Former Bachelorette Hannah Brown learned to deal with long-held family traumas through Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) psychotherapy.
“I’ve only done two sessions,” Brown, 30, said on the Wednesday, June 25, episode of “The Squeeze” podcast. “The therapist that I work with does really long sessions, so a session for me could be, like, five hours. It’s, like, five weeks of therapy because she works really intensely.”
She added, “It’s great, [and] I’ve learned so much and been able to have so many breakthrough sessions lately. It’s not, like, I leave a session and feel like something’s open and I need to go back and talk about it.”
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Brown’s sessions allowed her to look back at past memories, which brought her closure.
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“EMDR is really tough because there is a reason why we shove things done ‘cause they’re super painful,” she told podcast host Tay Lautner. “I had to list out all the worst things that have happened to me that I can remember. Then, there’s themes of [topics] and it’s, like, ‘OK, we’re going to target this one.’ It might not be the worst thing that happened. I haven’t done my biggest trauma yet, I’ll say that.”
Without disclosing details of her most triggering memory, Brown revealed that she recently re-examined the death of some relatives.
“We did one that was harder … my aunt and my cousins were brutally murdered,” Brown stated. “I was the same age as my cousin, and so was my brother [Patrick]. It was just, like, that whole experience of coming to terms with that was pretty traumatic for me. In some ways, that was one of the easier ones and maybe ‘cause I had processed it a little bit.”
She continued, “We targeted that memory, but then other things will come up and it was, like, I fully got this almost snap into place of, ‘I have taken this message from this bad moment of my life and attached meaning to it and, because of that, I show up in these ways or these things trigger me.’”
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Brown previously revealed in her 2021 memoir, God Bless This Mess, that her aunt and cousins were killed by a man living in a trailer on their property while fixing their house. The man, who was previously incarcerated for a nonviolent offense, was out on a work-release program. He was convicted of six counts of capital murder in 2005. Brown was 6 years old at the time of the tragedy.
While discussing her healing journey, the Bachelor in Paradise personality further noted on “The Squeeze” podcast that it has been “painful and hard to talk about” the lessons she learned in EMDR therapy, especially with her fiancé, Adam Woolard.
“To know that Adam was there and feel, like, I was under really good care was great,” Brown said, noting that her 33-year-old fiancé sat “in the back” of the room during her therapy sessions. “When you’re having these big ‘aha’ awareness moments, it’s draining and then having to go back and tell your partner, so that you can co-regulate … can be really tough.”
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