Psychedelic Assisted EMDR Therapy with Hannah Raine-Smith and Jocelyn Rose

This is The Psychedelic Medicine Podcast. Hello and welcome to the next episode of The Psychedelic Medicine Podcast. I'm Dr. Lynn Murry-Morsky, your guide on this journey. And today we're going to be discussing Psychedelic Assisted EMDR Therapy with Hannah Reinsmith and Jocelyn Rose. Hannah is an integrative psychotherapist and independent researcher specializing in psychedelic integration using EMDR therapy. Jocelyn is a psychedelic therapist working in clinical research who uses EMDR as a psychedelic preparation and integration tool when working in private practice. Their collaboration explores the unfolding potential of EMDR as a trauma-focused, scalable psychedelic-assisted therapy. Well, as a person who has done EMDR once or twice before, I am very excited to hear this conversation. But before we get to it, just a reminder that the Psychedelic Medicine Podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing here is to be construed as medical or legal advice. And always as a reminder, if you are a clinician and you would like to learn more about psychedelics, and by the way, if you are a clinician of the counseling variety as well, if the psychotherapist variety, in addition to prescribers, nurse practitioners, all the above, please head over and check out the Psychedelic Medicine Association. It is our mission to get you up to speed and feeling comfortable enough to discuss the psychedelic medicines with your patients when appropriate. You can find the Psychedelic Medicine Association at psychedelicmedicinetassociation.org. Now without further ado, thank you so much for joining us today, Jocelyn and Hannah. Hi, it's lovely to be here. Great to be here. I'm very much looking forward to this. To my American listeners, you're welcome for these two very cool British voices. We get to listen to for the next hour. So that it could be 30 minutes. I don't know, I'm just guessing. Anyway, I'm very excited to have you both on. I would love to hear either of you tell us how you both got started thinking about combining psychedelic assisted therapy with EMDR. So I think initially it was after I'd finished my EMDR training, it was getting an influx of people with, had had adverse reactions to psychedelics, so PTSD in effect. So, and that matches with the EMDR, obviously, that was the originally, what it was originally designed for or developed for, although over the years it's kind of been developed to work with lots of different presentations. So yeah, initially it was just realizing that it can be used to integrate and stabilize people coming into private practice who have been really disregulated by psychedelic experiences. And maybe we've gone into it unprepared. And I think then we've kind of expanded it from there through meeting at the Institute of Psychedelic Therapy. We're looking at the way they're doing it in the studies and things. And using the preparation phases of EMDR to help with preparation. So to avoid people being destabilised and having to come in with PTSD, so they can kind of prepare properly and integrate properly using EMDR. So yeah, I came to use psychedelics with EMDR in a similar way to Hannah. And just to add to what she's already shared, I found both of the modalities to be really helpful in my own healing journey. And so it made perfect sense for me to combine them in my clinical practice. And we took what worked for us and then added to it our clinical trainings. And then more recently we've been working together as independent researchers to refine and develop our ideas and really kind of develop that extra step. And before we go any further, how are we explaining to the listeners who might not know what EMDR is? So EMDR is an innovative trauma-focused therapy. It utilises the natural healing abilities of our bodies. Essentially in EMDR therapy, a disturbing memory and event, or maybe even a flashback from a psychedelic experience will be identified. And then repeated sets of eye movements across the visual field will be used to reprocess these experiences along with their faulty cognition. So it's similar to the eye movements that happened during REM state sleep and dreaming. Essentially eye movements tax working memory, which allows emotions to be properly felt. And once they've been fully expressed, the memories tend to change in a way that they lose their painful intensity and they become more neutral, like an event in the past. So that happens not only to the main event but also to other associated memories. And so these may hear at the same time. And this linking of related memories can lead to a dramatic improvement in many aspects of a person's life. So that's how EMDR is used to treat psychopathology. And it seems that the bilateral stimulation of the brain induces an altered state of consciousness, like with indigenous shamanic practices. EMDR uses simple rhythms to alter consciousness. So EMDR is like an ancient healing mechanism that's been adapted to treat the modern soul. It's based on a model of healing called the Adaptive Information Processing Hypothesis. So maladaptively stored memories of trauma create obstacles in processing information. And these blockages affects the cortex and then adversely affect our emotions and our behaviour. So when we reprocess these memories using bilateral stimulation of the brain, you start thinking and feeling differently about the same events. So trauma therapy isn't about changing the past. It's about changing how you think and feel about those experiences. So you leave the past in the past