What is EMDR and will it help me?
This is a question I get all the time. If you’ve been following along, you may have read my post What is trauma?, where I explain what qualifies as trauma, but don’t get to how I treat trauma in my practice. This is where EMDR comes in.
EMDR stands for Eye-movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It is an evidenced based treatment modality (meaning it’s backed by years of research and is widely accepted) for treatment of trauma and PTSD. It’s considered evidenced based for other mental health concerns as well, but that is for a later post. For now, we are focusing on trauma.
EMDR works by stimulating the left and right hemispheres of the brain simultaneously to help the brain integrate and make sense of information. Sound complicated or intimidating? Let me break it down. If your are familiar with the sleep cycle, you know there is part of our sleep called REM (rapid eye-movement) sleep. This is when our eyes move back and forth under our eye-lids. The theory here is this stimulates the left and right hemispheres of our brains, allowing us to make sense of situations that happened to us (i.e. process information). Ever go to bed a little anxious about something and then wake up with more clarity? While you were busy sleeping, your brain was busy processing this anxiety and integrating it so it wouldn’t bother you so much. You still remember what was making you anxious, but the anxiety itself is less or gone.
For example, maybe you got stuck in traffic on your way to an appointment, making you late. You might feel anxious or frazzled and maybe it throws off your day a little. Then you go to bed that night and you wake up the next morning. Do you still feel anxious and frazzled? Probably not. You remember you were late, but the annoyance and anxiety are gone and don’t continue to affect you. You aren’t still annoyed because you were stuck in traffic a year ago, right?
When something bad happens, our brains are often unable to process what happened to us in a way that makes sense and feels good to us. We continue to wake up after days, weeks, even years and still feel that same fear and anxiety that we did when this situation occurred. We might not always recognize what we are experiencing is a result of trauma. You see, unprocessed trauma shows up in a variety of ways. In addition to feeling overwhelmingly anxious or depressed, we may find ourselves saying or doing things we don’t mean, constantly looking over our shoulders, unable to trust, etc. Do you find yourself saying “I just haven’t been the same since?” EMDR may be able to help with this.
But how does it work? The answer is bilateral stimulation, which is a fancy way of saying we use techniques, including eye movements, tapping, etc. to stimulate the right and left hemispheres of your brain to help you process through past situations that hurt you. Remember, your brain already does this by itself - we are just mimicking what the brain already does to help it process really tough information. The result? We still remember the trauma happened, however, we lose the reactivity behind the trauma. Just like in that first example where you don’t continue to be frazzled years after getting stuck in traffic, you also don’t continue to feel affected by the trauma. For example, we remember the car accident, but the paralyzing fear and anxiety is gone, and we are able to get behind the wheel again no problem. Or we remember how painful it was to lose a loved one unexpectedly, but we don’t continue to live in this pain every day.
Sound scary? It might be different than anything you’ve ever experienced before. Something I always tell people is, with EMDR you are not “reliving the past,” “being hypnotized,” “harming your brain.” You will be 100 percent in control at all times, and you are simply allowing your brain to glimpse the past in order to process what happened to you. What I love most about EMDR is the whole premise is our brains can heal themselves. That’s what EMDR is - a technique that helps our brains do what they do best - process what happens to us, so we can move forward.
Will EMDR help you? Probably. Can I say yes with 100 percent certainty, of course not. Every individual is different and there are other therapies to treat trauma that may also be helpful. I find EMDR is best for people who really haven’t gotten much out of talk therapy. One of the reasons I decided to get trained in EMDR was because I felt like people weren’t experiencing full healing. Did they feel better? Yes. But I found they continued to be reactive, anxious or feel different than they were before the trauma. With EMDR, I am amazed at the healing that can occur. Read more about why I specialize in trauma here.
Want to learn more about EMDR - visit the EMDR Institute website: https://www.emdr.com/
References: Shapiro, F. (2018). Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing: Basic principles, protocols and procedures (3rd). New York: Guilford Press.