The Power of Accelerated Resolution Therapy in Healing Childhood Trauma and Relationship Issues

Show Notes

Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART) can be used in healing relational trauma and promoting personal growth. Discover how ART uses bilateral stimulation to move stuck images, sensations, and emotions in the brain, allowing individuals to find relief, gain a new perspective, and create healthier, more fulfilling relationships.

Key takeaways from the episode:

• Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART) is an offshoot of EMDR using bilateral stimulation to help move along unwanted images, sensations, and emotions, providing a new perspective on traumatic events.

• How ART sessions can help infidelity for couples process trauma, leading to compassion and understanding.

• ART helps individuals maintain the memory of events without the intense emotional reactions.

• ART is not limited to trauma; it can address day-to-day issues like anxiety, depression, and codependency.

Allison is licensed as an LICSW in MN, Texas and Wisconsin.  She practices out of Minnesota and is passionate about helping people live their best lives.  Allison specializes in working with high achieving adults who have a history of childhood trauma, both big and little t traumas.  She uses an eclectic blend of mind, body, spirit interventions as well as Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART), a smooth pursuit eye movement therapy. ART clears bothersome sensations and emotions in the body and brain.  

Allison is passionate about helping people heal the root cause of their challenges, whether that results from childhood trauma or a traumatic experience that occurred later in life.  More often than not, these traumatic experiences result in challenges which strain or fracture relationships with others, and or the self, throughout the lifespan. 

Noteworthy quotes from this episode:

[30:20] "ART is like you're not really doing anything different. It's just you're letting someone guide you through helping you allow your brain to move that stuff into the right spot. So you're not just sitting there on your hamster wheel."

[18:23] "It's like when we have trauma... It's like the furnace is always running in the background. It never shuts off. And then when it finally shuts off, it's like this different level of peace. It's quiet and gentle and clean in some way, like light. [That’s what ART can do.]"

Connect with Allison 

Website - https://www.allisonkirk.net/about

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Paige Bond hosts the Stubborn Love podcast, is a Licensed Marriage Therapist, and a Polyamory Relationship Coach. Her mission is to help people-pleasing millennials navigate non-monogamy so they can tame their jealousy and love with ease. Her own journey from feeling lonely, insecure, and jealous to feeling empowered and reassured is what fuels her passion to help other people-pleasers to conquer jealousy and embrace love.

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Disclaimer: This podcast and communication through our email are not meant to serve as professional advice or therapy. If you are in need of mental health support, you are encouraged to connect with a licensed mental health professional to receive the support needed.

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Transcript

(generated by AI - please excuse errors)

[00:01:43] Allison Kirk, Licensed Clinical Social Worker: Hey Paige, thanks a lot for having me. I'm a licensed independent clinical social worker in Minnesota and I work primarily with people who have a history of childhood trauma.

Probably about, I don't know, two or three years into doing my private practice therapy work, I realized that there were some things that people were really struggling to heal. They were like, triggered, triggered events, things that didn't feel good in their body, intrusive memories that they couldn't get rid of old traumas from the past that just would not go away.

So I did a little bit of research and stumbled upon accelerated resolution therapy. we call it ART, ART is really. An offshoot of EMDR that basically takes one scene at a time. and what it does is uses bilateral stimulation, so we move the eyes back and forth with the use of a protocol, and by using that protocol, what we do is we help the brain move along unwanted images, sensations and emotion, so maybe we take a scene from someone's childhood, maybe it's not an old scene at all, maybe it's something that's really recent that was traumatic, That is causing a lot of problems, so it's become a pretty, pivotal game changer in my practice, because it really helps people heal much more quickly and gives them a new perspective on whatever it was that happened.

Um, it gets into deeper levels of brain functioning than what cognitive therapy or, you know, any kind of talk therapy can do alone. Yeah. That's what I'm into these days. 

[00:03:43] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist: Thank you so much for giving us the rundown on ART. And I think you kind of touched on my question. why is it that ART moves along something like trauma a lot faster than regular talk therapy?