and then integrate that information into the present. And it's the future too. So many of the listeners may have come across Gabel Matte. He says that trauma isn't what happened to us. It's what has happened in our bodies. There's a consequence of those experiences. And EMDR is really sort of built upon that. And it was set on the foundations of the pioneering work of Francine Shapiro who developed EMDR as a treatment in the late 80s and early 90s. It was originally developed as a treatment for PTSD. But as we move towards a transdiagnostic view of mental health where we start to understand people's emotions and behaviours as an understandable reaction to what has happened to them. EMDR becomes a useful treatment for other psychological presentations as well. So also just to mention EMDR is one of the few empirically validated psychotherapies. So we've been working alongside this evidence-based standard protocol and then adapting it and further developing it as a tool for psychedelic preparation and integration therapy. And even taking it a step further now to see how it could be brought into the medicine sessions during a psychedelic dose. We'd like to speak a little bit more about that in due course. Absolutely. And Hannah, we'll go back to you. Can you describe to people because as a person, like I said, I have done EMDR and so I know what it is like to be in the session. But can you describe a little bit about, you know, Jocelyn mentioned the bilateral brain stimulation? What does that actually look like when you are in the EMDR session? So I work 100% online, which before the pandemic was a little bit out there, I think. But now it's more normal. So I use an online platform where you have bilateral stimulation as a dot that you follow on the screen. And I use sound as well in the headphones. So I get the person we work out using the AIP model, which is the adaptive information processing model. We work out which memories we think are linked to the presenting issues. So it's with standard PTSD and there's an event that's happened. I get the person to connect, connect with the event, thought, feeling and sensation that goes with it and then add the bilateral stimulation. It just lets the brain in a calm environment process information that the brain was too dysregulated to process at the time because we're working with this idea that when the brain, when the limit system is really dysregulated and it kicks in the frontal lobe, stops processing the information properly. So it's not encoding it in a cohesive format. It's kind of stored in a fragmented format. It's all the sensory information there, the thought, the feeling, the sensation, the somatic response is kind of stored in a state-specific format. So when you think about a trauma memory is in first person, you think about it as if you're there. You feel it in your body, as if it's still happening, whereas a memory can be traumatic. But if it's stored properly, it'll be third person and it's a narrative. It's like long term, properly stored memory is. This happened and this happened and this happened. It was scary, but it's over, I'm safe now. So it's that kind of perspective. So through using the eye movements or tapping, Josie uses tapping and eye movements a bit more now, don't you, Jos? But gradually you'll shift out of the first person and it'll kind of be. The somatic response will dampen down and it'll just be the story rather than with all the other somatic things going on. So when we use the scale called the subjective unit of distress, so it's suds. I don't know if you've come across that before. It's a scale out of 10. So zero being no emotional somatic response, 10 being the strongest response you could have. And when it gets to zero, that's when a zero or one is deemed that the memory is processed enough and is fully integrated, basically. So, yeah, hopefully that makes sense. I don't know if it went off on that. Yeah, no, absolutely. And thank you for describing that they're both as the eye version where you're looking back and forth or hearing sounds back and forth and how Jocelyn also does the tapping. I had done the tapping because I kept saying I can't go inward if my eyes are open. So I couldn't like look at a thing and so she was tapping on like, I think she was tapping on my knees back and forth. I get people to visualize it with the with the sound. So you have clicks on and then so you get the rhythm. So one thing they think is going on. be kind of simulating the slow wave REM sleep cycle and the frequencies, the waves going across the brain of the resting state network frequencies. So I start it off with your eyes closed with the clicks, visualise it and then add the eye movements and that really just gets the process in going. So it's, yeah, there's different ways to do it but I find that's the most effective in my practice, but very nice. Yeah, go ahead. I was just going to say one of the things that is quite useful with the taps is that it can actually be taken into the psychedelic dosing session and so I've had experience working in the Netherlands where you know people start getting kind of blocking bleep or looping as they're kind of going going into like a difficult aspect of the psychedelic journey and you can use the taps to kind of you know really kind of allow an enhanced processing through those difficult transient moments and and so one of the ways that potentially EMDR could be useful is you know if there are kind of defense mechanisms or resistance that comes up in the journey that that could be a facilitative mechanism to flush that through. Oh, I like that very much. I did not know there was any way to stop looping so that or to to facilitate maybe the end so I think that is a very useful resource point. