EMDR THERAPY

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is an evidence-based treatment that can enable you to safely process traumatic experiences which negatively affect your quality of life. Initially developed to treat PTSD from traumas such as car accidents and assaults, evidence has shown it to be incredibly helpful along the spectrum of traumas, including: 

  • Complex trauma, such as childhood abuse

  • Anxiety

  • Phobias, such as fear of flying, driving, heights, or claustrophobia

  • Physical pain

  • Addiction

When an event is too distressing, it overwhelms our brains’ natural process of healing from trauma and safely filing those memories into “the past.”  The memory of that past trauma (or traumas) gets stuck in “the present,” continually triggered by similar experiences. We then relive the intense emotions and distorted thoughts from the original event – even years afterward – rather than experiencing the current event for what it actually is.  For example, your current partner is kind and loving, but because your brain is unable to integrate this new information (that relationships can be safe), you find yourself struggling with intimacy and trust, reacting as if they were a previous partner who was abusive.

EMDR is a way to speak to our emotional self with the support and reason of our logical self.

Maybe you know exactly what memory you want to process. Maybe you aren’t sure, but you know you’re experiencing anxiety in certain situations or around certain thoughts (“the future” is a very common one). Maybe you want to try EMDR, but there are certain memories you want to make sure we don’t touch. With EMDR, you are completely in control of what memories we target – and which we avoid.

If you’ve seen a video of it in action, the visual of a therapist waving their fingers in front of their client’s eyes can seem bizarre. Maybe even like snake oil. But EMDR isn’t magic. It doesn’t “trick” you into thinking that a painful experience is less important; rather it allows you to remember it from a more rational and self-supportive — and less emotionally-triggering — perspective. 

The idea of the “finger waving” is that as your eyes follow my finger, rapidly darting side to side, both hemispheres of your brain are engaged (bilateral stimulation) – the right brain, which controls emotion, and the left brain, which controls logic. Put simply, this allows you to explore a traumatic memory without reliving it — as if you are watching a movie of it. And, like a movie, we then re-edit the memory into a healthier perception of the events.

The result is that memories that were once intensely disturbing to recall may eventually be brought up with ease. More importantly, events in our current life that used to remind us of those memories can now be experienced as what they actually are — rather than experiencing them as what our old pain used to tell us they were.

To learn more about the science of EMDR, visit the EMDR International Association: https://www.emdria.org/about-emdr-therapy/