Elevator Speeches

Thank goodness for dear friends! Every Friday, a group of friends gathers around Tracy’s enormous fire pit. The other night, as we watched the stars and sipped our warm beverages, someone asked, “Kathleen, what is trauma and how does it affect us?”

Luckily, I have my minute long EMDR elevator pitch memorized, and so I started… “We are all adaptive, but when trauma happens, which can be Big T’s or Little t’s”.

My friends looked at me with a curious look. “Wait! Little t’s are trauma? What?” Everyone was shocked; little t’s actually matter.

So we sat around the fire, sipping on Jameson’s Irish Whiskey, speaking of our little t traumas: bullying, feeling ignored, bad grades, getting kicked off the football team, etc.

Later that evening as I crawled into bed, I thought about how so many people do not know that most of us have faced small t traumas, some sort of insult to our core. In small ways we are trapped, repeating unconscious patterns, limiting ourselves, feeling less than, and acting in only safe ways. It is important for us to speak about little t traumas, and yet, often we don’t, and so understanding that little t traumas can effect and limit a person’s life isn’t common knowledge.

Being with my friends and talking about this with some of my favorite people made me remember that people benefit from knowing that trauma can be Big T or little t, and that both types benefit from being talked about and treated.

We just need to spread the word!

How do you explain EMDR to other people? Watch as I and Liz provide you with some ideas to develop your own EMDR "elevator speech"!