Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Catch up on old episodes!

“EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) therapy kicked off my personal transformation from a self-absorbed workaholic in an industry of (what I now view as) questionable merit into a human being making a positive contribution to the world and focused on helping others. EMDR helped me discover that my psychological struggles were the result of the trauma I had suffered as a child and that my traumatic memories had been buried long ago. I had constructed a sham persona to defend against (what I now know was) a deep-seated fear that I was worthless and unlovable.”

Michael Baldwin is a patient advocate.

He shares his story and discusses his book, Every Memory Deserves Respect: EMDR, the Proven Trauma Therapy with the Power to Heal.

The Podcast by KevinMD is brought to you by the Nuance Dragon Ambient eXperience.

With so many demands on their time, physicians today report record levels of burnout. Burnout is caused by many factors, one of which is clinical documentation. Studies indicate physicians spend two hours documenting care for every hour spent with patients.

At Nuance, we are committed to helping physicians do what you love – care for patients – and spend less time on clinical documentation. The Nuance Dragon Ambient eXperience, or DAX for short, is an AI-powered, ambient clinical intelligence solution that automatically captures patient encounters securely and accurately at the point of care. Physicians who use DAX have reported a 50 percent decrease in documentation time and a 70 percent reduction in feelings of burnout, and 83 percent of patients say their physician is more personable and conversational.

Rediscover the joy of medicine with clinical documentation that writes itself, all within the EHR.

VISIT SPONSOR → https://nuance.com/daxinaction

SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST → https://kevinmd.com/podcast

RATE AND REVIEW → https://kevinmd.com/rate

FOLLOW ON INSTAGRAM → https://www.instagram.com/kevinphomd

FOLLOW ON TIKTOK → https://www.tiktok.com/@kevinphomd

GET CME FOR THIS EPISODE → https://earnc.me/lFBYkS

Powered by CMEfy.

Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show. Rate and review at KevinMD.com/rate. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast. Today on the show, we have Michael Baldwin. He is a patient advocate, and he’s the co-author of the book, Every Memory Deserves Respect: EMDR, the Proven Trauma Therapy with the Power to Heal. Michael, welcome to the show.

Michael Baldwin: Kevin, thank you for having me.

Kevin Pho: So we’ll get into your book and KevinMD article in a little bit, but first off, just briefly share your story and journey to where you are today.

Michael Baldwin: So my story is of someone who grew up in a very privileged background, who at the same time was subjected to severe neglect and abuse, sexual, physical, and emotional abuse, and who grew up with a strategy to try to fight against the belief, growing up, that I was sort of worthless and not deserving of any kind of attention or attachment to either one of my two parents. So in my case, I grew up with no sense of security, no sense of stability, and no one to back me up or to turn to. I was really left out on my own. I had three siblings in the same situation.

So as I got into adulthood, I got into what I think of as a kind of grandiosity strategy, where I became a status and achievement junkie and a workaholic. I had a 35-year career in advertising, where it was all about appearance and status and image, again guarding against a core belief that I was worthless, which is the deduction a child comes to when basically neglected.

And there came a point when I lost the job I had sought after, after maybe 16 years at Ogilvy & Mather in New York, where I was a world account director on the IBM business, the biggest piece of advertising business in the world. When I got laid off from that job, and actually it was the second account I ran after that, everything kind of came off the wheels. The wheels just came off, and this trauma that had been buried and had been lurking just started to inch its way out, knocking on the door.

I eventually was able to connect with an EMDR therapist named Jeffrey Magnavita, who was the eighth therapist I’d seen in 22 years. So it’s not like I wasn’t trying, but no therapist I had seen before Dr. Magnavita had ever mentioned trauma, and none of them ever had anything to do with, or were even, I think, familiar with, EMDR therapy, which is what basically saved me.

Kevin Pho: Sure. So I certainly want to talk more about that. When you were telling your story, you said that the wheels came off and the trauma started to resurface. What exactly do you mean by that? Tell us about that time.

Michael Baldwin: That means that the things I was doing to try to avoid it and numb what was starting to come to the surface were excessive drinking, combining alcohol with Vicodin, and blacking out. It just got to the point where I felt sort of hopeless. I would think, “I’m going to end up the guy on the sidewalk in front of the Walgreens in a blanket,” these kinds of catastrophized scenarios in my mind, because pretty much my entire identity was wrapped up in my job and my career. So when that ended, I was just sort of left with this lurking trauma.

I mean, the way trauma works is it gets locked in the nervous system because it’s too big to be processed, so it just stays perfectly preserved unless and until you are hopefully lucky enough to deal with it with a trauma-informed therapist.

Kevin Pho: So you talk more about your therapy in your book, Every Memory Deserves Respect: EMDR, the Proven Trauma Therapy with the Power to Heal. EMDR is an acronym for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy. So to give my audience a little bit of context before you talk about your book, exactly what is that?

