SOCIAL FOR GOOD
Social media is a powerful force. What we choose to do with the messages so easily typed, matters. This new marketing we find ourselves immersed in can be fun, silly, educational, sad, or sometimes shallow. How else do you feel about it?
DOING MORE FOR BRANDS THAT DO MORE
There’s probably something that moves you. Something you could be doing more for a cause that sits in the back of your mind. But life is busy. We grow up, build businesses, take care of our families, and the days and years pass by so fast. One day, we’re going to be at the end looking back, and wonder, “Could I have done more?”
The answer for some of us is yes.
We’re in a powerful era, and making a difference is literally at our fingertips.
We have helped businesses large and small identify a cause that’s important to them, and weave a thread of giveback into their marketing. You can start small. Take a tiny step. In fact, maybe you’re already doing good things in your business, but you haven’t found a way to tie it into your message. It’s easier than you think, and more important than you may realize, to let your audience know where you stand on important issues.
If you’re ready to elevate your brand image and message by aligning with a cause that’s important to you, contact us and let’s make movement.
Our Cause:
EMDR EducationWhat is EMDR? Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing is a breakthrough therapy with special capacity to overcome the often devastating effects of psychological trauma.
Why does it matter? There are alarming increases in:
What we’re doing: Yearly webinars with EMDR organizations and our client’s entire teams to educate them about how they can use this therapy to improve their lives at home and at work.
If you’d like more information on EMDR, please reach out. We are currently vetting the few non profits associated with EMDR and trying to decide who we will be partnering with in 2019 and what more we can do for this cause.
How EMDR Saved My Life
A personal message from our founder, Tracy Petrucci
The following stories of my life never fit into the narrative of my business, until now. While bumbling along, sometimes feeling shallow in my work, I realized I needed to be doing more. Not just thinking about it, but really making movement toward it. I’m past those early days of struggle, the business is thriving and profitable, and I need to stop and give back. When trying to find a cause to align with our brand, I had a hard time, because I have always been so troubled by so many things in the world.
Over the years I’d rally for certain issues, always surprised when others didn’t care the way I did about the topic. Someone once said to me, “Well, everyone has their thing.” I was offended at first, but after witnessing my lack of enthusiasm for some of my peer’s causes, it finally clicked. There is only so far we can go when trying to make change for something that we haven’t experienced ourselves, and can never fully understand.
How could I pick something for my business when there are so many things that trouble me, but so many of them haven’t affected me personally? How will I be authentic in my outreach? Finally, during a meeting where I was trying to rank and prioritize all of life’s issues that bothered me, I realized there is something I am extremely passionate about afterall, and when I realized how many people spanning these different issues that trouble me could be reached through this cause, I knew I had my answer.
When I ask someone, “Have you heard of EMDR?” the answer is almost always, “no.” After describing it, it’s inevitable I see that spark of hope flicker across their face that indeed, there is something else they can try to heal from a trauma. I have found a passion in the education of EMDR and how it changed the course of my life.
When I was in high school, I was in a car accident with my best friends. I was in the backseat, in the middle between two sisters. They both flew out of the car, in a scene that plays through my mind to this day, and one of them passed away that night. The other survived and became like a sister to me, and we developed an unwavering love and connection that is impossible to describe. 15 years later, that sister was living with us while she made some difficult life decisions. One night, she had an eclamptic seizure, and beyond my best efforts to save her, she passed away on my living room floor.
That was that. I went numb. I was thankful for my work to distract me, thinking what I went through was nothing compared the horrors that happen around the rest of the world, or what her parents had to go through, now losing a second child. But then it caught up to me. I started to become depressed on a level I had never experienced. I felt all the sadness of the world on my chest and I could never breath. I could never laugh. It scared me. One night, while standing outside at a party chatting with a stranger about my experience, she told me I had PTSD. I didn’t quite understand how I could have that, but I started researching it, and I realized there are many ways that PTSD manifests, one of which described all of the ways I was feeling.
To be honest, I don’t remember who suggested EMDR. It may have been my marriage counselor, who at that point admitted he could not reach me, and could not help me. It may have been that woman on the balcony. I don’t know, but I know that it changed my life.
I found a therapist who did EMDR covered under my insurance, which is quite a feat, and quite another problem. Both therapists advised me maybe I should take some kind of antidepressant short term, just to get me through the grief, but I really did not want to start that if there could be another way. So I declined, and said, “Let’s just try this first.”
I will say this…EMDR is bizarre. I sat there, holding two little hand pieces that vibrated in alternating patterns, recounting the most painful and worst memories of my friends’ deaths.
You will have some odd experiences through the process of EMDR. Things you have deep in your subconscious pop up, that you never really realized you associated with that event. You are forced to reveal and look straight at some of your worst fears, until you’ve examined them from all angles, accepted them, and somewhat, gotten over them. We were able to process through the more recent death faster, because it had happened not as long ago. I even had a really interesting vision, a sort of alternate ending, where she had died in a forest, like in the old days, and I was able to just lay across her body and cry and grieve for as long as I needed. Not the way it really happens in today’s world when paramedics burst in the door and pull you out into the hall while you pace and pray and wonder if it’s too late.
Progress was slow, and we never actually resolved my deepest issues of fear of sudden death to the extent that we could have. The car accident still feels like yesterday to me. I remember what I felt as we were rolling off the side of the road. I can smell the weeds. I can hear the sounds. I still have to close my eyes and cover my ears in car accident scenes on TV. I always think, if only I knew what PTSD was back then. If only EMDR was an option. If only I’d been able to do it in a timely manner. So many of my life’s little moments wouldn’t have been robbed of joy because of my fears.
When the therapy center changed which insurance they accepted, I was no longer able to continue. But by then though, I had made such huge improvements, that I’ve always deemed it a huge success. I was happy. I could look around and see a reason to be alive.
This is my mission now. The thing is, you never know when tragedy is going to hit. Maybe it will be next week. Maybe it will be next year. Maybe it will be never. But most people will suffer tragedy at some point in their life. And all trauma and all tragedy is difficult, and deserves to be taken seriously. I always tried to push mine down because it wasn’t “as tragic” as other things one could experience in life. But as cliche as it sounds, you don’t have to suffer in silence or feel alone. And if you knew the symptoms of PTSD, and you knew there was an effective, drug free treatment, then it could change the course of your life too.
EMDR can help with SO many more situations than what we traditionally think of as causing PTSD. Of course it did originate as a way to help war veterans, but now they have realized this therapy can span all trauma associated with rape, abuse, accidents, violence, bullying, for first responders, and any experience that has been difficult to process. This is one of the reasons I am so passionate about finally telling this story, and aligning our brand with a cause that matters to me, the people on our teams, our family members, or those we may have not even crossed paths with yet.