Hi, my name is James Andrew Sewell. I'm the owner and sole clinician with Evexia Counseling and Consultation, which is based in the Wilmington, North Carolina area in Castle Hayne, just outside of Wilmington. Even though my name is James, I go by Drew. I'm a licensed clinical mental health counselor in the state of North Carolina, as well as a qualified supervisor for LCMHCAs, or associate licensed clinicians who are working towards full licensure.
I am a trauma specialist. I work with complex trauma, as well as a few other areas I like to work with, like couples. A lot of overlap between the two in terms of understanding neurobiology and nervous system regulation and interpersonal dynamics. But when it comes to the trauma work, I use a very specific framework that I created called Psychoarchitecture.
This is an organizational tool, as well as kind of a skills intervention-based tool for clients as well. It is made up of multiple different research-based practices because, you know, we have to use research to guide everything we do. That is part of our ethical code. The tools that I use for this, the practices I use to make up my particular framework, are EMDR, attachment and interpersonal neurobiology-informed practices, or IPNB, systems-based work, and ACT and DBT.
My chief specialty that I'm known for being EMDR. Attachment is my first love within therapy, but EMDR is the actual modality that a lot of people with trauma research and investigate and look into and seek out. Even if they end up in therapy with someone who doesn't practice EMDR, they learn a lot of good tools, a lot of good skills that are very important, and their trauma still doesn't change.
That's usually when a clinician will say, you know, I think maybe you need something a little bit more. You need someone who's trained in something like EMDR. EMDR is not the only specialized trauma therapy. There are many of those. This is the one that I'm trained in. I took my first training in May of 2021, followed a few months later by my second training in August.
Those were just part of the standard basic training for EMDR. I've had a lot more training since then in more advanced applications of this particular modality, in addition to those other modalities of ACT and DBT. And just to give a little bit more information about it, today's goal is to focus on that and explain how it works and therefore why it's a part of my framework.
EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It does exactly that. It uses eye movements, as well as other types of bilateral stimulation that kind of imitate that. Most notably would be like the butterfly hug, where we do alternating taps. Some people will use auditory bilateral stimulation where their headphones or earbuds will play music in alternating patterns.
But either way, it uses bilateral stimulation to desensitize traumatic memories and then reprocess them so that they can be accessed and associated with more positive state. What this really means for clients is we have to understand that memory is stored in a format where it's made up of five different components.
It's made up of actual circumstances, sensory data, sensory input. It is made up of cognitions, emotions, and sensations. Those first two components of memory, the triggers, the circumstances and the input from senses, that sensory data, those are kind of the activators that we chiefly see with memory. So when people talk about being triggered, it is usually by one of those two components, if not both.
Circumstances would be, you know, the full environment in which a memory was originally experienced, not as a memory, but just for the first time, becomes kind of the cue for, you know, when the body, when the mind is triggered to believe that it's happening again. So if someone was in a car wreck, then the act of getting in the car becomes a triggering circumstance in which their body goes through, you know, the activation, the trigger.
For sensory input, that could be just the image of the car, even if someone doesn't get into it. You know, if it's a very specific car, that could be the trigger. It could be whatever activates this whole memory network. It could be a song that was on the stereo at the time of the car wreck. So, if there was a specific song playing, that song heard anywhere else could now retrieve this memory automatically and begin kind of this reaction to what's happening.
From there, we also get the other three components of memory: cognitions, emotions, and sensations. And so these are the beliefs we form about ourselves and our circumstance. You know, it could be, "I'm bad," or in the case of something like a car wreck, it could be, "I'm going to die." You know, "I'm in danger."
"I can't stop this." You know, these different thoughts about what the situation means, what it means about us, what it means about what's happening to us. The emotions can be anything. You know, panic could be sadness, could be anger, could be, you know, a lot of things, fear.
And then finally we've got body sensation. So that's whatever feels in our body at the time. You know, our normal physical reaction to that circumstance becomes what later we experience when triggered.