interesting how we can live through it and be you know, I
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can write a book on this, I know all this, I teach clients
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about this, but yet we feel so disconnected from Oh wait, oh yeah,
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that's that happened to me, and that's that's why I was the way
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I was. How did that come together for you? When did you come
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to certain realizations. I don't realize it's not a light switch, but were
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there certain therapists to help you facilitate that? Yeah, there have been a
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number of healers in my life, whether those have been psychotherapists or you know,
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other healers I've experienced along the way, from Reikie and energy work and
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yoga teachers and things like that that helped me really put it together. I
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think a lot of things really came together for me actually from everything that happened
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with my father. So when I was going through what happened with my father
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happened over a couple of years. It was a slow car crash kind of
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situation, and in that time, I all of a sudden became very aware
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of how I passed, how my personal experiences and my professional training all came
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together to help me do what I did in that moment and confront him and
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stop him from harming other people. And it was really through that process that
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I felt completely spiritually cracked open. I put a lot of pieces together,
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and all of a sudden, all these things that had happened in my life
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made a lot of sense as to why they might have happened to me,
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What I gained from that, How I learned from that. You know,
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I Mary Oliver has this poem. It's called Box of Darkness, and to
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shorten it, she says, essentially, someone I loved very much once gave
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me a box of darkness. And it took me years until I realized that
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that, too, was a gift. And that's very much part of my
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process when I came to recognize, oh, these things are considered traumatic.
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They were highly stressful for my nervous system, and they significantly impacted me.
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But I did my work and I learned a lot from them, and I
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see now that in some way they have been gifts because of how they challenged
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me to grow. How did things evolve and unfold such that you started creating
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your own, your own programs, your own training programs. Yeah, so
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I run an EMDR training and consulting business, and I started my own business
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in twenty seventeen. I'm also a trained yoga instructor, so that's you probably
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hear some of that spirituality and how I speak and how I make sense of
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things, and the way that my training business started felt very very serendipitous,
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very much like the universe said, this is the next step for you.
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One of my colleagues in the Denver area who wasn't MDR train was retiring and
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she sold her training program to me, and it was kind of beyond my
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wildest dreams. I had never necessarily envisioned myself owning a training business like I
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do today, but it was very much a situation of the universe saying go
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this way now. So I did. And I expected to just be a
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very small training business, just a one woman show, and the universe had
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other plans because we're a very large training group now. But what has always
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been at the center of my belief system and how I believe in running EMDR
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trainings and just professional learning spaces for clinicians is one I believe we have a
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mantra in my training business that is, create shame free spaces for learning,
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because what we know from polyvagal theory, what we know from our study of
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neurobiology, is that shame is not a helpful emotion. It's not a helpful
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experience, and it's certainly not helpful when we're trying to learn and grow.
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And I find so often that the academic world of psycho therapy of psychology is
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really disembodied from what we know to be true about how people best learn,
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about the importance of safety, about the importance of connection. And I have
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had too many experiences myself professionally in which I felt too vulnerable or shamed,
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or ridiculed or just unsafe in a professional training space to ask questions or to
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make mistakes. And I think that most of us have experiences in our professional
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training career where we can think of a time we've been shamed by a supervisor
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or colleague or somebody with power and control over us, and it probably didn't
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really aid us or help us in our growth and learning. So I really
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believe in creating shame free spaces for clinicians to learn the tools to aid in
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healing the nervous system. Because an EMDR training you actually have to practice EMDR
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with each other, there's so much vulnerability. I'm learning this new thing and
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I'm practicing with people I don't know, and people are watching me that I
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don't know, so scary. So that's been such a cornerstone for me.
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And one of the other pieces that I believe is creating engaging environment. So
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often academic trainings are just dull and boring and stale and not very interesting or
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funny or right, like, we're talking about heavy stuff. When we go
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to trauma trainings. We're talking about trauma. It's heavy enough, right,
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And I think all trauma therapists understand the value of dark humor, finding laughter,
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finding play in our work. Play is healing. It's a way to
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connect to that ventral circuit, the window of tolerance. And so I also
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very much believed in creating engaging environments where people can play and laugh and have
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fun with some really heavy material. I believe that that is how we best
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learn, and so that's really been some of my secret sauce. I would
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say to building my training business, and it's the reason that we have such
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a huge community and a huge following. When you first start started well,
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when you first said yes, all right, I'm gonna create this business,
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this company. How far along were you in your own experience as an MDR
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practitioner. Yeah, so, I mean at that point, I was an
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MDR consultant. I had been consulting for a number of years, so I
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was already I was I had credentials where I could be my own trainer,
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and I had also been volunteering with a nonprofit organization. Their name is Trauma
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Recovery HAP. They're a great group. Highly recommend checking them out if you
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are in the MDR world. And so I had been facilitating trainings with them
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and had actually started as a trainer for them, so they had also brought
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me on to train training. So it felt very much aligned with this is
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the natural next step if you want to take this career further. You know,
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it's interesting to hear you kind of outline the differentiators in your business.