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, really interesting. Oh, I love that. I love that very much. Definitely if you not to terrify people but it is one of the most negative side effects I've ever had of a journey so I love to hear that that is being addressed. So going back to your paper, I saw that that you mentioned that a key reason for combining these two therapies EMDR and psychedelic treatment is that they both promote neuroplasticity. Could you talk a little bit about that please? Okay, so as we mentioned EMDR helps us to think and feel differently about previous experiences. So this is neuroplasticity but from our experiences of doing EMDR with people who have had psychedelics we recognize that some of the resistance that would normally be present in an EMDR session is diminished when someone's had a recent psychedelic experience. There can there can also be enhanced resourcing experiences so if someone's had an encounter with newness or religious content whilst on psychedelics this can be used as a resource to then further support a sense of safety during processing sessions. We've also found that people process really quickly with EMDR after they've had psychedelics. So for example I've been working with people who have been accessing legal ketamine therapy here in the UK and they're going through so much content in a single EMDR session after they've had a ketamine dose. So we're wondering whether we're tapping into the the window of neuro enhanced neuroplasticity that comes after ketamine treatments and then that's being used to support an enhanced EMDR therapy. So this that's an example of how we are adapting our work to get as much processing done with people as possible really front-loading the therapy to make the most of the neuroplastic window while it's still open. And that's and that's true for other substances too but each substance seems to work in a different way so we're just adapting our approach accordingly and that's helpful. So it doesn't only optimize the potency of the EMDR but it also optimizes the efficacy of the therapeutic impact for each psychedelic dose too and that and that reduces the need for repeated doses and you know ketamine therapy is expensive and each time someone's given a psychedelic medication they're put into the unknown of what might emerge in a in a psychedelic experience which it's risky. So what we're trying to do with the EMDR therapies to enhance the therapeutic impact of every dose really making the most of each integration so that people don't need to have as many medicine-dosing sessions unless treatment is is financially but also environmentally more sustainable. Yeah we think albeit this is still untested. EMDR affects the same neural pathways as psychedelics do in the brain so the 5HT system or serotonin system EMDR has been scientifically shown with MRI studies to shown to down-regulate the default mode network in the same way the psychedelics do and during the down-regulation phases what seems to be happening is a hyperplastic brain state allows for very rapid learning experiences and the same thing happens during run-state sleep and dreaming and research has shown that EMDR taps into to the same mechanisms as REM. It's like adding the healing benefits of dreaming whilst on psychedelics but being more in control of what gets reprocessed and as many psychedelics as stimulants it's hard to do psychedelic therapy and it's impossible to do normal therapy whilst someone is asleep but with EMDR you get the enhanced processing benefits of those processing dream states plus there's a whole toolkit of EMDR safety utensils that can be deployed to help people out if they get a bit stuck. Again more research is needed particularly around EMDR specifically but researchers at Imperial College in London and at University College San Francisco researching into sleep states and psychedelics and fixed pathways of thinking that a synonymous with psychopathology and they've developed something called the Rubus model that details how these hyperplastic brain states might facilitate processing and how this could contribute to an understanding of the neuroplastic effects of these compounds and entropic brain states such as those seen during psychedelics and EMDR seem to facilitate large scale changes in neural wiring so EMDR seems to kind of enhance or match that and it's a it's approach-closed therapy that activates these similar pathways so what Hannah and I are really interested in is how this therapy might be used as an adjunct to psychedelic therapy to support the structural and functional changes that are needed but just to point out this is really cutting edge stuff that we're working towards and obviously it takes time to build an empirical evidence base to support what we believe to be happening and much of this is yet untested and unknown alongside this we're we're also interested in microdosing and using psychedelic doses with EMDR to optimize the neuroplastic potential of these medicines of course though it's really important to really highlight here that more research is needed and much of this is untested and some of this is what we're exploring in our collaboration together and also what we've been experiencing in our clinical practice very nice and in your paper there was something else that I saw that that you know this is such a small point that you made but I again I love whenever you I see something that addresses