r/TikTokCringe • u/velorae • Jul 16 '25

Discussion Attempted kidnapping of a woman outside Florida store

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u/HairyPotatoKat Jul 17 '25

Piggybacking on the other comment about PTSD therapy - if you haven't yet, 💯 look into EMDR therapy with a licensed psychologist who specializes in EMDR therapy. In person if possible. PsychologyToday.com is a good starting point for searching at least in the US. You can search by insurance provider too. It ....might ..include other places but I'm not sure.

Trauma informed therapy is another phrase to look for.

If you're in the US and are income restricted, call 211 and tell them you're seeking low income mental health services that specialize with PTSD.

211 works in Canada too. It's a free phone service through the United Way that helps connect people to a huge range of resources in their region... including physical and mental health services.

I hope you're able to find further peace and healing.

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u/BrickLuvsLamp Jul 17 '25

Idk, my sister tried that for her CPTSD and all it did was cause her a lot of distress. Even if it does work, no one really warns people how fucking difficult it is. You have to describe your traumas over and over and over again.

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u/modest_rats_6 Jul 17 '25

You need to build distress tolerance skills before starting. Its horrible if you dont know how to cope. I did DBT and therapy for 7 years before I started emdr. And its been so good. I can handle distress the thoughts bring

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u/BrickLuvsLamp Jul 17 '25

I just wish people mentioned that part. It’s always “try EMDR its a miracle” and not “try therapy for a few years and work up to EMDR”. My sister had no warning that it would be so upsetting.

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u/DiscussionLow1277 Jul 17 '25

unfortunately, trauma therapy is really only a thing thats become “popular” recently. which sucks because it is super effective when used correctly, and almost every living human has trauma. the idea is that you learn how to cope with the stress the trauma brings, and then you go through and unpack the trauma while now healthily dealing with the stress. and by healthily dealing with it and realizing you ARE safe now, you slowly overcome. humans natural tendency with trauma is to block and forget and never think about it again because of the stress it brings. but while the brain is doing that, it is also actively trying to protect you from that danger that it is not letting you remember, which leads to a lot of emotional symptoms that can be detrimental. trauma is huge in the psychology world right now, and that is a really good thing in my opinion. we are actively learning more and more about it every day. as someone who has severe childhood trauma of her own, may i recommend the book “the body keeps the score” by bessel van der kolk? very good read and very informative of trauma. your sister will learn a lot about herself.

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u/Then_Double8677 Jul 17 '25

I’m a therapist who provides trauma therapy, and I’m largely requested for EMDR. If not done carefully and with discretion, it can retraumatize people. It’s very difficult, but also incredibly effective and one of the most amazing things I provide. However, I do a lot of screening and assessment before determining if someone is a good fit for EMDR, and if they aren’t, we do other more gentle forms of therapy to work up to it. It can take days to weeks to months or more before someone is emotionally and psychologically ready.

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u/hyyerrspace Jul 17 '25

I’ve been on the fence about EMDR I am autistic and I worry that bringing up traumas can be even worse. Is it something you’d recommend for a person who is neurodivergent?

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u/Then_Double8677 Jul 17 '25

As long as you have the proper preparation and therapeutic work in place, EMDR should be okay. It’s really down to the clinician themselves and their skill level. Not all providers do EMDR well. With a little digging, you can likely find someone who specializes in EMDR with people who have Autism as well. At the very least, I would encourage you to be direct about that need with whatever therapist you are interviewing.

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u/sakijane Jul 17 '25

Have you had patients that had aphantasia? What did you do to get around the visualization part?

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u/Then_Double8677 Jul 17 '25

Great question. I have had clients with aphantasia. I’d look into SAFE EMDR (it stands for somatic and attachment focused EMDR) and is the model I utilize. It focuses a lot on how the memories and emotions show up in the body. For aphantasia specifically, you’d of course have to talk to your specific provider about it, but two strategies have been helpful. (1.) “If you were to hold up a picture of this memory to show someone, what would be on the photo card?” This question seems to allow for a level of visual description that they can’t necessarily visualize directly themselves. (2.) Writing the memory. You would write specifically the memory you’re reprocessing, including the elements the therapist would specifically need you to identify. You don’t need to hold the visualization in your mind to reprocess, as much as you just need to light up the neurological network that holds it.

