Welcome to EMDR Voices Therapy
Improving the quality of life for those living with the impact of trauma or severe psychosocial disability on Sydney’s Northern Beaches
Have you, or your clients, had problems accessing suitable help for distressing symptoms like emotional dysregulation or hearing voices? Not getting the help you feel you need from the local public mental health services? Taking medication but it just isn’t doing enough for you? Or perhaps you just want to feel better and live a better quality of life? Then EMDR Voices Therapy could be just what you are looking for.
EMDR Voices Therapy is an evidence-based service run by Melanie White, an experienced and passionate nurse who saw the need for more specialised services than those currently available through the local community mental health service. Melanie understands the frustration and disappointment at the lack of available services that has resulted from poor funding for mental health. So she has set out to provide these services for people living in her local area – the Northern Beaches of Sydney.
Melanie works from the philosophy that a person needs to feel safe before they can engage in any therapeutic or social activities. This starts with the Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP), a polyvagal approach designed to regulate the nervous system.
Following the SSP, Melanie’s work is very specialised, focusing on only three areas. The first is processing distressing memories, the most likely cause of emotional dysregulation, through the use of EMDR. The second is the very niche area of working with people who are distressed by hearing voices. And finally, the capacity building programs that enhance recovery and are designed to empower those who live long-term with severe psychosocial disability to join in with the normal recreational and social pursuits that are so easily available to everyone else.
If you would like to discuss a program for yourself, or you are a GP considering referring your patients, or an NDIS plan manager wanting to know more about what we can provide for your clients, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. All services are offered privately and, depending on circumstances, through the NDIS.
PLEASE NOTE: To protect the health of my clients and myself from COVID-19, services are currently conducted online via encrypted telehealth services until further notice.
Safe & Sound Protocol
This is where it all begins. Clients listen to acoustically altered music through headphones while being co-regulated by the therapist. This leads to better emotional regulation and an improved ability to focus. The SSP is grounded in Polyvagal theory.
Trauma therapy
Using EMDR, clients are guided to process memories of distressing life experiences or traumas that continue to impact their lives, in a safe environment. Very little access to a memory is needed in order to process it, so there is less discomfort for the client than there is with other trauma therapies.
Voices Work
This capacity building approach assists individuals who are distressed by the voices that they hear to learn to live with the voices. By understanding the purpose and the meaning of the voices, the voice hearer feels safer and more comfortable with having voices.
Capacity Building
Run in small groups; these programs aim to help people who have found themselves isolated by the symptoms of mental illness to develop skills and make friends in a purposeful way.
These are only offered in face-to-face mode and will not be running until there is more control of Covid.
About Melanie R.N.
After working in community mental health services, Melanie experienced first-hand the need for specialised services for people who have experienced early trauma and those who experience distress from hearing voices that others can’t. Not your average Mental Health Nurse, Melanie’s wide-ranging professional experience as well as her own lived experience underlie an empathic, informed and human approach. Today, her service offers a combination of private and NDIS funded programs to clients based on the Northern Beaches of Sydney.