And you're saying it has to do with the way that ART, interacts with the brain. Is that how it happens? Yes. 

[00:04:04] Allison Kirk, Licensed Clinical Social Worker: Right. So, like I said, we use bilateral stimulation and with ART the recommended way to execute this procedure is through moving the eyes back and forth. So when we move the eyes back and forth, we end up holding the frontal lobe in place.

And without that, the frontal lobe is offline when someone is triggered, right? And that's a very protective mechanism of the brain. If you think about Oh, for example, you're driving up to a stoplight and there's a semi that's coming towards you. You don't really want to stop and like figure out a complicated algorithm of should I turn right?

Should I turn left? Should I back up? No, you want to react. Well, to be able to do that, the frontal lobe needs to quit working, right? It needs to let your middle brain or your limbic system be in charge. And that's great for in the moment. But the problem is when we're repeatedly triggered and the frontal lobe is not online, those stuck images, sensations, and emotions are basically just like living on a hamster wheel in the middle of your brain.

So when we hold your frontal lobe down by moving your eyes back and forth, there are other ways to do it too. But ART really, you know, the founder really wants you to use the eyes to do that because it's the most effective. when we hold the frontal lobe down and then we have someone see their scene in a very specific, you know, like 14 page protocol or 18 page, I don't know how long it is, something like that.

When we use that protocol and we hold the frontal lobe down, we allow those things that are stuck in the middle brain to move from the middle brain through the frontal lobe to the cortex, which is where they are either consolidated or purged. Because we don't need to remember everything and it doesn't need to have such an emotional drag on our systems and on our lives.

that's the thing about ART that makes it special is that it's combining this bilateral eye movement stimulation with a very specific protocol to help reduce And move along those stuck images, sensations and emotions. 

[00:06:25] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist: That's amazing, really, and it sounds like this is a way for you to just move through being able to deal with triggers.

In a very specific way and in a safe setting, you know, under the care of a therapist, so that they become relieved and not really present in life anymore. Is that what happens? 

[00:06:52] Allison Kirk, Licensed Clinical Social Worker: Right. Well, I mean, you never lose the memory, right? So you always remember exactly what happened, but you don't have that same reaction anymore.

You may be, somebody that's a victim of some kind of gunshot outside of their house that consistently is afraid when a door is slammed. Right. And so you go back and you process that trauma of these gunshots outside of the house. And you always remember that the gunshots were there, but the slamming of a door doesn't create this startle response or this trigger response where all of a sudden you're thinking about the gunshots outside the door.

It's just a door slamming. 

[00:07:35] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist: It sounds like this can really help people get their lives back or get their lives, you know, to a place that they might have not been able to experience before. 

[00:07:45] Allison Kirk, Licensed Clinical Social Worker: Totally. Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:07:48] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist: So I know I asked to have you on in particular for this series of ART episodes because I wanted to really talk about how ART can help move really painful relational trauma or relational upsets and hurt.

And I was wondering if you can speak to some instances where you've seen ART really help any kind of relational cases that you've worked with. 

[00:08:14] Allison Kirk, Licensed Clinical Social Worker: Yeah. So, uh, kind of a profound example that I have from within my practice or was a married couple that I saw. I started seeing them as a couple and the husband in this case, I'm going to call him Steve, had cheated on his wife and I'm going to call her Mary. yeah. Repeatedly. like thousands of times he cheated on his wife. It was online. It was in person. It was over one and a half decades of like 15, 16 years of it.

And he had been engaged in therapy and they came to me for couples counseling. So I had been working with them and it didn't take too long to really recognize that Mary was super triggered by what had happened. You would imagine. Um, and, and her triggers were just all over the place. I mean, they were in their house, they were his phone, it was the computer, it was her being at work, it was him being at work, it was their bedroom, it was just everything.

So, we decided that I was going to work with Mary. And not do couples counseling with them anymore. And Steve was going to continue to work with his therapist. So I started working with Mary. you know, it was kind of like the most profound things that had happened around the affairs is what we worked on first.

