Basic Premise

EMDR takes the approach that the brain is wired for self healing just like your body. You don’t have to tell your skin to form a scab when you’ve been deeply scratched and you don’t have to consciously direct your brain to process important events in your life. However, symptoms can appear when healing is blocked. If you have debris in a skin wound, this blocks healing and causes negative symptoms like redness or festering. Similarly, when disturbing events are blocked from being processed, you can develop negative symptoms like intrusive thoughts or flashbacks of the event, anxiety, or negative perceptions of yourself, just to name a few. When the block is removed, both the body and brain can resume their natural path to healing.

What Results Can I Expect?

When we work to process a memory, we work to process all aspects of it: body memory (sensations), visual and auditory memory, emotional memory, and any associated negative self-beliefs. Those who experience symptoms of hyper-vigilance and jitteriness can expect the nervous system to become more calm; triggers won’t be as activating, if at all. Those with negative self-beliefs that are false (e.g. I am worthless) can come to emotionally believe what they logically know is true. Many report a sense of calm and balance. EMDR does not make us forget our memories or change our opinions about what happened. It allows us to think about it without re-feeling or reliving the experience; the emotional charge is dramatically reduced, if not gone. Naturally, results vary and are dependent on a number of unique and personal factors.

How Does It Work?

Have you ever seen a person sleep and their eyes move back and forth under their eye lids? This is Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, and it is believed that this is the stage of sleep where we process our experiences. This bilateral (side to side) movement is believed to help the left (logical) and right (emotional) sides of your brain process together. EMDR uses bilateral stimulation to facilitate your brain’s processing of a specific event while you are awake. Bilateral stimulation could include following an object with your eyes left to right, listening to a quick sound first in one ear and then the other, or tapping one knee and then the other. Find out what a typical EMDR session looks like here.

The Benefits of EMDR

One of the most notable befits of EMDR is time. It can be helpful for busy people who prefer not to take time off work or away from family obligations every week for an hour or more, for months. Someone using EMDR can process in a few hours what takes weeks or months to process with traditional talk therapy. This benefit can be further enhanced with intensive sessions of three or four hours.

Some people have been in therapy with a good therapist, and have done a lot of good work, but still feel they haven’t met their own expectations for what they wanted to get out of the process. EMDR can facilitate processing at a much deeper level, helping people experience more profound and adaptive changes in their thoughts and feelings.

Maybe someone wants to continue learning skills with their current therapist, but wants to process traumatic memories quickly with an EMDR therapist. EMDR can be provided as adjunct to their current therapy.

Perhaps someone has been struggling with their past for far too long and is eager to move forward quickly.

EMDR is recognized as an effective treatment by the American Psychiatric Association, American Psychological Association, International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, The National Alliance on Mental Illness, Substance Abuse and Mental Heath Services Association, U.S Department of Veteran’s Affairs, and the World Health Organization

What EMDR is Not

EMDR is not Hypnosis.

Clients are awake and self-aware throughout the treatment. It’s like having one foot in the past and one in the present and being aware of both at the same time. EMDR cannot install suggestions or cause someone to believe something that isn’t true. EMDR helps the brain process and integrate past events based on information they intellectually know to be true (left brain) but struggle to feel as true (right brain).

EMDR is not a quick fix.

While it is true that EMDR can help someone process experiences in a significantly shorter period of time than talk therapy, it still takes time and varies for each person. Clients can experience progress and symptom relief at a deeper level and an increased pace, keeping them motivated in treatment. People with single incident trauma can expect treatment to take less time than someone with complex trauma (multiple incidents from childhood). Other factors that can influence the process include: the stage of brain development at the time of the event, the nature of the event, or any protective mechanisms the brain has developed to avoid thinking of the event, just to name a few.

EMDR will not make you relive your difficult past repeatedly.

Some talk therapies help people desensitize to their traumas by repeatedly talking, journaling, or thinking about them, often in great detail. This can be helpful to some, but can feel re-traumatizing to others. EMDR typically requires you to think about the event once (putting one foot in the past) and then immediately goes into processing it. Preparation for EMDR includes learning techniques to help keep one foot in the present like breathing or tapping. During processing, the clinician will periodically stop to ask what you are noticing. You only have to provide a basic “headline” such as “I feel angry” or “I just realized how little I was”, and the clinician will prompt you to continue processing. You don’t have to retell the entire story or go into details. Your brain knows what to do and where to go. The clinician is there to keep things on track. When doing intensive (longer) sessions, memories can often be completely processed in that session, resulting in little to no disturbance when thought of. When doing EMDR in the hourly format, some memories can be completely processed but some are not completed. This means the partially processed memory will have to be reactivated at the beginning of the next session. Because it was partially processed, and the client may have continued processing it after the session, it may not be as disturbing as the first time it was targeted for processing.

EMDR is not only for people with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or trauma.

Initial studies did focus on military veterans suffering from combat related PTSD, and it is endorsed by the Veteran’s Administration as an evidence based treatment for PTSD. However, in the past 30+ years, EMDR has been studied in multiple populations with varying clinical symptoms such as depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and much more. Unless you are using insurance, you do not have to have a clinical diagnosis to receive EMDR treatment. EMDR targets specific symptoms that you want to focus on, not diagnoses. Someone may have some of the symptoms of PTSD but not meet all of the clinical criteria for a formal diagnosis. Someone may have past experiences that affect their life negatively, but they aren’t classified as traumas. By targeting specific unwanted behaviors that are rooted in past learning, EMDR can help people become better versions of themselves.