EMDR Therapy
EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.
It is a highly effective, evidence-based approach to helping people break free from limiting beliefs.
Limiting beliefs start with some kind of trauma.
Don’t be misled by the word “trauma;” it means more than what we tend to think of as “trauma.”
We usually think of trauma as the big stuff – fatal accidents, assault, natural disasters, etc. However, anything that overwhelmed your ability to cope at the time could be something your brain categorized as “traumatic.”
It could be something as common as experiences with a critical teacher or parent, school bullies, or an insensitive boyfriend.
Trauma limits our beliefs; it changes the way we look at ourselves, others and the world around us.
Limiting beliefs, in turn, inform the way we act as we move through our lives.
If I think EMDR might be helpful to you, I will talk about it with you and explain more about how it works. There are screenings I conduct to make sure EMDR is suitable for you and if you are interested in moving forward with it.
If we decide together to move forward with EMDR, I will engage you in identifying memories that will target exactly what you want to work on. I am trained to guide you in this process, so this is not a list you will have to come up with on your own. In fact, it is wise to not think about it too much between sessions because you do not want to activate memories without support.
Once we have identified the past targets, we will choose a memory to work on, and activate it through a series of questions. I will lead you in something called “bilateral stimulation,” which could include eye movements, alternating tapping on your legs or shoulders, holding gentle buzzers that alternate buzzing sensations in your hands, or headphones that generate tones that alternate from ear to ear. This engages your brain in a way that seems to get the parts of your brain working together in a new way.
We do about 30 seconds of bilateral stimulation, and then I ask you what you notice. Something will stand out to you, whether it’s an image, a thought, a feeling, a body sensation, a phrase, a metaphor.
I’ll ask you to “notice that” and lead you in another 30 seconds of bilateral stimulation.
During this process, your brain is showing you the things it has associated with the cluster of thoughts/feelings/body sensations that you have connected to the target memory. It has stored these away in places where they seem to have gotten stuck. Bilateral stimulation gets them moving through the brain so your brain can say, “Oh, that’s over. I am actually safe now” and store that memory away in long term storage.
It can feel intense when you are processing these memories. It is my job to make sure you are doing okay through the process. I will do things to change your focus, so you can better remember that you are in the therapy room and not in the memory. I attend to how the memory might be moving and when it resolves.
Once that memory resolves, we work on how you would like to think about the memory instead, and do some bilateral stimulation with that thought to strengthen it.
We check for any unusual body sensations that might indicate that your body is still hanging on to some part of the memory before considering that memory to be “cleared.”
We work on the past memories you shared in the beginning, and once we resolve them, we move onto working on present triggers in the same way.
Once a present trigger resolves, we look to the future and lay a road map of sorts in your brain so you have an adaptive plan to meet any similar future challenges.
Many people like EMDR because it is possible to experience relief pretty quickly, without having to talk about every detail of the traumatic experience.
It is not possible to make sweeping statements about how everyone will respond to it or how quickly the process will be because your brain is uniquely yours.
Your therapy will need to run on your brain’s timeline and that will vary from person to person.
As a therapist, I love EMDR therapy because it puts the client in such a place of power – we are truly following the path your brain is taking to weave through therapy.
I find it to be such an effective way to get at those behaviors that we get stuck on all the time. Those situations when we logically know we are having an irrational thought, or that we want to react differently but we can’t seem to force the feelings in our body to catch up.