Michael Baldwin: So EMDR therapy is a memory-based therapy, and it is based on the notion that unresolved traumatic memories are basically the cause of pretty much any kind of mental health issue, and to the extent that they are sitting there locked in the central nervous system, unprocessed, they can cause any number of physical and emotional symptoms. So that’s the essence of the philosophy of the therapy itself.

And the reason why I wanted to rename the book with the set of words the title has today is because no one’s going to remember “eye movement desensitization and reprocessing,” but everyone can remember “every memory deserves respect.” And it points again to the notion, as I said in the premise for the book, that our memories are the caretakers of truth in our lives. Those memories are to be respected and examined, because in a trauma context, that’s where the trauma lives.

Kevin Pho: So you mentioned that this particular therapist was your seventh or eighth therapist. Tell us what exactly this therapist did that was different in contrast to the other seven or eight that you’d been to.

Michael Baldwin: So, Dr. Jeffrey Magnavita. And just for your audience’s benefit, my co-author, Deborah Korn, was not my therapist. She’s my co-author and a leader in the EMDR field. I had CBT. I had talk therapy. I had intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy. I had lots of different types of therapy. None of them offered any kind of substantive or long-lasting relief.

From the first moment I saw Dr. Magnavita, I mean, I think he pretty much took one look at me, because by the time I got to him, I was at such a low point. He was a certified EMDR therapist, and I think he knew that he wanted to go right for the third rail, which is trying to touch back into these memories where this trauma lives.

The difference between talk therapy and EMDR therapy is that talk therapy is literally talking and intellectualizing about events in your past. With EMDR therapy, the best way I can describe it is it’s like grabbing the third rail. You are holding right on to that abuse, that neglect, that divorce, that time your brother-in-law got killed, or maybe there’s a rape involved, or whatever. You are reprocessing those things as if you were in that moment, because the whole point is to go back and be in touch with those emotions and the thoughts and the beliefs that go with them, as if it were happening when it happened in the first place.

Kevin Pho: What are some samples of questions that the therapist would ask you? Take us into one of those sessions. What were some sample questions that they would ask?

Michael Baldwin: It sort of has to do with what’s on your mind: “How are you feeling? What’s going on with you today?” Let’s say, for example, I had an episode before I was with Dr. Magnavita, and it was very upsetting. Let’s say you had said something to me that really upset me. That’s the starting point, because you can see that there’s a level of upset in my face; they see everything.

And the point of EMDR is to try to identify, in a script, it’s called floating back, the earliest memory that you have where those same feelings were apparent. That’s how they sort of put their finger on where the trauma started, because an event, an episode that you and I have had in the present day isn’t really what’s going to be triggering me, and again, there’s the operative word. It’s triggering something that happened a long time ago. So their job is to see if they can float back to the earliest memory where that same reaction is taking place and start there with “What are you feeling? Where do you feel it in your body? What’s going on?” And that’s where the bilateral stimulation comes in, which is what Dr. Francine Shapiro discovered in 1987, and which is the foundation of the desensitization component of EMDR therapy.

Kevin Pho: So give us a sense of the time course of the therapy. When did you start feeling that this particular approach was helping?

Michael Baldwin: It may sound strange, but I knew that this particular course of therapy was helping the very first time I saw Dr. Magnavita. And what do I mean by that? I had such a profound sense of relief. He was about 110 miles away from me, so I had to drive a ways from New York City to get to him, and so I opted for extended engagement, which means I would do two 90-minute sessions back to back, because I knew it would take me a while to get up there, and I would see him once a week.

So literally, the first time I saw him, a lot of the initial exploration had to do with getting in touch with the neglect, because it started with me preverbally, and getting in touch with longing and loneliness and feeling abandoned. Those are pretty strong emotions. I’m talking about them now, but in his office on that day, there was a lot of emotion coming out of me, because I was re-experiencing that. So in answer to your question, from the very first day I saw him, and every session I ever had with him over the course of two years.

Kevin Pho: And are there any particular conditions that EMDR therapy is best suited to treat?

Michael Baldwin: That’s a great question, and I wish Debbie, my co-author, were sitting here right next to me. There are so many now: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, psychosomatic issues having to do with physical issues, and addiction. There are so many. And again, I’m not speaking just off the top of my head. These are based on, I think, 30 years of evidence-based research that’s been done. So now there’s a pretty broad, really broad array of symptoms that EMDR has been research-proven to be effective in treating.

Kevin Pho: And how does one go about finding an EMDR therapist?