So, you know, we cleaned up her triggers around the phone and the bedroom and the computer. What we started to notice was that she ended up having compassion for him in part because she was recognizing that she she had Lots of childhood trauma that was unresolved, you know High expectations on edge all the time kind of a stressful career that she had come to be in as a result of this You know, well meaning, hardworking, Midwestern family, but her expectations were bigger than she could really handle.

So she was in a stress response all the time. through our work with ART, we were able to really kind of take back each layer and see that what had happened to her really was a result of her childhood as well as a sexual assault that she had endured as a teenager. And all of these things were contributing to her response to her husband, not only in his infidelity, but also in their marriage just in general.

So she was crabby every day when he would come home. Even when she didn't know he was cheating on her, she was crabby. And quite frankly, he didn't like it. It was not a turn on for Steve, at all, to have her be crabby. So, her right sizing her expectations, and, you know, working through her childhood trauma, After we had done, you know, I don't know, probably 20 some sessions, maybe, I want to say, I mean, you got to remember this is like 15 years of infidelity where when she found out it was like, Oh, my God, what about when we were here?

What about when we were there? And and she came across a lot of emails and platforms and All the, all the different ways that people find to not be loyal to their partners these days. He had them all going on. So we had a lot of work to do, but it really paid off in the end for them, and they're still together.

They are happier than they ever were their 30th wedding anniversary. They. went and renewed their vows. They had graduated from therapy at that point. Both of them. I mean, definitely it took, you know, it took a couple of years to get there. But they stayed true to what they wanted, which was to be together and be healthy and happy, and their work paid off.

[00:12:36] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist: What a success Story. I mean, to go through so much, and I'm sure it's not easy for the client also to bring up all these memories to the surface during session. Either and to really come out on the other side like that, to be able to have compassion and renew their love for each other. I mean, it can't get much better than that for a success story with ART.

[00:13:04] Allison Kirk, Licensed Clinical Social Worker: Totally. I mean, I think there's kind of like a couple of different kinds of work that that goes on in it right there's like the. There's the sort of no brainers, which kind of, I don't know if that's a pun, it's not intended, but it kind of feels like it in some way. Of like, yeah, okay. So all of these things are triggers.

I remember very concretely finding, you know, 2, 500 emails or finding this platform and looking at these conversations that you've been having with these women. Um, you know, those are kind of like the easy. The easy things to clean up in a way they're not as deep or they don't take quite as much like depth and and courage, I would say, is like looking at Wow, what do I do?

What do I do in my life that isn't great? And why am I doing it? And how do I work on changing that? I mean, I think, I think that's the part of ART that I love is like, you can use ART for those deep, painful places that we don't always want to share about ourselves, we don't necessarily love to be honest with ourselves about our part in how or why relationships don't work.

But it's, it's the mature thing to do, right? It's like being able to be with ourselves and recognize that we are all humans, we are imperfect, and our brains are just really trying to protect us. That's why they develop these expectations or, maladaptive coping strategies.

They're protective. And the intent is not to harm us. It's to support us in our survival. But we don't always feel that way. So we like to hide them. And it takes a lot of courage to kind of like open up the closet doors and let the skeletons out and take ownership of them. 

[00:15:11] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist: And I think that's probably one of the hardest things to do in therapy, you know, as clients we go to therapy, with a problem, and usually it's an external problem, I'm mad at this or I can't stand when my partner does that.

And. It's really hard to kind of get any work done because we can't control any of those external factors. We can only do the work on ourselves in hopes that maybe that'll affect those external factors. But if not, then you gotta kind of take a look at, all right, what do you want in life? So I love how you talked about ART was also kind of a mirror for your client to be able to look at themselves and take accountability, explore why they were the way they were and how they can start to unravel that and become a better partner for themselves and for their partner.

Sounds like it helps develop compassion for the self as well as for their husband. . 

