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Emotional Housecleaning: Letting Go of Old Baggage

Nearly everyone has experience emotional trauma at some time in their life. If you’ve even been seriously humiliated, the Talmud calls it “murder of the soul”, a very serious offense in many cultures.

Like every other species on the planet, we respond to serious trauma by fight, flight, or freeze. Unlike lower animals that tend to freeze physically, we tend to freeze emotionally, and even though we know we survived it, it feels like it’s still going on.

If thinking about a past trauma causes no emotional reaction or discomfort, it’s been processed, completed, and not broken so don’t attempt to fix it. However, if those thoughts cause your throat to tighten, your heart to speed up, your stomach to churn, and strong feelings to surge through your body, it’s not finished and probably still affecting your life in many ways. Fortunately, with the help of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and IGI (Interactive Guided Imagery), we have had great success in rapidly helping patients to overcome major trauma such as the death of a loved family member or pet, motor vehicle accidents, home invasion robberies, sudden job or economic losses, and the diagnosis of a life-threatening illness.

Dr. Bresler has continued to research and develop this combination approach for more than 25 years and reports that in as little as five or six visits, many patients have been able to completely process and overcome traumatic recollections and thoughts that have plagued them most of their adult life. While years of prior therapy with analysis, CBT, DBT, or other approaches did little to help, they report that treatment at the Bresler Center has enabled them to recall the prior trauma with little or no discomfort whatsoever.

If you’ve experienced trauma that is continuing to cause emotional or physical discomfort, this combination can probably help help you, too. Call us at 310-474-2777 so you give it a try.

Therapeutic Massage Best For Backs, Joints, & Muscles

One of the most popular services we offer at The Bresler Center is therapeutic massage. Humans are really not well designed to sit. We’re better designed to squat, yet we sit at a table when we eats meals, sit in the car driving to work, sit at our desks while we work or study, go out to dinner and sit at a table, then to the movies to sit and watch.

Over time, most of us develop significant stress and strain in our necks, shoulders, backs, and in other muscles and joints. Therapeutic massage can be tremendously helpful in counteracting many of the imbalances caused just from sitting.

Massage increases and improves blood circulation which helps to relieve pain, and a 2011 study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that massage was at least as effective as other methods of treatment for chronic low back pain. Other studies show that massage can also soothe anxiety and alleviate depression. It is well known to encourage restful sleep even in those undergoing chemo or radiation therapy.

A 2010 study in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine found that massage boosts patients’ white blood cell count which plays a large role in defending the body from disease. It’s also one of the best ways to relieve a headache or severe muscle spasm. Just ask some of the elite athletes we treat.

Most of our patient tell us that we provide the best massage they’ve ever received, and if you’d like to find out if that’s true for you, please call us at 310-474-2777 to schedule an appointment.

Surprising Ways To Overcome Grief and Depression

Dealing with a serious loss is a horrible experience for anyone to under go. Profound grief which is characterized by feelings of helpless and hopelessness can often progress to depression which gives an extra goody: worthlessness – it was your fault.

Dr. Bresler believes that AIDS was a low blow, because it affected the immune system which is our main defense against viruses. He believes that depression is also a low blow, because it affects the main thing keeping us alive: the will to live.

Because antidepressant pharmaceutical medications are often no more effective than placebos and carry significant sexual and other side effects, we have continued to research various alternatives for helping our patients overcome grief and depression.

Two things are required to fill a bathtub. You must turn on the faucets, and you must also plug the leaks. Turning on the faucets means providing palliative care or relief of symptoms, including lack of appetite, sleep, libido, and vocational and social interactions.

We do this using a personalized combination of acupuncture, therapeutic massage, and nutritional supplements. We also use the same electronic transcranial stimulator that relieves chronic pain, for it can significantly elevate mood and is approved by the FDA for depression

Plugging the leaks means re-exploring and reprocessing the loss using Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy and Interactive Guided Imagery(sm). This combination has been profoundly helpful to getting people quickly unstuck from depression and free of its emotional pain.

For more information and help, call us at 310-474-2777 to set up an appointment with Dr. Bresler.

310-474-2777