What is EMDR? It is an approach that has been extensively researched. It’s been proven effective to relieve many types of psychological stress. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy helps you heal from anxiety, depression, OCD, chronic pain, addictions, trauma and PTSD. EMDR originated in the late 1980’s as a means of treating PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder).
What is EMDR? It is not like talk therapy in that it has a lot more structure. It encourages you to focus briefly on a trauma memory while doing eye movements, tapping or listening to tones. This reduces the intensity and emotion associated with the memory.
How Trauma Invades Your Life
Trauma can come back to you in many ways. Through memories, bodily sensations, thoughts, fears, lingering worries or sensations that you “can’t seem to let go of”. When you had experiences in the past where you were wounded in a traumatic way, it can have devastating effects on your life.
Trauma becomes “stuck” in the memory with all its original sensory and emotional context. When that trauma is triggered later in life, all of those original sensations are re-lived or re-activated.
For example, if you witnessed a terrible divorce and your parents/caregivers neglected your needs at a very young age. This childhood event can have an effect on you as adult, without you even realizing it. So, when you experience neglect as an adult at work or in your primary relationship, it can trigger your nervous system that the same kind of childhood trauma is about to happen. This puts your mind, heart and body on “full alert” and you begin to react to your current life as if it were your past.
This is not a “conscious choice” on your part to react this way. It’s involuntary because your brain was wired to react to neglect by being on alert. The child inside of you “needed” to protect him/herself and that same “protective” mechanism is going off in your life today. Even if you’re in not nearly at the same level of danger or vulnerability.
What Is EMDR?
So overreacting to a current experience like one that happened in your past is a way your body/mind/heart are attempting to protect you from harm. We want to soothe that reaction and EMDR is one way we can do it. In EMDR sessions, you focus on the stressful event while also focusing on actions the therapist is doing.
The dual attention processing ”unsticks” the event so your brain can re-process and integrate the old and the new experiences into an adult context. This removal of the “threat” allows your nervous system to create a new response to stress. You can stop feeling the same panic and intensity that you previously assigned to anything that reminded you of your past trauma. Once this happens, naturally, your anxiety and depression that are caused by this memory start to diminish.
Desensitization and Reprocessing of Intense Memories
When you ask, what is EMDR, we work together to discover the events from your past that created the problem or present situations causing you distress. The technique of EMDR aims to help you desensitize your nervous system from the internal experiences related to events similar to those that were traumatic in your life (real or imagined). Through a set of inquiries, we explore topics and then I help you resolve the event. We do this by identifying, processing through, and desensitizing you to those experiences and others that are similar in nature.
This allows you to feel more in control and positive about your life. EMDR strengthens positive self-beliefs after which the body sensations and negative feelings associated with the problem become much more manageable because you’re less reactive.
That isn’t to say that you wouldn’t react to a red-alarm fire in an appropriate way in the future. But it is to say that you won’t react to a smoldering fire as if it were an all-out emergency when it really just needs a lighter touch.
Every person has a different need for EMDR treatment. Some people can jump right into EMDR with no problem. Others may need to work on feeling safe enough to proceed by using neurofeedback before going into the deeper issues. EMDR therapy reprograms your neural pathways so that routine brain functions resume. The stressful events are remembered without the emotional baggage constantly clouding your judgment.
The Eight Phases of What is EMDR
There are eight phases of EMDR.
Phase 1 is history and treatment planning, 1 to 2 sessions. This is where we discuss what happened in the past that created the problem and what you are experiencing in the present that is causing distress. We don’t have to discuss the disturbing memory in detail in order to process it. We also discuss what a better future would feel like.
Phase 2 is the Preparation Phase, one to four sessions. You will learn basic skills to relax, decompress and take care of yourself. This might include having family and/or friends that will support you during this process. This phase also gives us time to build trust.
Phase 3 is Assessment. You will choose a specific image that best represents the memory. Then we find the belief that best expresses your negative belief about yourself. For example, ‘I am worthless” or ‘I am helpless”.
We also find a positive belief that you’d rather believe. Such as ‘I am worthy’ or ‘I can succeed’. You would also identify the the negative emotions such as fear or anger, and the body sensations associated with the feelings, such as tightness in the stomach or chest.
Decreasing the Negative Belief and Increasing the Positive Belief
The goal would be to reduce the intensity of the negative belief and increase the positive belief. This brings us to Phase 4, Desensitization. I lead you in sets of eye movements, taps, or sounds as you focus on the memory. We do this until the intensity of the event is reduced to zero, and all the associations you have to the event are also gone through.
Then, in the Phase 5, Installation, the goal is to increase the positive belief. In Phase 6, we do a body scan and make sure that when we go back to the negative belief you don’t have any residual body sensations or feelings about the original memory.
In Phase 7, Closure, we go back to self-calming techniques and make sure you will leave feeling ok outside my office. Some processing can happen between sessions, so we talk about keeping a journal to record these experiences and calming techniques that you can do on your own.
Phase 8 is the Reevaluation Phase which helps us keep track of how the treatment is going over time. We will want to monitor the success of the EMDR to make sure it’s holding since the last session.
If you would like to explore what is EMDR for yourself, please reach out to me. You can leave a confidential voicemail at 310-314-6933 or email me at mindy@mftherapy.com.