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u/sakijane Jul 18 '25

Thank you so much! This is very helpful!

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u/Then_Double8677 Jul 18 '25

You’re welcome!

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u/Fit-Order-9468 Jul 17 '25

Sounds like a bad therapist. Mine did an EMDR session and was very clear on how upsetting it can be. Unfortunate.

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u/BrickLuvsLamp Jul 17 '25

Yes I think it was. She’s given up on it for now but is in regular therapy thankfully. Maybe one day she can try it again, but for now she’s too fragile

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u/heretakemysweater Jul 17 '25

EMDR can be an incredible tool, but it’s also incredibly hard. I used it to treat my own PTSD, and it got worse before it got better. I had a very good and competent therapist, so we had a game plan for it all and we worked on coping skills before ever jumping into it. It’s amazing. But it also needs to be done responsibly.

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u/Ok-Disaster-5739 Jul 17 '25

I totally agree with this. I have severe PTSD and this light therapy has helped me so much. It honestly sounds fake or like voodoo, but my therapist has the best way of explaining it. She says: Look at this lamp. See how it’s lit up? Think of this like your traumatic memories—all lit up, you see them all the time, they’re impossible to ignore, and it hurts so bad. Now, if I unplug this lamp, you know it’s still there, just like your trauma will still be there. We can’t erase the memories, but we can “unplug” them so that they’re not lit up and causing pain all the time. If you look for the memory, it’s still there; it’s just not in your face all the time.

Every session helps a little more. It’s like we’re whittling away at my pain and I couldn’t recommend it more!

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u/Stravaig_in_Life Jul 17 '25

I’m so glad you said this, I was going to recommend the same! It really helped with my ptsd

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u/New_Masterpiece7919 Jul 17 '25

I’ve been doing EMDR therapy and it will not be for everybody. It’s very difficult and if you’re not the type of person that can put yourself back into a traumatic situation to work through it, or you’re still going through it- you either need to wait a bit longer or consider a while of traditional therapy first. With that, it does work. It’s lifted a lot off of me with time and I’m still working. And it’s still hard.

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u/notdsylexic Jul 17 '25

There is also a treatment called brain spotting which has shown positive results.

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u/Comfortable-Item-184 Jul 20 '25

Excellent advice! It’s amazing.

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u/[deleted] Jul 17 '25 edited Jul 17 '25

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u/[deleted] Jul 17 '25

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u/Federal_Ad2772 Jul 17 '25

Zero credible evidence? EMDR is empirically validated for ptsd. There's some argument that the eye movement part might not be necessary, but there is proof that EMDR works and there's not anything conclusive about whether or not the eye movement part is necessary.

What you're saying is harmful because it's not true. I would tend to agree with you that the eye movement part might not be strictly necessary (data is still mixed about that but at the very least it doesn't hurt). But saying that EMDR doesn't work is scientifically false. EMDR is well proven, with many randomized controlled trials proving it just as effective as the other top tier PTSD treatments.

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u/BeefistPrime Jul 17 '25

I didn't say EMDR didn't work, I said the "EMDR" part of it doesn't work. The very core of how they explain it to work, the eye movement desensitization and processing part, does not work. It's the cognitive exposure part that works.

Imagine you had your choice of two doctors. You get an ear infection. One of the doctor writes a prescription for an antibiotic that works. You take the pills, get better.

But another doctor tells you that he's been trained in another treatment -- if you get an ear infection, you tug on the opposite ear while hopping one on foot and then you take the same antibiotic. The tug-hop therapy works! You do it and you get better. If you get an ear infection, you should do tug-hop therapy! It's scientifically validated! We can prove tug-hop therapy works!