something that previously does not have a lot of information with it and I see that you all had made a hypothesis about the possible origins of hallucinogen persisting perception disorder otherwise known as HPPD which is a disorder as you described here in the paper a non-psychotic disorder where an individual experiences visual hallucinations that persist after the use of any drug including psychedelics and you know a lot of times you I hear people describe it as kind of like visual snow or they'll see certain like kind of lights or halos or different different things and then you describe how from you know you described the AIP perspective which as you said earlier is adaptive information processing but can you describe how you think that HPPD may be conceptualized in in those regards like because I think at this point we we're not sure what causes it but I like that you you all have a hypothesis it's a little bit controversial this one but we think from an AIP perspective that it is basically a version of PTSD so if so say something quite disregulating emerges during a psychedelic trip and and that someone becomes very disregulated they start encoding the trip in a dysfunctional way so that the memory of the trip is stored in a maladaptive manner with the visual part the somatic part and the visual part because you have the psychedelic imagery and stuff I mean I'm not sure specifically about the snow to be honest with you but I mean my sense is because I have I have worked with people who have I'm getting a lot of young clients for example who are so they say they're on LSD or something like that and then they have some synthetic cannabinoid vape by accident or a nozz balloon nitrous oxide or something like that and then they frit go into because of whatever the kind of the cannabinoid thing does to your brain they've just gone completely default mode network offline I think and then whatever they're so disregulated by that whatever's encoded I've I've had them where they have a thing where if they get stressed after the trip way after it will kind of go to the same sort of juttery imagery of when they were in the trip so it's almost like as a visual flashback of the trip it seems like but there's there's the somatic responses stuff there as well but I mean it's fairly anecdotal this but it makes sense from our trauma perspective that it is maladaptive encoding I don't know just want to kind of add to that as well Han does a beautiful work with some psychedelic pensioners so people who have had difficult experiences back in the late 1960s on LSD. And for many years have had kind of flashback images, HPPD-like symptoms connected to that. And I'm thinking about it from the AIP model very often what seems to be happening during psychedelic reactivations is that some sort of faulty or maladactively stored memory from earlier childhood experiences, which hasn't been properly coded and processed, is getting reactivated in the psychedelic experience. And so when you go back and you properly process the earlier target from usually it's in a critical attachment window pre-10, the age of 10, then very often what will happen is that that the that will generalise out to the the psychedelic content. And you can then process that according to what it is known in EMDR as the 3-pronged approach. So that's the past, the present and the future. And we kind of add the psychedelic into that in terms of present content or past content depending on how old that is. And just noticing I guess the change in the perception of the psychedelic content, so the difficult experience but also the reactivations drastically reducing as well. So yeah, kind of thinking about how that looks in terms of treatment. Even people who have perhaps had psychedelic experiences 55 years ago seem to be getting something out of using EMDR as an integration therapy. Oh, I very much love to hear that. Thank you for sharing that and that's hopefully very informative for some some of our listeners. So I was looking further in your paper and I'll throw this to Hannah. You suggest that there are some parts of some of the current models that are used in research of preparation, integration, etc, that you think are lacking. Can you describe some ways that EMDR could help address some of those areas? We are proposing that EMDR is used as more as a screening tool because you said you had some EMDR previously. It does cause a certain amount of dysregulation because you have to kind of be able to be resilient enough to lean into the trauma. There are ways to there are ways to work with trauma of the EMDR where you do it remotely and it's less less first person when you approach it, but the standard way of doing it, there's a certain amount of dysregulation that's caused. So we we instead of in a lot of the standard preparation phases, they're training people in embodiment, for example, but it's in they're training in embodiment by doing a visualization, for example, of a body scan. It's basically a glorified body scan a lot of the time. It feels like whereas with the EMDR, we proposed you should have maybe I think in our model we're saying four sessions of EMDR with working on memories, either stuff around building the intention or blocks or worries about maybe there's a worst fear of what might happen in the trip, but using that as a target, doing EMDR, seeing how the client reacts in the session and in between the sessions, as a way to assess their readiness to progress, to go and do psychedelics because it's a really good screening tool just to see how people cope because I think that yeah, because it