[00:16:20] Allison Kirk, Licensed Clinical Social Worker: Totally. . I mean they talk about that in training, like one of the side effects of ART is empathy. I mean, I think it's fantastic if we can have empathy for others. And I would venture to say that there are probably 95 percent of humans that could stand to be more compassionate towards themselves and to be able to kind of take a look from the outside in.

In a different way, like A. R. T. helps people do, and then to move along those unwanted feelings really makes it a lot easier to look at that younger part of ourselves that struggled so much with whatever it was and be like, yeah, that, that really shouldn't have happened. That wasn't fair.

And really what that younger part of me needs or needed then and probably needs now is some extra love. And generosity and grace. And so to have people come away from a therapy session, like able to relax within themselves and be like, yeah, it really did suck and I'm okay. I'm here. I'm actually doing great in my life.

It's really not that bad, you know, allows for them to make those bigger changes, whether it's lifestyle or maybe it is a partner.

[00:17:49] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist: When I did my ART training, the trainer was talking about how sometimes it feels like, before ART people have been carrying around the big T, the little T traumas. You know, like in this backpack that's been on their back and it's been growing and growing and growing over the years and after an ART session, it's almost as if they take the backpack off and all of a sudden they're kind of like feeling like weightless without it holding them down.

[00:18:21] Allison Kirk, Licensed Clinical Social Worker: Exactly. Yeah. I often describe it like you know, when you're sitting in a room and you can just kind of hear the furnace going. I mean, I'm in Minnesota, so I'll say furnace. Some other people might want to say central air, but we don't have a whole lot of use for that up here. Well, in the summer we do, but, um, it's like you can hear the furnace, right?

When you really pay attention to it, but a lot of times you don't even know it's there. And then when it's off, it's like, Whoa, it's really quiet in here. And that's, that's kind of like what ART is. It's like when, well, we have the trauma. It's like the furnace is always running in the background. It never shuts off.

And then when it finally shuts off, it's like this different level of peace. It's quiet and gentle and clean in some way, like light. I don't know.

That's a good way to describe it too. But it's like a backpack that you don't really know is there, right? Yeah. It just keeps filling, but you don't even know you have it. 

[00:19:29] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist: Mm hmm. And I, I wonder what your experience might be for people that you've seen after an ART session and they come back to you telling you what it's like now not living with the furnace on or now not living with the backpack, you know, weighing them down.

Do they talk about kind of just the difference in their life it makes.

[00:19:54] Allison Kirk, Licensed Clinical Social Worker: So it kind of depends on what we're talking about. If we're talking about like single episode, recent trauma. Yeah, I mean, right away, people are like, wow, this is so great. I might not even see them again. Right? I mean, I do some of that work too, where I see people who have had some egregious something happen and they will come and see me for one or two, maybe three sessions.

And then I don't see them again. Like they're fine. They don't have a whole lot of baggage in their past. For people who have, you know, childhood trauma, lots of little t trauma. It's, it's kind of like a whole process, right? It's like we move along these, triggered events and we kind of just start plucking them off one by one and they notice the small changes, but the longer we keep going, they start to have bigger changes.

I mean, it reminds me of a client that I worked with for probably about five years, lots of trauma, like just terrible stuff happened for this woman in her childhood and throughout her life, really. But what we did was we interspersed ART with talk therapy and some other kind of like lifestyle choices, right?

So we were working on cognitive restructuring and self care and then we'd stumble across you know, something that had happened in the past that we're like, okay, we're gonna do ART and clean that up. So it was like Her mind was getting healed, her body was changing, she was all of a sudden, you know, feeling the desire to exercise and eat better, she was in better shape, and she started to really recognize that she was a lot more intuitive than she had ever realized, but she couldn't realize it because her brain was, was really cluttered with all the trauma that she didn't know the difference between intuition and being triggered.

Right. Because how do you know, how can you tell when you really can't, it's very difficult. Once those traumas were cleared out of her brain and she had gotten her chemistry dialed in, in her physical being, she had this new level of intuition and like spiritual connectedness where her life has changed dramatically.