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I kind of appreciate that. When you said the psychology world, or psychology
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educational world more specifically, is disembodied. Talk more about that. I find
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that more often than not, we are sitting in places where we're looking to
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this expert, this guru in the fields. You know, somebody who knows
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a whole lot, who is teaching us in a way that doesn't embrace what
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they what they preach. I believe you got to talk the talk and walk
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the walk. I believe you gotta you know, beat your message. And
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so I have too often found experts talking about this is how you heal trauma,
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but they do it in a way that miss is the importance of human
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connection, That miss is the importance of play, That miss is the importance
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of embracing curiosity. And maybe they model poor boundaries or self care all the
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things that we teach our clients, like you got to take care of yourself.
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It's important to set boundaries, it's important to be curious, it's important
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to find awe and inspiration in the world. Like all of these we know
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to be really important components to healing. They're all medicinal experiences for our nervous
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system to be our best. And so it just feels so confusing that the
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academic worlds can often feel so unsafe. As someone who is in the academic
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world a lot. It feels really unsafe. There's a lot of big egos,
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there's a lot of challenging perspectives and thinking, and if it's not written
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down or researched out the wazoo, then let's not even talk about it.
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Which research is important, but we also need to recognize the impact of white
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supremacy in our research paradigm and evidence based paradigm of who hasn't been at the
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table, whose techniques haven't been able to be researched, right, And I
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think a lot of people can resonate with what I'm saying. I'm not saying
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that's everybody in the academic world, of course not, but I've found that
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too often it is. It is what you find individuals who talk the talk
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but don't really walk the walk. Who you say, they know a lot,
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But I don't necessarily want to be them, right, I'm not necessarily
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personally inspired by them, right, And so I'm I'm looking for the people
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who not only talk the talk, but walk the walk and model their message.
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Who does that for you? Who does that for me? I have
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a couple of yoga instructors in my life who do that for me. Robin
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Shapiro, who I really love in the emd our world. She definitely does
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that for me. Yeah, I really adore her. One of my graduate
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professors does that for me, and honestly, my whole team, my community,
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like this, this business that I've built, the people who follow us
17:52
and the folks who work for me, because we set I set the precedence
17:56
of like, this is how we be, this is how we show up,
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and I inspired by them the most. Let me just remind everyone that
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I'm speaking with Rebecca Case. Let me just see here. Your companies called
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Casing Company, Training and Consulting JAS and Co, Case andco dot com.
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So you said your company and the work you do kind of embodies embodiment in
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a sense, this congluency. How specifically do you do that in your trainings?
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What does that look like? Yeah, so in our trainings, we
18:34
have some secret sauce that I won't share all of that here, but we
18:37
have some specific expectations for those who are conducting trainings, whether that's me or
18:42
someone else on my faculty. For you know, how much learning time versus
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how much playtime we bring in. We always bring in play, We bring
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in humor, we bring in a lot of authenticity and relatability everybody on the
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training team. When we're coaching and supporting other we always share our misses and
19:02
our hard learns and how I know you're afraid of breaking your client, which
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is such a common thing when we learn. Mdr. Let me tell you
19:08
about some of my experiences and some of the hard lessons I've learned. Right.
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We bring in music, we play games, so we do a lot
19:18
of things to create a really dynamic space, to mix up the content so
19:22
you're not just sitting here listening to somebody lecture for the whole time. And
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we create a lot of connection. We create lots of opportunities to connect where
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there's you know, often you go to trainings online or even in person and
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you're not really connecting with anyone, And we find ways to build connection and
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community and just to share case and co The CO isn't for company, The
19:45
co is actually for community. I got it. What do you see in
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terms of the current state of education for people in the trauma field? Well,
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I think back too. If I compare to when I started my work
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as a trauma therapist, I think that we are blessed with having a lot
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more knowledge and awareness of trauma. Right. It used to be when I
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went to school, I had a specialty certificate in track that I could take
20:18
to be a trauma expert. And while I wouldn't say that all therapists consider
20:22
themselves to be experts in trauma, I think pretty much all therapists now have
20:26
some knowledge or understanding of this is what trauma is. Everybody on my caseload
20:30
has it right, and here's some things I need to know about how to
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treat it. I do feel that we are becoming a bit more aligned with
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the nervous system and I really embrace Polyvagle theory in MDR. I have a
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book coming out in May with Norton called polyvagel Informed MDR. That's all about
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how to integrate Polyvagle theory into the eight phases of MDR therapy. And I
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believe that that is a neuroinformed approach to therapy. And when I say neuroinformed,
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it's really about focusing on the nervous system as the focus of assessment,
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intervention, and outcome. Because this therapist, what do we treat? We
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treat the nervous system, right, that is the focus of our work.
