What is EMDR?
Do you ever go emotionally from 0-60 without warning? Your anxiety or shame attacks you out of nowhere? Or maybe your stomach cinches up, your heart rate soars, and your body feels flooded with uncontrollable negative sensations?
Often our difficult life experiences, whether recent or from decades ago, can store unpleasant emotions, beliefs about ourselves, distressing images, and even body tension in ways that can easily be triggered when we least expect these reactions.
When past experiences have been negative or traumatic, they can remain unprocessed in your nervous system. Your current behaviors and perceptions become stuck and can cause disruptions in various aspects of your life, including how you feel about yourself, how you see the world and how you relate to others.
What is EMDR?
EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing is a form of psychotherapy that specifically targets these adverse life experiences and helps the brain reprocess them. While your brain naturally does some reprocessing during your REM sleep cycle, EMDR organizes and focuses on the disruptive patterns while you are awake. EMDR does not erase or create memories, but can simply help hit the ‘reset’ button and prevent certain specific past experiences from becoming limitations.
From the moment we are in utero, our nervous system collects information from our environment, all recorded in our neural networks. As we grow up, our positive and negative perceptions determine how we react to situations. Even as adults, we continue collecting information and reacting to our environment. If not addressed, recent negative events or unprocessed and unrecognized childhood traumatic memories can lead us to accumulate unresolved issues that make us feel stuck and anxious, and can keep us from performing at our best.
How does EMDR work?
First, it’s crucial to develop rapport and safety between the therapist and the client. Some history-taking is important, and the beginning stages also include a discussion the goals of working together.
Next, a major part of EMDR is to learn some calming, relaxation skills. We want these to be solidly in place before working on the harder stuff.
After this, the therapist may be ready to organize the “targets” of EMDR. This organizational work can be difficult emotionally, so it is important to take it slowly and safely.
Once the tasks of the previous stages are solidified, the therapist may ask you to bring up different parts of a past memory and use some kind of bi-lateral movement while asking you to simply allow your brain to notice what it wants to notice. We do this several times, expecting some emotional charge to happen, but eventually expecting the charge to lessen toward a more neutral place in your nervous system.
At a good place to pause, the therapist will help restore calm to your body and thoughts by using the previously mentioned relaxation or calming skills. A “target” may or may not be resolved in a single session. When it has been resolved, a mental body scan can pick up any remaining distress.
Finally, even future events that relate to a particular distressing target can be addressed and planned for.
If you’d like to know more, visit the international organization that is a clearinghouse of sorts for all things EMDR - https://www.emdria.org/