I mean, she was diagnosed with all the things, literally like all of the things she had on her list. And she wasn't my typical kind of client. She had called me from this pretty prestigious hospital, wanted to work with me. And I was kind of like, wow, I don't know. I think you probably need to do some DBT first.

And said I would call her back again. Tried to call her back, and she was still inpatient, but they wouldn't let her talk to me, and it really bothered me. I was like, wait a minute. You know, she's, she had put forth, she had put forth the initial effort to reach out to me, and I was like, all right, well, kind of irritating that they're not letting me talk to her when she's making this effort, so I'm like, okay, we're gonna, we're gonna do this work, she really, like, came to recognize that she didn't have borderline personality disorder.

Major Depressive Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, of which she'd been treated with everything, including, you know, like ECT and, you know, all the big, all the big ones. She had trauma. And she came out on the other side having better relationships with everybody, her husband, her children, herself.

She has real friends now, not just friends that use her or that she's kind of limping along with. She's living a vibrant, authentic life. And she graduated from therapy. Oh, it's pretty great. I hear I hear from her every once in a while. 

[00:23:55] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist: Yeah, that sounds so Oh, I love that she can stay in touch and just let you know just how she's doing.

Yeah, I think that's so inspiring and Especially because I think people are way over diagnosed way over everything and You know, the older I get, the more I realize that we're all just out here trying to live like it's no wonder that people are ending up, you know, with these so called diagnoses or problems that saying that, you know, there's something wrong with diagnosing.

It can be helpful at times, but I think that can put people in a box sometimes and make people feel like they're not understood or make people feel like that the things in their life. I don't know. It doesn't really like add up to like their potential or whatever. And I think it kind of holds them back sometimes from that real deep rooted healing by, you know, all of these diagnoses or medications, things like that.

[00:25:01] Allison Kirk, Licensed Clinical Social Worker: Yeah, I totally agree with you. Kind of like talks us into even more thinking that there's something wrong with us. 

[00:25:10] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist: Yeah, perpetuating it, right? 

[00:25:13] Allison Kirk, Licensed Clinical Social Worker: Yeah. Yeah. , 

[00:25:15] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist: I want to go back to something else. We were talking about the case with the infidelity and I was kind of curious. One of the questions that we had talked about pre show was, you know, something that people don't often talk about related to affairs.

And I'm, I'm wondering what that is, you know, what's, what's something that people aren't having discussions about when it comes to infidelity?

[00:25:41] Allison Kirk, Licensed Clinical Social Worker: In my experience, there's kind of a philosophy for a lot of couples counselors, I think. Um, Not all, but I think there's definitely an idea that when there is infidelity in a relationship and I'm going to just, I'm just going to use like the easy term, the cheater and the victim, and I mean, no harm by using them.

I just want to make it simple. Right. But it's like the idea that in a healthy relationship, affairs don't happen right when things are going well, people are happy and connected and meeting each other's needs and living a vibrant marriage infidelity doesn't occur. It's when something goes wrong in the relationship.

In my experience, in my opinion, that cheating happens. And so I think there's a real problem with the idea that until the victim is able to forgive the cheater, you really can't talk about anything else. I don't think that that's a really great way to approach healing because usually there is a reason that precedes the infidelity that made the infidelity happen in the first place.

And so often At least again, in my experience, it relates to family of origin issues, not necessarily trauma for everybody, but ways of relating to each other, you know, gender roles, roles in our marriage, socioeconomic status and how we approach our careers. All those things can really play into how we behave in a romantic relationship and they mean something.

So, I really appreciate that with ART, you can't really hide from it. the brain is going to give you what the problem is. And it's a safe way to do that because you're not talking about what happened necessarily or at all. You don't need to talk about it at all. You're just seeing your scene. So it's like, I don't, somebody doesn't need to tell me, yeah, I'm a really big rag to my husband when he gets home.

I'm, I want him to help out. I want him to do all of this stuff, but the way I approach it, I am really a snag, right? They don't have to tell me that and like, put it out on the table and be embarrassed or whatever. The brain is going to show that to them and they're going to watch themselves do that to their husband in their mind's eye.