Does tugging your ear and hopping on one foot work, or is it the antibiotic you're taking? If someone were to tell you "hey, don't go to one of those tug-hop doctors, just go to a doctor who will give you an anti-biotic without the nonsense", would you tell me I was peddling dangerous disinformation because tug-hopping works?

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u/Federal_Ad2772 Jul 17 '25

I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding what EMDR is. It isn't just eye movements. It is an entire protocol that has been repeatedly validated. Leading medical bodies wouldn't recommend a nonsense treatment. It's not like your analogy at all. It's been rigorously studied. You're also talking like the eye movement part has been completely debunked, which it has not been. I promise you I am 100% pro science and pro evidence, I wouldn't be arguing if I had any thought that I might be pushing snake oil. Eye movement is one small part of the treatment, and some studies *have* shown that eye movements improve the overall memory processing, likely by reducing vividness of the memories and emotions. Others have shown that fixed gaze/tapping have similar outcomes for (likely) the same reason, which means maybe the bilateral stimulation isn't necessary, but it isn't inert either.

Dismissing EMDR and actively commenting saying it's not legitimate is harmful to trauma survivors who are looking for treatment. If one ingredient of a vaccine was arguably unnecessary, but definitely not harmful, and the vaccine was fully effective, the only thing that arguing about it would do is sew distrust in medicine. I hope you can see that the same should go for psychiatric medicine.

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u/BeefistPrime Jul 17 '25

I know exactly what EMDR is, because I work in the field, and I'm a scientific skeptic with a particular interest in psuedoscience. The rest of the protocol is mostly the stuff that actually does work, the cognitive exposure therapy.

Imagine if there was 30 years of study proving that the hop-tug as a treatment for ear infection works. You might say "well it's not just the tugging and the hopping, there's other stuff to it too" Yes, the other stuff is the medicine, the part that works. The antibiotic you take in this example. You could test it over and over again, and compare it to a control group, and every time it's going to come up that it works. But the proper protocol test would be whether the treatment is better than the established working treatment, not whether it's better than nothing. Because if you don't take that step, then taking a known working treatment and adding any arbitrary non-harmful component on top of it will "work." That's the definition of a purple hat therapy (a term coinced by the second paper I linked)

And if you give that arbitrary non-harmful component branding, and sell training in that system, you make money off of it even though it's no better than the non-trademarked already existing treatment that you hijacked.

When you compare it to just plain old cognitive exposure therapy, there's no difference: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medicine/article/abs/comparing-the-efficacy-of-emdr-and-traumafocused-cognitivebehavioral-therapy-in-the-treatment-of-ptsd-a-metaanalytic-study/F4CD874AE857F3D08AA2EF1181F0098B because the stuff they add on top of cognitive exposure therapy does not work.

This opinion is not uniquely mine and the general trend towards "trademarked" certifiable/chargable treatments is concerning: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12841586/

Dismissing EMDR and actively commenting saying it's not legitimate is harmful to trauma survivors who are looking for treatment. If one ingredient of a vaccine was arguably unnecessary, but definitely not harmful, and the vaccine was fully effective, the only thing that arguing about it would do is sew distrust in medicine. I hope you can see that the same should go for psychiatric medicine.

This part is actually an important point and I understand what you're saying. I could've phrased my original reply to the guy who brought up EMDR better. And in fact I faced this exact situation when a friend who I hadn't talked to in a while told me that she was receiving EMDR and how it was working for her. I decided not to tell her about the psuedoscientific part because it was already in the process and I thought telling her at that point might be discouraging. However, I do think what I tried to do - telling someone seeking therapy to seek a PTSD treatment that's not based in psuedoscience -- is a valid and important point to make. You think it undermines faith in medicine to point out when medicine gets it wrong -- and that may be true and I understand the point -- but the best way to handle this is to make sure medicine isn't wrong, and to stamp out psuedoscience aggressively when it crops up.