just feels more thorough and also it shores up some of the foundations because you can be quite strategic because because we are psychodynamic in the way that we work. There's no such thing really as single event PTSD. There's always a root node memory generally around seven, not always seven, but it's often around that time. But so you could shore up the foundations with the EMDR. So people are more resilient and also we have the preparation for the bits of EMDR where we do resourcing, I'm sorry I forgot to even mention that is a whole part of EMDR where we resource people for even do reprocessing. So we do it use the imaginal space to activate parts of the brain and reimagine attachment experiences to patch over deficits in the attachment. So people can better regulate themselves when they become dysregulated on psychedelics basically. I hope that makes sense. I'm happy for me to jump in here as well because I think this is the part that Han and I feel really passionate about. And that really is thinking about how psychedelics can be kind of move forward. And for both of us, I guess the big question is how do we make these treatments available to more people and make them more inclusive because there is a sort of psychedelic elitism that is kind of prohibitive in terms of widening access. So on the trials that I work on, for example, you know, they're a very strict exclusion criteria. Many people retreat centers are out of the equation they're unaffordable. And so what Han and I feel kind of really passionate about is thinking about the next big, I guess, puzzle when it comes to psychedelic medicines. Psychedelics will get licensed. You know, there are phase three clinical trials happening. You know, these medicines will be available. The question is, is how do we scale them? How do we bring them into healthcare settings? And kind of teasing through that question is really thinking about how do we get these treatments available to the people who need them most? And what Han and I have recognised both in our private practice and also from researching our book is that the people who are most likely to have adverse drug reactions to psychedelics, whether that's HPPD or tolerance, tend to be the people who also have adverse childhood experiences or have traumatic complexity in their biographical content. And so we recognise that there's a need for trauma-focused psychedelic treatments if we're going to make these treatments available to the people who need them most and make them scalable. And we think that EMDR is a good enough fit for that work to happen. And some modifications will need to happen in order for that to fit. But as Hannah identifies really beautifully there, screening is a component of that. And so too is resourcing to allow these treatments to really kind of be impactful. But so too, and kind of this again, this is I think the sort of the unique feature of EMDR is that it was designed for CPTSD for complexity. And so it can be used as a stabilisation tool. So we've been working with war veterans and former sex workers, people who would normally be an absolute know when it comes to psychedelic treatments. And we're using EMDR to stabilise them enough so that they can get into a position of an access point. So that then the psychedelic medications are then available. And there's still more work to be done in terms of really optimising these treatments. But for Hannah and I, obviously both of us have got a huge passion for psychedelics. We love EMDR and how that works, how it's a manualised therapy. So everyone kind of gets something that's vaguely recognisable. And so healthcare commissioners are going to love that. But also, this also kind of comes down to an issue of social justice, which is around how to make these treatments available to the people who need them most. I love that. I love the social justice aspect and the access. And yeah, one of the things that struck me in reading your article, and by the way, if I have not said it earlier, the name of the article is psychedelic assisted EMDR therapy, a memory consolidation approach to psychedelic healing that will be in the show notes. But I love that you just describe that EMDR is used to working with patients. You said even in psychotic states and that so much of what you are focusing both of you in your work is trying to get more people to a state that they would no longer be excluded. So many of the clinical trials have excluded people that need it the most because of because we don't know how it will affect people who have a history of psychosis and those kind of things. So like you said, bringing people to a place where it's safe enough for them to do psychedelics is amazing. So thank you for that work that you're doing. As I'm gathering from the paper and then also from what you've just described, it sounds like EMDR, because I saw on the paper you mentioned preparation integration, but with what you were discussing with looping, sounds like it can also be useful in the ceremony as well. Can you discuss kind of how, I guess, what we'll go to Hannah, how, you know, maybe if you guys want to go back and forth either how you want to describe it, but how EMDR you said in this understand beforehand preparation great with screening and resourcing and maybe getting some some intention set anything that's missing on there. And if you could describe also like how it is applicable in those other two phases. I don't think we've missed anything there. I've read so far. It's been a bit of an overview. Yeah, there's always so much to say. I suppose it's worth mentioning that this