EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing

What is EMDR?

The mind can often heal itself naturally, in the same way as the body does. Much of this natural coping mechanism occurs during sleep, particularly during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Francine Shapiro developed Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) in 1987, utilizing this natural process in order to successfully treat Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Since then, EMDR has been used to effectively treat a wide range of mental health problems. 

EMDR works with a direct effect on the brain, and so it's very different from conventional talking therapies. More traditional talk therapy will often stimulate a traumatic memory, but lack the mechanism to resolve it. This radically different approach is the reason why EMDR has become the preferred treatment for PTSD/trauma and why conventional counseling is not recommended. Typically, EMDR is quickly effective precisely because it does not rely on lengthy life analysis or repetitious reliving of problems. Clients who prefer not to talk in detail about what happened to them do just as well as those who are able to discuss these traumatic events. The result, even for those who doubt whether EMDR will work, is almost always transformative. 

Clients who have engaged in EMDR have seen dramatic improvement in their symptoms in much less time than traditional talk therapy because the process addresses deep seated negative beliefs and replaces them with more realistic and adaptive truths. EMDR is a type of therapy that enables people to heal from the symptoms and emotional distress that are the result of disturbing life experiences. EMDR seeks to resolve issues from the past, relieve the symptoms experienced in the present, and to provide a new template for dealing with the future. EMDR is a fresh approach to your problems using the latest proven techniques that can dramatically change how you experience you everyday life. 

It is widely assumed that severe emotional pain requires a long time to heal.  EMDR therapy shows that the mind can in fact heal from psychological trauma much as the body recovers from physical trauma.  When you cut your hand, your body works to close the wound.  If a  foreign object or repeated injury irritates the wound, it festers and causes pain.  Once the block is removed, healing resumes.  EMDR therapy demonstrates that a similar sequence of events occurs with mental processes. The brain’s information processing system naturally moves toward improving mental health. If the system is blocked or imbalanced by the impact of a disturbing event, the emotional wound festers and can cause intense suffering. Once the block is removed, healing resumes. With successful EMDR treatment, the natural adaptive processes are resumed and the person moves on and through this memory or sets of memories. They still recall what has happened, but it is no longer upsetting, disturbing or negatively influencing their current life. Using the detailed protocols and procedures learned in EMDR therapy,  clinicians help clients activate their natural healing processes.

What does EMDR treat?

EMDR Therapy can be helpful in treating most mental health problems but not everyone who benefits from EMDR is diagnosed with a mental illness. EMDR can help with a number of life's stresses and conflicts that can affect anyone. For example, it may help you:

  • Resolve conflicts with your partner or someone else in your life

  • Relieve anxiety or stress due to work or other situations

  • Cope with major life changes, such as divorce, the death of a loved one or the loss of a job

  • Learn to manage unhealthy reactions such as anger

  • Come to terms with an ongoing or serious physical health problem

  • Recover from physical or sexual abuse or witnessing violence

  • Cope with sexual problems, whether they're due to a physical or psychological cause

  • Sleep better, if you have trouble getting to sleep or staying asleep (insomnia)

  • Resolving feelings of worthlessness/low self-esteem 

EMDR has been successfully used to treat:

  • PTSD and smaller Traumas (car accident, divorce, infidelity, medical condition)

  • anxiety and panic attacks

  • depression

  • stress

  • phobias

  • sleep problems

  • grief

  • addictions

  • pain relief, phantom limb pain

  • self-esteem

  • performance anxiety

What evidence is there that EMDR is a successful treatment?

EMDR is an innovative clinical treatment which has successfully helped over a million individuals. The validity and reliability of EMDR has been established by rigorous research. There are now nineteen controlled studies into EMDR making it the most thoroughly researched method used in the treatment of trauma, (Details on www.emdria.com or www.emdr.org) and is recommended by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) as an effective treatment for PTSD. 

How does EMDR work?

EMDR or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing utilizes the brain’s natural tendency to heal by stimulating both sides of the brain through the use of eye movements, taps, or sounds. Dual awareness is created as the client concentrates on a distressing/traumatic incident while staying grounded in the present by tracking movements or sounds made by the therapist. Research has proven this to be an extremely effective treatment for trauma because it resolves the current symptoms and creates new neural pathways in the brain allowing the client to view his or her situation more realistically.

We know that when a person is very upset, their brain cannot process information as it does ordinarily. One moment becomes "frozen in time," and remembering a trauma may feel as bad as going through it the first time because the images, sounds, smells, and feelings haven’t changed. Such memories have a lasting negative effect that interferes with the way a person sees the world and the way they relate to other people. EMDR seems to have a direct effect on the way that the brain processes information. Normal information processing is resumed, so following a successful EMDR session, a person no longer relives the images, sounds, and feelings when the event is brought to mind. You still remember what happened, but it is less upsetting. Many types of therapy have similar goals. However, EMDR appears to be similar to what occurs naturally during dreaming or REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. Therefore, EMDR can be thought of as a physiologically based therapy that helps a person see disturbing material in a new and less distressing way. 

What is an EMDR session like?

EMDR utilizes the natural healing ability of your body. After a thorough assessment, you will be asked specific questions about a particular disturbing memory. Eye movements, similar to those during REM sleep, will be recreated, which acts as bilateral brain stimulation simply by asking you to watch a light moving back and forth across your visual field. Sometimes headphones or tapping is used instead depending on client preference. The eye movements will last for a short while and then stop. You will then be asked to report back on the experiences you have had during each of these sets of eye movements. Experiences during a session may include changes in thoughts, images, and feelings.

With repeated sets of eye movements, the memory tends to change in such a way that it loses its painful intensity and simply becomes a neutral memory of an event in the past. Other associated memories may also heal at the same time. This linking of related memories can lead to a dramatic and rapid improvement in many aspects of your life. 

What happens when you are traumatized?

Most of the time your body routinely manages new information and experiences without you being aware of it. However, when something out of the ordinary occurs and you are traumatized by an overwhelming event (e.g. a car accident, infidelity, divorce) or by being repeatedly subjected to distress (e.g. childhood neglect), your natural coping mechanism can become overloaded. This overloading can result in disturbing experiences remaining frozen in your brain or being "unprocessed". Such unprocessed memories and feelings are stored in the limbic system of your brain in a "raw" and emotional form, rather than in a verbal “story” mode. This limbic system maintains traumatic memories in an isolated memory network that is associated with emotions and physical sensations, and which are disconnected from the brain’s cortex where we use language to store memories. The limbic system’s traumatic memories can be continually triggered when you experience events similar to the difficult experiences you have been through. Often the memory itself is long forgotten, but the painful feelings such as anxiety, panic, anger, or despair are continually triggered in the present. This also activates the fight, flight, freeze response. Your ability to live in the present and learn from new experiences can therefore become inhibited. EMDR helps create the connections between your brain’s memory networks, enabling your brain to process the traumatic memory in a very natural way.