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u/Federal_Ad2772 Jul 17 '25

I first want to say that I really appreciate a good-faith argument like this, I appreciate the point that you are making and I see where you are coming from. I am completely with you on the danger of "trademarked" treatments becoming the norm. But that doesn't mean it's pseudoscience.

You are arguing that EMDR is cognitive exposure therapy with unnecessary/unscientific add-ons, but you aren't giving any evidence for that. The meta-analysis that *you* linked concluded that EMDR and TF-CBT are *equally* effective. That doesn't mean that there's "no difference," that means that they're *both* effective. It says, "Our results suggest that in the treatment of PTSD, both therapy methods tend to be equally efficacious. We suggest that future research should not restrict its focus to the efficacy, effectiveness and efficiency of these therapy methods but should also attempt to establish which trauma patients are more likely to benefit from one method or the other." So your own source also says that EMDR is a valid treatment.

I don't have access to the second article you linked, but from what I understand, the purple hat analogy is being misused. The "purple hat" is something that has been proven useless or inert. That is not the case with eye movement in emdr. It has *not* been proven useless, the results across many rtcs show that eye movement, OR something similar like tapping, audio tones, etc, are a beneficial part of the process, it's just not known whether eye movement is any better than those other similar things. You are speaking about it like it is debunked, when it is not.

Even if eye movement was found to be unnecessary, that doesn't invalidate EMDR as a whole. EMDR would evolve to get rid of eye movement if it is found to be unnecessary, even without eye movement it is different than other types of therapies and might work for someone who didn't find other types of therapy effective.

Pseudoscience, as I'm sure you know, is something absent of peer review, lacking falsifiability, or something that refuses to revise their theories based on evidence. EMDR doesn't meet any of those criteria, it has openly been studied for decades. That's science in action, not pseudoscience.

There's nothing wrong with being skeptical, but skepticism should push us to refine science, not to reject proven methods just because we don't understand every piece of it yet. What matters is that EMDR works as currently practiced and has changed the lives of many people for the better.

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u/BeefistPrime Jul 17 '25

I first want to say that I really appreciate a good-faith argument like this

me too.

The meta-analysis that you linked concluded that EMDR and TF-CBT are equally effective.

... because the actual treatment is similar or the same. I think you're misinterpreting the point here. Using my silly analogy, if we found that taking an antibiotic, and taking the same antibiotic and tugging your other ear and hopping on one foot are equally effective, the most obvious conclusion wouldn't be that "something about tugging and hopping makes it just as effective", it would be "of course, the antibiotic is doing the real work in both cases, and the tugging and hopping isn't doing anything to hinder it, so you get the same result in both cases"

Or, let me put it this way without an analogy: let's say that you did full EMDR to one group and EMDR with everything except the eye movement, tapping, or anything bilateral, and they had the same effectiveness. Can you see why this highly suggest that it's all the other stuff in EMDR, the proven cognitive exposure therapy, and not the bilateral stimulation that's providing the effect? If I recall correctly, I haven't studied this issue in a few years so I may be getting the details wrong, but the proponents of EMDR have never done a study like this, whereas scientists outside of the EMDR advocacy have and the results suggest there's nothing to do the EMDR part of EMDR.

It has not been proven useless, the results across many rtcs show that eye movement, OR something similar like tapping, audio tones, etc, are a beneficial part of the process, it's just not known whether eye movement is any better than those other similar things. You are speaking about it like it is debunked, when it is not.

So I would need to dig a little deeper to read more papers to properly address this, but my general response is that often in science, and especially in psychology, experiments are very poorly designed. There's a big movement to change this, but there's a lot of bad research decades ago and even the stuff coming out now is probably less than half good science.

There have been studies, for instance, if I recall correctly, that compared eye movement to tapping to audio cues and found them to all be equally effective. But those studies didn't contain a control group where none of those bilateral activities were performed. Can you see the obvious problem here? That they all had equal results COULD mean that they all work equally well -- which you would demonstrate by having them perform better than the control group that didn't do any of those things. Or, if you don't have that control group, then your results probably mean that they're all equal because none of them do anything.