work is already happening in parts of the world where these treatments are legal. So for example, we have used EMDR to support reprocessing in psilocybin retreats in the Netherlands and also just a highlight that different substances seem to work in different ways. So we've also been able to use cannabis EMDR therapy with those who have medical cannabis prescription here in the UK. That seems to have quite a somatic effect on the body or on reprocessing. ketamine EMDR therapy is already happening with our colleagues based in the US and they say that it's a good fit because of the and Hans Neurifin. plastic effects produced by Lodo's ketamine. It's also been interesting to hear about underground EMDR psychedelic therapy too. You did some interviews with people. Did you want to talk about that? So for the book, which is the same title as the paper actually, so EMDR's Amelid memories consolidation approach to psychedelic healing. We've interviewed people who have been experimentally working with EMDR on the underground and going to Holland and places where it's legal as well and using EMDR. It's really interesting. I'm also speaking to people who have been using EMDR with MDMA combined. It seems like with the MDMA in particular, they're perfectly matched. It's almost like it's been described as if you're looking at the memory. Because we describe any EMDR, we talk about young talks about complexes and growth talks about co-exes. We talk about memory networks and it's been described as if you had the bilateral stimulation on the screen. It's almost like the memory network is just there in front of you. We know this happens with MDMA anyway. But when we do it in a guided way, although we let the brain do what needs to do, we predetermine which network we want to target, defined by the intention. We hone it down a bit more using the AIP models. The intention would be linked to the memory network. Then occasionally, the therapies would bring the person back to the intention, which would activate the memory network and you'd see what the bodily response is. If there's anything still there, if the suds are still over zero or one, when you ever go to the memory that's come up or the cognition, the positive cognition of it still doesn't sit quite right. It goes straight back into the memory network and lets the processing happen so you can kind of keep it more focused on the intention. Because what we're noticing is that we all talk about intentions from the 60s research and everything. But actually, in the research, they're really not revisited. They're not really used. It's almost like a token gesture using the intention. But actually, because in EMDR, we use a negative cognition, which is linked to the memory network, and we're just flipping the negative cognition to the positive cognition, which is the positive intention and then using that to guide the work during the psycholytic EMDR work basically. So just to keep it focused, rather than letting it go all round all over the place, if it's just to use the intention in a controlled way, without really not that we're controlling it. That's not what I use. But just to keep it focused on the intention, I think that's the aim. And just to embellish what Hans said a little further, there are still unknowns. We are researching around people who are using it with psycholytic doses, with different substances. So with ketamine and DMA cannabis, with psilocybin, we're looking also whether dose plays a role. And thinking too, even if people are going for the full immersive mystical experience, whether in the descent from the arc of the experience, as people come back down, and often a lot of the biographical content will come up then, to use EMDR to support people to reprocess as they are descending back in from those extended states. So one of the things that Hannah and I are currently doing is setting up a working group. So if there are other EMDR practitioners transatlantic or in Australia or other parts of the Middle East, wherever they are, we're looking for people who are up for collaborating, up for kind of developing an evidence base, so that we can start to think about how the protocols might be used really as a kind of a grassroots bottom-up approach to research. We've been kind of toying with this notion of academic research. So thinking about how people who are working in practice might be able to bring their learning up into clinical settings and use their experience from working on the ground, working in practice, back into inform kind of policy and help these transition into kind of the medicines that they have the potential to be. Absolutely, I love that because I think we spend a lot of time getting psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy or psychedelic-assisted therapy, I think just today maps put out that they have submitted for their new drug approval and all the things, but what has yet to be discovered is what therapeutic adjuncts can be most effective. And I love that you have all brought up how EMDR can be so effective in this. Yeah, I really hear that too. It's an expensive process to get a drug to market and really the therapy poses a bit of a problem when it comes to the clinical research because essentially it acts as a confounding variable and so they kind of recognize that in terms of adverse drug effects and optimizing outcomes therapy needs to be kind of part of the approval when it comes to granting licenses for these medications, but so far the medicines are kind of getting pushed forward a rate of knots, but as of yet finding how to optimize therapeutic efficacy