And then we're going to clean it up. We're going to clean up those feelings. What is your sense of urgency that's making you behave in this way? Well, maybe it's because he actually isn't helping out at all, but he can't receive the message because the way the message is delivered, it's so snarky that he's triggered and shut down himself.

But it's like, yeah, the brain just gives that to us to clean up. Like it, it wants to feel better. We all want to do better. ART makes that really easy because we don't have to speak it, you know, we can clean it up other ways and get relief on a deeper level without having to practice all the things all the time or, you know, not that we shouldn't be practicing them, but it's a little bit of a shortcut in a way.

Yeah, yeah, I like that phrasing for it, a shortcut, you know, as you were talking I was kind of imagining this image of like a door being on like the head and like it opening up to your mind and that's what ART does. Exactly.. 

[00:29:51] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist: So beautiful. well, we do have to start wrapping up here soon, but are there any other things that would be really great for the audience to hear in terms of talking about ART when it comes to relational issues? Either any other success, or maybe if someone feels hesitant to try ART to work on their relational issues, what would you say as, something to give them some relief to that hesitancy?

[00:30:20] Allison Kirk, Licensed Clinical Social Worker: Well, the thing is, is if you're already having relational issues, You're already in the worst part of it, right? You're already living in this space that's really difficult and what ART is going to do is allow you to feel less bad about it. It's not going to make it worse. It's going to relieve you from whatever you're feeling in your body, and it's going to help you get some control over your brain.

It's, it's kind of like any other trauma that we're experiencing. If we're triggered by our relationship, we've already experienced the worst part I mean, the worst part is the first time it happened, right? And then we continue to relive it. So it's really nothing different than what someone is already doing.

It's just that if you work with an ART practitioner, they will help you clean it up so you don't have to keep repeating that. It's like you're not really doing anything different. It's just you're letting someone guide you through helping you make or helping you allow your brain to move that stuff into the right spot. So you're not just sitting there on your hamster wheel. 

[00:31:37] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist: Yeah, I love the way you put that. Thank you so much for kind of giving some insight there to that. 

[00:31:43] Allison Kirk, Licensed Clinical Social Worker: Yeah, of course. Um, you know, I was thinking about what are the other ways that ART is helpful for relationships and, and I think the thing about ART is that it's not just for trauma and PTSD, right?

It's for like your day to day stuff. It's for anxiety. It's for depression. It's for codependency. It's for fear. Right? We have all sorts of protocols that we use. It's not just trauma, and a lot of times, those other diagnoses or those other issues or difficulties cause problems in a relationship. So, even if you don't term the struggles that you're having as being trauma, even if they just like stress you out, we have a protocol for that.

We have a way to help you deal with that. So, you know, you can either, like, stay where you are and keep living that way, or you can make a choice to change it. I think ART is just a really, a really easy, and it can be really remarkably fun because it's such a creative process. it's worth giving it a shot rather than just staying the same in the hamster wheel. 

[00:33:01] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist: Yeah. Yeah. And thank you for shedding some light on how this can really be impactful for any kind of struggle. There's so many different applicable ways that ART can give someone relief for their stressors. So I appreciate that. 

[00:33:19] Allison Kirk, Licensed Clinical Social Worker: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. You're welcome. It's been a pleasure. 

[00:33:24] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist: Yes, it's thank you so much for being on the show. If people want to hear more about you, Allison, or find you or even work with you, since you're licensed in more than one state, where can people find you? 

[00:33:38] Allison Kirk, Licensed Clinical Social Worker: They can find me at allisonkirk.Net. A L L I S O N K I R K.net

[00:33:46] Paige Bond, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist: Perfect. I will make sure to have that link in the show notes. So people can just click on your website and hop on your page and contact you and see what you're all about. I so appreciate you for being here and, listeners, thank you so much for listening. Make sure to go check out, all of Alison's beautiful work that she does with ART and remember to take care.