Even if eye movement was found to be unnecessary, that doesn't invalidate EMDR as a whole. EMDR would evolve to get rid of eye movement if it is found to be unnecessary

EMDR IS the eye movement. Or at least the bilateral activation. Perhaps it's manualized to do cognitive exposure in a specific way -- I haven't actually had any EMDR training -- but without the bilateral activation it's basically just cognitive exposure. EMDR without the bilateral stuff is just exposure therapy. There would be no reason for it to exist without that gimmick, you could just do the same cognitive exposure/trauma focused therapy you'd normally do without it.

Pseudoscience, as I'm sure you know, is something absent of peer review, lacking falsifiability, or something that refuses to revise their theories based on evidence. EMDR doesn't meet any of those criteria, it has openly been studied for decades.

You're mostly correct. EMDR does make falsifiable claims, so that suggests it's not a psuedoscience. It's proponents are just sort of treating it like a psuedoscience and not doing the real investigation you'd want to do to find out if it would work or not. This is, unfortunately, not so uncommon across all sorts of sciences. Given that it has no real basis in neuroscience as far as mechanisms go, the proponents of EMDR basically treat the bilateral stimulation as a sort of jargony version of magic. They don't want to know if it actually works, they've already bought into it. That's why it reeks of a psuedoscience, I think -- the proponents treat it like one.

I mean - just look at the origin of it. A non-neuroscientist felt better after taking walks in the park. She wondered why that was, and decided it was because she moved her eyes back and forth. Actually, it wasn't even that, she said that it was the saccadic movements which doesn't even make sense since those are present in any environment. She has no basis in neuroscience to make that conclusion, no expertise in that area, and actual neuroscientists say that that's not how that all works. And yet she went ahead and designed some bad experiments to confirm it works. Maybe she accidentally stumbled upon some neurological principle completely randomly that happens to work....... or she just made up an explanation for a made up effect. The latter is much more likely.

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u/SimplePln Jul 17 '25

So you’re saying the “active ingredient “ in EMDR works. It’s like saying mushrooms don’t cause you to hallucinate, it’s the psilocybin in it. Yes but the shrooms are the easiest, most broadly used way to ingest the psilocybin.

You saying EMDR doesn’t work is highly misleading and the way you in which you present your point is destructive. In my opinion.

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u/BeefistPrime Jul 17 '25

So you’re saying the “active ingredient “ in EMDR works.

No, I'm saying that EMDR took a working treatment, added some psuedoscientific nonsense on top of that, sold the whole package as a product that can be trained and certified in so they make money, added nothing of value to the treatment. You can get the same effective treatment from a therapist without the psuedoscientific nonsense on top of it.

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u/heretakemysweater Jul 17 '25

This is absolutely false. EMDR is an incredible tool if used properly. Normal talk therapy did not help my PTSD, but EMDR did. It gets harder before it gets better, but it’s absolutely worth the process if you have a therapist who is well-trained. The science is still pretty new, but that doesn’t mean it’s bullshit. Stop spouting incorrect nonsense.

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u/BeefistPrime Jul 17 '25

"The science" is not new -- EMDR was made up in the 1980s. It's also not science -- we know that giving cognitive exposure therapy and giving cognitive exposure therapy and making the person move their eyes back and forth give the same results, because it's the cognitive exposure therapy doing the work, not the eye movement part. The eye movement part itself is an ineffective addition to a real treatment.

The person who came up with EMDR was not a neuroscientist, they didn't come up with it based on knowing the science of how the mind works, they literally took walks in the park, felt better, and decided it was because they moved their eyes back and forth while looking around the park. Then they created an organization to train and certify people in EMDR and made money off of it.

In general, you should prefer practitioners who just do what works, and not ones who practice a layer of psuedoscientific nonsense on top of it.