has not really had any funding or kind of support behind it. And so it's been largely left to either traditional practice which was written around a lot in the kind of the first wave of psychedelic research, this sort of psychoanalytic approach and Jungin Jungin ideals which has served it well to a certain extent and or kind of CBT, third wave CBT models like ACT which are kind of what's popular now today. The thing is with both of those models is that in the last 40 years psych therapies moved on a lot. We've now got access to trauma informed trauma-focused therapies and so how do we kind of respond to that and reflect that in how we work with these compounds, we know the impact of the autonomic nervous system, we can kind of play through how this works in practice and really the question is then how do we put those two wonderful kind of schools of thought together in a way that is conducive to really kind of taking these medicines to the next level to the people who really need them. Also, there's some really interesting research in the EMDR field which kind of backs up some of our thoughts around it being a useful tool for stabilization of people who maybe had ab reactions to psychedelics. There's been a proof of concept trial done by Manchester University I think which was I think it was only 60 participants but it was a randomized control trial of EMDR with first events psychosis and state as a stabilization tool and it had really good results and they're about to well they're in the process of rolling that out to a multistake trial so the hope is we can maybe get some secondary data from that to kind of validate our concept that EMDR could be used for drug-induced psychosis but we need to just just see if that gets approved for that trial but I mean it all seems to point in the direction of what we're saying I know a lot of what we're talking about is very anecdotal and we acknowledge that I think from our work but I mean that's all we really have to work with at the moment because they're not going to afford it's 25 grand minimum for a trial for anything so this is the way to do it at the moment and then tap on to other research. And that's I think you know the grassroots movement you know this does need a sort of bottom-up approach you know what's already happening in practice what is good practice what a practitioner's finding is working and then building onto that and evidence base and and really I mean my collaboration with Hannah is kind of testament to the kind of the work or the potential that's possible through these grassroots movements you know we met some time ago and you know we've just been kind of geeking out about psychedelic assisted EMDR therapy ever since and and everything that we've done is upon you know the kind of the idea that collaboration is is the stuff of growth and just kind of being supportive of one another's ideas and giving each other the confidence to kind of speak more openly about what we were both already doing independently and we you know we want to kind of snowball that and bring other people into kind of our shared interest and and hopefully might get some evidence along the way and perhaps if there's enough evidence we may also then at some point secure funding for something a little bit more scientifically robust. Absolutely well here's your chance tell people how to find you all so that you can collaborate and build that evidence where should if we have other fellow EMDR therapists listening who would love to collaborate where can they reach out to contact you all. I'd probably info at bridgetothematrix.com is probably the best email so info bridgetothematrix.com so yeah that's the one and email us and we're all I'm on LinkedIn so Hannah Reinsmith on LinkedIn I think Joseph's as well but yeah we're anyone who wants to join us come join us yeah fantastic and you said you have a book coming out in the in the near future with the same name as the as the paper yeah with RootLidge which is pretty exciting as well oh yeah congratulations well done well you know this I'm always excited because like you said a lot of the therapeutic aspects are going to be bottom up we did an episode on psychedelics and internal family systems and now we have psychedelics at EMDR and I appreciate all the therapists that are out there putting their their you know what they've been trained in with psychedelic therapy to see if it works and it sounds like you know at least from your paper and in what you've described this is has a has a really significant place and role that could in that it can play in getting people prepared helping people during the journey not only make the most out of it but also if they are having a challenging journey hopefully to bring them back and then to integrate afterwards so I really wanted to thank you both for your work we will put links to your article in the show notes and if anybody's out there who wants to collaborate with them at bridge to thematrix.com, is that correct? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you so much to you both for coming on today and sharing your work. - Thank you so much. - Right, for everybody else out there, until next time. - Thanks so much for listening to the Psychedelic Medicine podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard, please leave a rating or review as it helps others find the show. And if you'd like to learn more, you can find the show notes at plantmedicine.org/podcast and there's information for clinicians at psychedelicmedicineassociation.org. Our incredible music was by the one and only Porangi. We'll see you next time.