Michael Baldwin: So probably the fastest way is to go to the website of the international organization of EMDR. It’s emdria.org. Right on the landing page, there’s “Find a Therapist.” You can enter your location and the radius you want to search in. You can check whether or not you want a certified EMDR therapist, and I would recommend one. You can also check whether you want a consultant, who can also advise in case there’s no room in a particular practice. You can also check off the insurance that you have and see if the provider takes it. So you have a lot of filters, but that’s the main place to go if you’re looking for an EMDR therapist.

Kevin Pho: So in your book, Every Memory Deserves Respect: EMDR, the Proven Trauma Therapy with the Power to Heal, what are some of the other key points that you want readers to come away with?

Michael Baldwin: My main one, given my history, is that if you yourself or anyone you know, a husband, a wife, a colleague, a son or a daughter, or a neighbor, is suffering and may not know why, don’t wait. Avail yourself. Go and find an EMDR therapist, because, as my co-author often says in any interview we’ve done like this, in her almost 40 years of experience as a clinician, and we’re basically having a mental health crisis as a planet these days, for trauma, EMDR is the most efficient and effective way of dealing with trauma and PTSD. And she’s fluent in pretty much every therapeutic language there is. That’s her definitive stance on EMDR: the most effective and the most efficient. So if you yourself or anyone you know or care about is suffering, seek out an EMDR therapist and don’t wait. Life’s too short.

Kevin Pho: Now, in the world of therapy in general, I’m actually not that familiar with it. How common is the EMDR approach?

Michael Baldwin: More and more. But I’ll tell you, one of the reasons why I wanted to write this book in the first place is because I figured if I had seen seven therapists over 22 years and no one mentioned trauma and no one mentioned EMDR, there have got to be a lot of other people out there suffering, like I was, who could benefit, like I did. So I wanted to get a book out for the lay public, and we have a wonderful publisher named Workman Publishing, which has published wonderful books for the lay public, and I thought they were a perfect partner for us.

And one of the main goals is this: It’s been around for 30 years, and the research speaks for itself. But if I went to a cocktail party in New York, probably 75 percent of the people there have not heard of EMDR therapy, although we’re making progress. There was a pretty big piece in The New York Times about three weeks ago where they interviewed Debbie extensively and filmed her in her office, and that was about five million people. It was all about EMDR, what it is and how it works. And Bessel van der Kolk, who’s the author of a book called The Body Keeps the Score, basically said there’s nothing theoretical, this is what works for trauma, it really works. So we’re getting there, but that was the main reason for me to want to do this book in the first place.

Kevin Pho: So as you know, I’m a primary care physician. If I’m talking to a patient in the exam room, what are some signs, symptoms, or red flags that would trigger me to think, “Hey, perhaps EMDR therapy would be right for this patient”?

Michael Baldwin: Again, I wish Debbie were here. The way she describes it is a bouncing knee, not being able to look at you, just a general sense of anxiety or unease, where it may be something that’s completely, totally nonverbal, but you as a human can sense there’s something going on with this person. And then, of course, in a workup of a patient, you can find out.

But people who come to Debbie or Debbie’s colleagues, and these days they call them clients, not patients, don’t come with an answer. They just come saying, “I’m miserable. My marriage is breaking up. I can’t concentrate. I can’t keep a job. I can’t stop drinking. I can’t sleep.” So she always encourages them, and it’s one of the things she says at the end of any interview we usually do, “Don’t try to figure anything out. Just bring you and your whole hot mess situation through my door, and we will work this out together.” So that’s what she always encourages people to do.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Michael Baldwin. He’s a patient advocate, and he’s a co-author of the book, Every Memory Deserves Respect: EMDR, the Proven Trauma Therapy with the Power to Heal. Michael, what are some of your take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience?

Michael Baldwin: I’m going to repeat the one I said earlier. You could argue that at 67, I may have used up maybe two-thirds of the time I’ve got here, and maybe 25 of those years could have been spent differently had I engaged with someone like Dr. Magnavita in my 20s. And there are probably 45 people I know, friends, friends of friends, and children of friends, since I started this book project, who are now seeing EMDR therapists, who had seen other kinds of therapists and who could ask, “Could Debbie find someone for me?” So they’re having transformative experiences, including my own brother, whom I grew up with as a bully. We had no relationship until we were in our late 60s, and now we have a wonderful relationship, because he went through EMDR, as did I. So I guess I would say again, if you want the most efficient and effective way to deal with any issues you’re having, if you’re having them, seek out an EMDR therapist. Don’t wait. Life’s too short.

Kevin Pho: And how can people reach you?

Michael Baldwin: The best way to reach me or my co-author, Deborah Korn, is through everymemorydeservesrespect.com. There are articles, videos, resource material, and lots of things there, including links to the organizations where you can find a therapist. Everything is there.

Kevin Pho: Michael, thank you so much for sharing your story, time, and insight, and thanks again for being on the show.

Michael Baldwin: Thank you for having me.