Risorgimento

It took me about three months to find my word for 2025: risorgimento. It means a time of renewal and renaissance. I think back to my college art history classes and the art of the High Renaissance. Michelangelo. DaVinci. Raphael. That is not the kind of renaissance I am having. Rather, I am experiencing a renewal of my spirit as a human being and as a therapist and private practice owner. 

In my last blog post, I told you I am doing my own EMDR therapy. While it is not always easy, it is transformative. The hard part is seeing how certain events in my life changed how I saw myself and the world around me. Events from my earliest days to things that have happened more recently, and all kinds of stuff in between. The interesting thing is that what affected me may not have affected others. A good example is the car accident I was in several years ago. It was not a major accident, and no one was injured, but over the following 18 months I became extremely afraid of driving and being in a car. My dad, on the other hand, has been in many car accidents worse than mine but never felt like he wanted to stop driving. That’s how trauma works. Working with an EMDR therapist helped me heal this trauma wound.

What I see in my EMDR therapy journey is similar to what I see with my clients. Willingness to go through short-term pain for long-term healing. Courage to look at the things we hide from just about everyone else. Increasing strength and resilience by doing more than just talking about these experiences and their impact on us. EMDR is more than just talking about things, it is a way to heal these wounds. 

In addition to what I am undergoing as an EMDR therapy client, I have been learning about ways to enhance how I provide therapy to clients by offering intensives. Intensives are longer therapy sessions, often three or four, even six or eight, hour sessions over the course of one or more days. This allows for deep work in a shorter period of time. Think about being able to accomplish months’ worth of therapy in a few days or a week. Yes, it would be a lot of hard, intense work, but it would also be transformative, renewing, and a renaissance.