EMDR Therapy - Effective Trauma Treatment for Healing and Resilience

What is EMDR? 

Many people have been through upsetting, stressful, or frightening experiences in their lives. Sometimes those experiences can have lasting impacts by causing psychological trauma. Trauma is not the disturbing event itself but the emotional distress you experience when the negative event overwhelms your ability to cope or is out of your control. When this happens, your brain’s natural ability to process information about your experiences in an adaptive way is disrupted or blocked.  The unprocessed trauma blocks your brain’s natural ability to heal, like the way a splinter blocks your physical body’s ability to heal a cut. Untreated trauma can feel like living with an emotional injury or wound. That injury might cause symptoms that change the way you feel or think, and interfere with parts of daily life. Those changes may look like any of the symptoms listed below.

• Flashbacks—reliving the traumatic event, including physical symptoms, such as a racing heart or sweating
• Recurring memories or dreams related to the event
• Distressing thoughts
• Physical signs of stress
• Staying away from places, events, or objects that are reminders of the experience
• Avoiding thoughts or feelings related to the traumatic event
• Being easily startled
• Feeling tense, on guard, or on edge
• Having difficulty concentrating
• Having difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep
• Feeling irritable and having angry or aggressive outbursts
• Engaging in risky, reckless, or destructive behavior
• Trouble remembering key features of the traumatic event
• Negative thoughts about oneself or the world
• Exaggerated feelings of blame directed toward oneself or others
• Ongoing negative emotions, such as fear, anger, guilt, or shame
• Loss of interest in previous activities
• Feelings of social isolation
• Difficulty feeling positive emotions, such as happiness or satisfaction

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a method of psychotherapy that has been shown to be effective in treating these symptoms of trauma. EMDR is designed to relieve emotional distress, reformulate the negative beliefs caused by trauma, and reduce physiological discomfort. Dr. Francine Shapiro began developing EMDR in the late 1980s and it now has a significant body of research demonstrating its efficacy. It is recognized as an effective form of treatment for trauma by organizations such as the American Psychiatric Association, the World Health Organization, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Dr. Shapiro hypothesizes that EMDR helps to unblock our brain’s natural ability to adaptively process information about the trauma, like removing the splinter so that the healing of a cut can continue.

What Happens During EMDR Therapy?

Your EMDR therapist will begin by exploring your background, history, symptoms, and current experiences to see whether EMDR is a good fit for you. If you and your therapist decide to start EMDR, your therapist will then help you explore how your current trauma symptoms are connected to difficult events from earlier in your life. Your therapist will also help you identify how these events have negatively impacted what you believe about yourself, others, or the world we live in. To help you prepare to work through your traumas, your therapist will also teach you some strategies for tolerating distress and regulating your emotions. 

In the next phase of treatment, your therapist will guide you through reprocessing your memories about these upsetting events using bilateral stimulation. Bilateral stimulation is a back-and-forth movement most commonly done as lateral eye movements directed by your therapist, but can also be accomplished with other methods like tapping your shoulders or knees. Your therapist will lead you through short sets of bilateral stimulation while you focus on the visual image related to the trauma memory, your emotions and body sensations, and your negative beliefs. This will help you access the emotionally disturbing material in small doses, while also relaxing and staying grounded in the present moment. As you move through these sets, your feelings and perceptions about the event will shift. This allows your brain to tone down the intensity of the memory and create new connections between the traumatic memory and more adaptive beliefs. EMDR changes the way your brain stores the traumatic memory so that you will be able to remember the upsetting event without experiencing emotional distress or other trauma-related symptoms.

With EMDR, not only will you feel less disturbed by the memories, but also the meaning and story you tell yourself about the trauma will shift in a healthy way. For example, a victim of assault may transform from believing they are unsafe or unworthy to strongly believing “I survived and I can thrive” or “I am worthwhile regardless of what happened.” They now recognize that these degrading or disturbing past experiences do not diminish their worthiness or value.

Successful treatment of trauma with EMDR does not require you to talk out loud about your upsetting experiences in great detail. However, you will need to think about your trauma, so you may feel some discomfort during the process. These feelings are usually temporary and decrease as you proceed with EMDR. Your therapist will also support you in tolerating this distress throughout your EMDR treatment.

Is EMDR Right for You?

EMDR has been shown to be effective in treating the effects of trauma, as well as a wide range of other mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression disorders, eating disorders, as well as OCD and phobias. In my EMDR work with clients, I’ve helped clients process experiences of sexual abuse, violence and physical assault, medical fears, grief, and painful relationships. Their stories about these events have transformed from those of loss, shame, powerlessness, and self-blame into stories of survival, empowerment, self-worth, trust, and safety. With these emotional wounds transformed, my clients are able to experience authentic self-worth and confidence, connect meaningfully with their friends and family, and pursue their most fulfilling lives.

EMDR may not be appropriate for individuals with severe psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia. EMDR may also not be appropriate for individuals who have difficulty managing intense emotions or dissociate regularly until they develop improved emotion regulation skills. The best way to find out whether EMDR may be helpful for you is to speak with an EMDR-trained therapist directly about your experiences and concerns.

If you are struggling to cope with or understand the troubling past events from your life, we invite you to reach out to us to see if we can help. You can schedule a free 15-minute phone consultation to learn more about our services and see if our EMDR provider may be a good fit for you.

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