[Intro] Hello, and welcome to my podcast, Empowered to Thrive. I'm so glad you joined me today. I'm your host, Corinne  Powell.

I help people pleasers find happiness, embrace courage, and experience peace of mind through inner child healing. If you're desperate for change and not sure how to make it happen, I'm here to guide you along the way. In this space, you'll find motivation to live a life full of joy and resilience.

We will talk all things inner wellness with spirituality interwoven at times. Being a mom to three, parenting will be a topic of conversation for sure. So happy to have you. Enjoy today's episode. 

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Corinne Powell: I have my good friend, Erica Kine here with me. Erica is a mom of two and a business owner living in New Haven, Connecticut, with her cat, dog, and two chickens.

She is a master of social work and provides therapy both in her own practice and in an addiction-focused counseling center. She has traveled to West Africa and started a recovery house in Liberia. She enjoys spending her free time at the beach or curled up at home with a warm blanket.

She has helped dozens of people to recover their life back after trauma and to heal from childhood pain. And that is why we love talking because you have a lot of the same passions as I do and you do a lot of the same sort of deep work with people. But today, specifically because Erica specializes in accelerated resolution therapy, that's what our conversation is going to be around.

And I'm so excited because I want to learn more about ART and I am looking forward to learning about it right here and now. So thanks for being with me. 

Erica Kyne: Yeah, thanks for inviting me on here, Corinne.

It's so good to talk with you. And I always say that with accelerated resolution therapy, it's a great tool for someone who's working with a counselor or a life coach to have in their tool belt. Because usually you only need one or two or three sessions and then you go right back with your regular counselor to process the changes that you've made.

So I think it goes hand in hand very well with the type of work you're doing and then with the type of solutions that this therapy can offer people. 

Corinne Powell: Okay. So in my understanding, it's a supplemental therapy? 

Erica Kyne: Yeah, that's what I would describe it as. It's not a long-term therapy. You can kind of tell in the name, it's accelerated resolution therapy. So it tends to be three to five sessions is the average.

Corinne Powell: Okay. Okay. And what is eye movement therapy actually all about or accelerated resolution therapy? 

Erica Kyne: Yeah, that's a great question. Right? Because it sounds out of the box, right? Like eye movement, what is that? Why would you bring that into therapy? So the cool thing about us as humans is that our eyes actually move every night when we're dreaming. It's part of the REM stage of sleep and REM stands for rapid eye movement. 

And they don't, I mean, we don't know about the brain fully yet. We're still discovering how our brains work. They are so magnificent and so complex. So all the science behind it, we don't really know all of it yet, but we can put two and two together and put the pieces together.

And so when we're dreaming at night, what are we doing? We're consolidating memories. We dream about big emotions we had during the day. And so scientists have seen that the brain activity when we're dreaming, when our eyes are moving, it's the same activity that happens when we're learning or memorizing a new image or new experiences.

So it's almost like we can redo scenes in dreams and change memories, change scenes. So the eye movements help the brain get to that type of activity. So that's a little background on just eye movements in general.

So then when we bring the eye movements into therapy, you can get to the parts of the brain that are harder to reach just by the logical side of our brain. I can logically talk through an event that happened to me, but when I add eye movements to it, you can really get to the emotional memory, to the trauma parts of the memory.

And we can heal it really, because I think some of us, we think of memory as set in stone. Like my memories are my memories. But actually, our memories are malleable.

They can change every time I recall something. It's like I take it off the bookshelf of my memory, and I open it, and I look at it. And then every time I look at it, it changes slightly.

I put it back on the shelf. That's why, I don't know if this has happened with your siblings, but sometimes siblings can remember things very differently. Memory does change over time.

And I think that's a healing gift from the universe, because we can change our memories. Not that we're erasing them or changing the facts, but we can reshape them and change the trauma that's stuck inside of them and change the negative emotions that are stuck inside of them. And with this therapy specifically, it's really great with getting rid of negative images.

So from traumatic events, there can be a stuck negative image that's very triggering. And this therapy, you can actually erase the image and replace it with a positive image. A little background on why eye movements can actually be very beneficial in therapy.

Corinne Powell: So what got you interested in this particular type of therapy? 

Erica Kyne: So, interestingly enough, you and I both live in Connecticut, and the creator of this therapy, her name is Lainey. She also lives in Connecticut. So we, I feel like all of us here are some of the first to benefit from this therapy.

Lainey came up with it in 2008, and she was already doing another eye movement therapy, which is more well known. It's called EMDR, which was created back in the late 1980s. But they are, they're very different therapies, even though they use similar eye movements.

So Lainey was able to consolidate it and make it more powerful. So what used to take 10 to 12 sessions can now happen in one session. And she, you know, she was close friends with some of the mental health workers that were in Connecticut.

And one of them was my former supervisor, who took Lainey's training, was thrilled about it, and managed to get a grant from the United Way for her organization, which I was working for at the time. So my supervisor, she was just a go-getter. She got this grant, and she got all of us employees trained in this therapy.