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All clinical symptoms, distress or happiness and peace and wellness can all be understood
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through functions of the nervous system, how well or not well it's functioning.
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And I feel that we are becoming a bit more aligned with neuroinformed counseling approaches,
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with more and more folks understanding the importance of understanding on some level how
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the brain functions and how the nervous system functions. And I think that that
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really gets us to the heart of the matter. That's what we're what we're
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treating. But I still think that we have a long way to go in
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the academic field and regards to I think training content is wonderful a lot of
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times, a lot of people put on amazing trainings with wonderful content, But
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I think it's important that we also focus on the delivery of it and how
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you focus on the inner personal process and training, as we know is therapist
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the number one most important variable for good therapeutic outcomes the relationship. So I
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believe that should be a parallel process in some way, shape and form and
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trainings. And when you say that, what do you specifically do you mean?
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What does that mean to you? What that means to me is creating
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academic learning spaces that feel like a container for learning, where you builds connection,
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where you build commonality, where you build empathy, where you build shared
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experience instead of I'm going to stand up here and talk to you about how
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to do this thing, right, that's not a very engaging experience, and
22:56
it doesn't engage the power of the nervous system. Right. If I'm just
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sitting here and somebody's just lecturing me and going through sides and just telling me
23:03
what to do, I'm probably not going to retain a whole lot of that
23:07
information. But if you bring in more of a dynamic experience where I'm watching
23:11
videos of you practice or I hear you talk about your mistakes, and all
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of a sudden, I'm like, Wow, they're really humble, they're really
23:17
relatable. I get that. Right. You create opportunities for people to get
23:22
into small groups to discuss material, whatever that may be. How do you
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build connection? And it can be really hard when you're in huge groups.
23:30
Right, when you have hundreds of people or thousands even at a conference,
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it may not be as easy or attainable, but it doesn't mean it's not
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at all. Or if you have smaller groups, it can be easier to
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do that, but I think that when we fail to do that, we
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kind of miss what we know to be so true in the counseling process.
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And while training is not counseling, we're still relying on similar mechanisms of the
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nervous system to engage and support our learning, so we can go out there
23:57
and actually support our clients in the counseling space. So how do you work
24:04
in terms of offering trainings and events? Is it virtual? Is it in
24:11
person? Both? What? Yeah? So we are we do everything virtual
24:17
at this time, we are open to doing in person training requests upon request.
24:23
Before the pandemic, it was all in person, and now we've gone
24:26
online. We found that that's just been really great for the business and we
24:30
can reach more people because before the pandemic, EMDR training was only allowed to
24:36
be offered in person, which is really limiting for people who didn't have money
24:41
to travel, who lived in rural locations, you know, single working parents
24:44
who don't have childcare. So I believe that virtual training environments, while a
24:48
lot of us would prefer to be in person, can create a lot more
24:52
accessibility for individuals. So we do all online trainings. We offer EMDR basic
24:56
training where an m DRY approved wider, so everything we do is legit.
25:00
We're also we also offer apacs and nbcccs and then we also offer advanced trainings
25:07
advanced courses, So we just had an advanced course on MDR with EGO States,
25:11
we have a training coming up on MDR with disordered eating. We have
25:15
a complex PTSD course, Grief and Lost course, refresher course. We've got
25:19
a lot of courses. We've got a whole lot of stuff to offer because
25:22
we want to be we want to be a place that people know they can
25:26
go and get rate material, connect to a community. We also offer EMDR
25:32
certification if folks want to get certified, and we also have a consultant training
25:36
process for those who want to become an m reapproved consultant. We're the only
25:40
group in the country to offer a package consultant training internship. We offer an
25:45
internship. So yeah, it's very well organized and packs a lot very cool.
25:52
Rebecca was the best place for people to get in contact with you.
25:56
Yeah, the best place to check me out, check out my team would
26:00
be to go to Case and Co. And my last name is spelled with
26:03
a K K A S. Case andco dot com. You can find our
26:07
whole schedule of events. You can sign up to get our mailers and newsletters
26:11
and discounts. You can reach out to me or anyone on the faculty there
26:15
too by finding our contact page. Awesome, And the book's coming out in
26:18
May and May. Okay, remind what the name of that is again,
26:23
Holly Vagel informed EMDR A narrow informed approach to healing. Okay, May twenty
26:30
third? Now is twenty three? Actually? Yeah? Is there currently a
26:37
link up anywhere the people can access get in full about Yes? Yeah.
26:41
You can find a link on the website to get connected to Norton and sign
26:45
up for pre sale. Awesome, Rebecca, Awesome, very inspiring what you're
26:49
doing. Appreciate being on here today. Thank you so much, Thanks so
26:53
much. Guy. Me to