EMDR
Area of PracticeWhat is EMDR?
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, or EMDR, is a therapy technique that has been successfully used to treat people who suffer from panic attacks, anxiety, PTSD, and false beliefs about themselves.
It is also a way for people to understand their own human potential. Beyond the reprocessing of traumatic events, EMDR also allows individuals a glimpse of any limiting false beliefs they may be holding onto, such as “I’m not good enough” or “I have to be perfect.”
Eye movements or other forms of bilateral stimulation seem to activate your problem-solving process, something that happens during REM sleep when your eyes are darting back and forth. By focusing on a specific problem and both its negative and positive emotions, sensations, and beliefs and adding bilateral stimulation your brain begins problem solving. Since you are focused on the specific problem, your brain is able to work through it more effectively than if it randomly comes up while you are sleeping.
Experts think EMDR induces a fundamental change in the circuitry of the brain. This helps people process memories and beliefs within a larger context of their own life experiences.
EMDR is considered a breakthrough modality because it can bring quick and lasting relief from emotional distress.
EMDR not only helps people move through big, traumatic events in their past but also smaller chronic ones that color their perception of themselves their world. This can ultimately lead to significant positive change in their lives.
Please watch the following introductory video to learn more about EMDR Therapy.
How Does EMDR Work?
EMDR helps us process disturbing memories.
Here is an example of how memories are usually processed: Let’s say that something disturbing happened to you, you witnessed something unpleasant. You had some thoughts and emotions about what happened and so you talked things through with others and maybe you dreamed about what happened. Then you woke up and it was less disturbing. Then a week later it was even less disturbing. You still had thoughts and emotions, but they were not as intense. Then a month later it was just a memory, not a good memory, but it did not bring any distressing emotions.
What happens sometimes with traumatic memories is they do not get processed because they are too overwhelming for our nervous system’s ability to process. They stay in their raw form with the same emotions, same thoughts, same autonomic nervous system reactions that we had while the event happened. They can be a month later or a year later or 40 years later.
These memories that were not processed by the brain in real time caused them to be stored maladaptively. Memories are really physiological associations with defenses. (Triggers.) Our nervous system got hijacked. This is where symptoms come from: flashbacks, nightmares, hypervigilence, shut-down, anxiety, depression, shame.
EMDR helps us process these memories to relieve symptoms. A recent EMDR practitioner said, “We look for the stuff that is stuck and causing yuck.”
We use a specific protocol of bi-lateral stimulation. (This can be eye movement using fingers or a light bar, tappers attached to your wrists, or listening to drum beats.) The bi-lateral stimulation helps the brain do what it failed to do during the trauma or shortly after the trauma – process the event.
EMDR reprocesses and desensitizes traumatic and disturbing memories that are stuck in the nervous system.
What is great about EMDR is we not only work on the verbal parts of the brain, we are able to remove trauma that is held in the body.
Why EMDR?
As trauma therapists, we love our work!
Yes, we have an intimate view of suffering. But as EMDR therapists, we also have an intimate view of deep and remarkable healing.
Most of our clients cannot hold hope for healing, so we tell them we will hold hope for them until they can begin to experience hope for themselves.
We have the privilege of seeing most of our clients find transforming and lasting healing. We see client after client safely reprocess and get remarkably “better” nearly every session.
Who wouldn’t want to witness that each day? It’s endlessly amazing!
We never doubt the importance of the work that we do, carefully helping people find their way out of the darkness and into sunshine. We know the value of watching clients begin to live lives they never thought possible!
EMDR works well with shock trauma (physical violence, rape, torture, war, bullying) and it also works well with developmental trauma from impaired parenting (neglect and physical, sexual, and/or emotional abuse).
Believing in the real possibility of healing makes trauma feel less horrible. It makes the huge history of awfulness feel a whole lot less awful and allows our clients to live in the fully in the present.