And she had actually been telling me about it for quite some time. I had even gone to just one day of the training before I could go to the whole thing. So it was like a teaser.

Like it was like, oh, here's this amazing therapy that cures the symptoms of PTSD, but you can't get trained in it yet. By the time I actually got to go to the training, I was thrilled. I just soaked up every minute.

I was so thankful to be there. And through that, it became my favorite form of therapy. I just, I really love it. I think even like the background I have in starting a recovery house in Liberia, I was working with ex-child combatants who obviously had PTSD, and I didn't know how to help them. And I wasn't really able to see a lot of progress with my work with them. 

So I just see all the pieces fitting together. Like this therapy has kind of fallen onto my path, and now I do have tools to help people who suffer from PTSD. So yeah, I used it in the organization I was working with, and eventually when I started my own practice, I only do this therapy in my private practice. And then I'll use it in other places I work with some of the people that I work with.

Corinne Powell: Okay. Wow. And what type of results do your clients have? 

Erica Kyne: Yeah. So I think it's, I mean, you can use this therapy for a lot of different types of things, but what it's most well-known for is how it works with trauma. 

So we can call it PTSD, but sometimes people have, we all have trauma, right? It might not actually develop into PTSD, but it's still trauma. So it works really well with trauma, whether we have the symptoms of PTSD or not, but with people coming in with very traumatic scenes, you know, I'm not going to talk specifically about any one client, but I've seen this so many times that I can tell you what normally happens. 

Because we're all like this human beings, right? We all, when we experienced trauma, we all have similar reactions.

So typically, you know, someone's coming in and they're a little hesitant about this therapy, you know, is this going to work? It sounds too good to be true. I don't know what to expect. And they, another benefit of this therapy is you don't have to talk if you don't want to.

You can share as much or as little about what you're working on with the therapist. So some, I mean, a lot of times, you know, someone's coming in and they actually can't really talk about what happened. They can like barely get the deep, the, you know, a few facts out, but they are obviously emotionally, you know, devastated about what happened.

There's tears, there's heavy breathing. There's just, you know, sometimes shaking. So all of those, you know, common to humanity, those are symptoms of trauma.

So they're coming in trying to, you know, give me a little background on what they want to work on. And so for the first part of the therapy, they actually, we, I've done this therapy for myself too. So whoever is there, we see our scene.

We see the traumatic event while we're moving our eyes. So usually this part of the therapy is the hardest part. We don't want to see it, even though sometimes we're seeing it all the time because we're replaying it in our head all day anyway.

But, you know, it's hard. And we're, we stop periodically. 

We just focus on sensations in the body. Like notice that your heart is racing. Just take one eye movement that just to notice that your heart is racing. The eye movements are very calming. They help people move through emotions to the other side of them pretty quickly. 

So after, you know, an eye movement set or two, they'll be calm and ready to jump back in to the scene. But it's hard. It's really hard sometimes to see it for the first time through. 

So after we see it the first time through, we process out all these different sensations, racing heart, you know, sometimes the tightness in the chest, the pit in the stomach, sweating, you know, whatever trauma, body, body trauma symptoms are coming up. We process those out through the eye movements, kind of the way the body can do the trauma too.

And often people will feel sensations similar to what they actually felt during the event. So if someone was, you know, stuck out somewhere in the cold during a traumatic event, they will, they will be freezing during a part of this, part of the session. That will be one of the sensations that come up.

And we'll use eye movements to help them process through that. So after they see it the first time through, and we've processed out all the sensations, then we come back and we're going to see it a second time, which sounds intimidating. You know, usually the person's like, oh, no, not again.

But the second time that someone sees this, because we've, it's kind of like we opened that memory, and we pulled out all the negative sensations out of it. When they go back and they see the same thing they just saw a second time, there was no, there's no tears. There's no heart rate increase. There's no heavy breathing. All of the emotional charge of that scene is gone. 

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Erica Kyne: And they're seeing the facts of the scene. A lot of times, actually, almost every time people will describe it as I'm watching myself in the scene and I'm seeing everything happen, but I'm not living it this time. There's a distance there.

So after seeing it the second time, usually people are very surprised. You know, I mean, it's still, they're feeling negative still because it's a negative scene, but mixed in, it's like, hey, how did I just see that so quickly and easily when it took me so long to see it the first time? What just happened? How is this possible? What is this therapy doing? How is this working? 

So that's all mixed in, seeing it the second time. And then this therapy is amazing because we kind of made up a word. It's called positization. So we don't stop there with just kind of, you know, healing the memory, desensitizing the memory. We even move on to positizing it.

We call it the director scene. So basically you get to create a good scene where you can rescue your younger self, you can have something normal happen instead of something traumatic. There's a big variety of ways we can create director scenes.

So at the end of the director scene, we usually feel positive. We feel at peace. We feel like, yes, this is the way I want it to be, you know? And because we're working with the memory in that window of time, that positive scene ends up getting stored in your brain very close to, connected to the original scene.

So oftentimes after a session, when we think back, that positive scene will come to mind first. It will be stronger than the original memory. So then we do one more step, which is important.

And we go back and we check for, we call them stuck snapshots, because those images can really get us. And our brain thinks in pictures and feelings get attached to pictures and images. So we just do a check through eye movements to see if there are any stuck images.

And if there are any, we are able to erase and replace them with a positive image. And that really wraps up the therapy session. It's thorough, complete.

You know, sometimes people think, oh, am I going to leave feeling raw? Or am I going to leave feeling opened and unresolved? And that doesn't happen with this therapy, because we end with the positive. We end with them feeling, you know, that it was resolved. And they can, they're relieved of the negative images and the negative sensations.

So, yes, it's actually really rewarding. I think that's why I like it so much, because people can make such amazing adjustments in just one therapy session. 

Corinne Powell: Yeah. Wow, that sounds so powerful. People are rewarded for their willingness to risk and say, I'll try this and see if healing will come to me. It sounds like they definitely find peace and healing from it.

Erica Kyne: Yeah. Yeah. And another, you know, comfort in this therapy is, which I'm sure you know this as a life coach, but sexual molestation or sexual assault or abuse, that it can be so devastating to a person's entire course of their life.

And knowing that this tool is available, it just offers this path of healing that's not long and that's so effective. And it takes some of that, the weight and the fear of, you know, like, are my children going to experience this? 

You know, what if I experience this? And just knowing that this tool is here and in one session, well, you know, sometimes it takes more than one session, usually one to three sessions, but in a short amount of time, traumas can be healed. It's not that we forget them, but it's that all the negative sensations and symptoms from it can be healed.

Corinne Powell: Yeah. So what is the actual eye movement that you're talking about?

Erica Kyne: So the eye movement, they are simple eye movements. I'm not going to get into too much detail here because I don't want anyone to try it at home.

Corinne Powell: Oh, sure, sure. But it's literally movement of the eye that you are, when you say that you mean literal? 

Erica Kyne: Yes, yes. Literally, your eyes are moving during the therapy.

Corinne Powell: Gotcha. Okay. Hmm. Yeah. Well, I love what you're saying and what people are finding, because even when I hear you saying with so much confidence, yes, one to three sessions or, you know, obviously it depends on the person and the situation, but generally speaking, you are, the clients you're working with, the individuals that use ART find results rapidly. 

And I just, I am so happy to hear that, you know, that it's not something you have to feel like is going to take forever, because when we, when we've lived with a trauma, we've already been living with it for so long.

And like you said, you know, we're replaying scenes of our life anyhow, subconsciously, you know, unconsciously. So to be willing to do it once more in a safe place with a good therapist and find results, I just feel like that's the best news. 

Erica Kyne: Yes. Yeah, it is really good news. You know, sometimes we think about all the evil out there in the world, and then knowing that there are places of healing, people who are healers, it just brings light to some of the darkness in the world. Yeah.

Corinne Powell: Yeah. So thanks for all that you're doing, and I love the work you're doing, and thank you for sharing it with us. Before we close, is there anything that you want to share with the listeners, specifically from your heart to them? 

Erica Kyne: Well, I mean, if they wanted to get more info on this therapy, there's lots of neat videos. I think a lot of veterans have been really helped by this therapy. They're trying to get it incorporated into military bases as a normal. They can offer it on a regular basis to people, but there's a website.

It's called ART, which stands for Accelerated Resolution Therapy, artworksnow.com, in case you know someone who has PTSD, and they are looking for a solution to their flashbacks or nightmares or the intrusive thoughts or interrupted thoughts. All of those things can be released in one to five sessions. 

Corinne Powell: Great, and I'll include that link in the show notes for anyone that wants to go directly to that website, and how can they reach out to you if they'd like Erica or find more about you? 

Erica Kyne: Yeah, you can find me on social media with the name Erica, last name Kyne, K-Y-N-E, or you can Google my name and my contact information will come up.

Corinne Powell: Super, and I'll also include that in the show notes. All right, well, we're going to end our time now, but thank you again so much. 

Erica Kyne: You're welcome, Corinne. Thanks for having the conversation with me, and I appreciate you and all the beautiful healing work that you do. Love being in this together with you. I want to close out today's episode by thanking you for being here with me.

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[Ending] We've made it to the end, and I hope what I shared has been helpful. If there is anything I've mentioned that you want to talk about in more depth, I would be so glad to connect with you. You can always find me on Instagram @corinne_changeradically⁠, or go directly to my website, changeradically.com. Of course, within the show notes, there's other ways that you can connect with me.

And if there is someone that you think would benefit from this podcast, please share it with them. To help my podcast get more growth and reach more people, please subscribe, review, and rate it. And until next week, I'm wishing you the very best.