What is EMDR Therapy?
Common Issues that Can Be Addressed with EMDR Therapy
Do you feel like you go from zero to one hundred in an instant?
Feel like you are reacting rather than being able to choose your response to situations?
Are you snapping at loved ones or avoiding situations due to anxiety or overwhelming emotions?
Wondering why you seem to get triggered by situations that others seem to be unaffected by?
Why do clients come to Flourish Mindset?
Many Clients come to Flourish Mindset to understand how their past experiences may be impacting their current relationships and holding them back from thriving in their lives.
One of the most efficient ways to heal from past experiences and cultivate fulfilling relationships is through EMDR therapy. If you have heard the term EMDR therapy from family or friends, but have questions about how it actually works, you are in the right place. This article will cover what EMDR therapy is, how it works, and how to find a trained EMDR therapist.
What is EMDR Therapy?
EMDR or Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing therapy is a type of trauma-informed therapy that harnesses the brain’s natural healing process. It helps people who have experienced disturbing events to move forward without feeling pulled back into the experience with every reminder of the situation. EMDR is different from other trauma counseling because it doesn’t require detailed accounts of the disturbing event, exposure therapy, or hours of homework in between sessions. It has been well-researched and is recommended as a therapy for childhood trauma, the best therapy for PTSD, anxiety, depression, panic disorder, and other mental health issues.
Bilateral Stimulation and Trauma
EMDR Therapy was founded by Francine Shapiro Ph.D., a Clinical Psychologist after she realized how bilateral stimulation through eye movements can impact the way the brain processes disturbing memories similar to the process of eye movements during REM sleep. According to the EMDR International Association (2022) engaging in EMDR therapy with a trained therapist can help to reduce trauma, anxiety, depression, OCD, addiction, and panic disorder symptoms.
How does EMDR Therapy Work?
The American Psychiatric Association, American Psychological Association, The International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, and World Health Organization are some of the national and international organizations that have deemed EMDR therapy as an effective treatment.
EMDR therapy taps into the brain's natural healing process.
Normally, when we have an experience our brains are able to process the information we encounter and determine what is important to keep and what can be discarded. This is why you may not remember what you had for breakfast last Thursday. When a traumatic or otherwise distressing event occurs, the body’s stress response interferes with the normal processing of information storage and memory recall.
An Interconnected Process
There is an interconnected process in the brain which occurs during stressful events between the amygdala (the signal for a stressful event), the hippocampus (which is involved in learning, specifically regarding memories about safety and threats), and the prefrontal cortex (which controls behaviors, emotions and conducts an analysis of them). When the body and brain are able to process information and the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex all work together, painful events can be handled and memories of the threatening experience can be processed naturally.
Trauma Changes the Way Our brains store memories
When a particularly stressful event occurs, or threatening events occur repeatedly, it becomes harder for the brain to process and resolve these events on its own. This occurs as a result of the body's fight-flight-freeze response instincts. These responses change the way information is stored in memories about distressing events. This explains why a person can recall the exact song that was on the radio when they got in a car accident or remember the smell of the cologne of their attacker. This can also cause the experience of feeling transported back to the moment of the disturbing event when you recall certain details.
MDR helps the brain to properly store those memories and allows healing to take place. The result is being able to remember the event, without the feeling of being pulled back into the sounds, sights, smells, or body sensations, and the fight, flight, and freeze responses are resolved.
Most clients report feeling that the disturbing event has less power over them and they feel freer to experience life in the present moment after doing EMDR therapy.
What is EMDR Therapy used for?
What if you haven’t suffered any major traumatic events? Is EMDR really the right type of therapy for you? Who can benefit from EMDR therapy? Many people who have experienced less severe or non-life-threatening trauma, can benefit from EMDR as well. EMDR has been shown to be clinically useful for treating anxiety, panic disorder, and depression. It is also helpful in rebuilding attachments, recovering from relationship ruptures, and supporting couples therapy.
EMDR For PTSD and Trauma
EMDR has been widely researched and is recommended as an effective treatment for trauma survivors. It specifically has been found to “reduce distress and strengthen adaptive cognitions related to the traumatic event” (Shapiro, 2014). EMDR therapy is one of the fastest methods of treating trauma compared to other trauma therapies.
One of the major benefits of EMDR compared to other trauma therapies is that a detailed discussion of the traumatic event is not required. This reduces the discomfort associated with having to tell the trauma story and therefore reduces the risk of re-traumatization from having to recount the traumatic event repeatedly.
EMDR Therapy For Anxiety
Similar to trauma, anxiety is often associated with a painful or negative experience. Anxiety symptoms tend to manifest as fear of the event happening in the future. Due to its ability to increase adaptive thoughts about distributing events, EMDR therapy helps to reduce lingering anxiety. Once the brain draws a new conclusion using information about current circumstances, anxiety is often reduced as a result.
When anxiety is caused by unprocessed memories of earlier life experiences, these memories are stored with the original emotions, physical sensations, and beliefs. With reprocessing of those memories using EMDR therapy, a reduction in the symptoms an increase in adaptive cognitions and increased functioning occurs. The life experience that was once disturbing becomes a formative experience that cultivates resilience (EMDRIA, 2022).
EMDR For Depression
EMDR for depression works similarly to EMDR for anxiety and trauma. Depression is related to negative beliefs about the self. Typically, you can trace your negative beliefs about yourself or your life situation back to a negative experience. This negative experience was likely stored as a disturbing memory. Oftentimes these disturbing memories cause you to make meaning from them to better understand your experience. EMDR can help you reframe your thoughts about the experience and shift your beliefs about yourself and your life situations which reduces symptoms. EMDR has been shown to have great efficacy in treating depression and provides an adaptive thought pattern that works as a protective factor in the case of future disturbing events or adverse life experiences (Shapiro, 2014).
EMDR Therapy for Couples
EMDR therapy can be used with couples to strengthen attachments, heal from a common traumatic experience, or help one partner move forward from a disturbing event that is causing them to be re-triggered in the relationship. EMDR for couples helps to reduce reactivity to triggers and prevents couples from falling into old unproductive patterns of communication.
What to Expect in an EMDR Session
EMDR has eight phases with sessions lasting between 50 min and 80 min that you will be guided through by your trauma therapist.
Understanding your history
Like any trauma-informed care, EMDR therapy will begin with a history-taking portion where your trained EMDR therapist will ask you a series of questions to get a better understanding of your background and any touchstone events that have been impactful in your life.
Setting Goals
You and your EMDR therapist will decide together what your goal will be.
Grounding Resources
First, you will learn resources for grounding yourself and self-soothing to ensure you have all the tools you need before you begin the next phase.
Identify Stressful Experiences
You will then identify examples of disturbing experiences and decide which will be your target memory.
Reprocessing The Trauma &/or Stressful Situation
During the reprocessing session, you will be asked to focus on the specific memory and the therapist will begin sets of side-to-side eye movements, taps, or sounds. You will be asked to focus on what comes to mind after each set. This may create shifts in thinking about the event, how the event is imagined, new feelings, or changes in beliefs about the event.
You are in control During EMDR
You are always in control and have the option to stop or take a break at any time. This process of eye movements, sounds, or taps is continued until the disturbance is reduced. EMDR therapy can be used within standard talk therapy, as an additional therapy to supplement talk therapy, or as a stand-alone treatment.
The brain’s natural healing process
One benefit of EMDR Therapy is that it doesn’t require you to repeat the narrative of your traumatic memory in order for treatment to work. EMDR doesn’t require homework between sessions or focusing on changing thought or behavior patterns. Instead, you let your brain do the work through its natural healing process which reduces the distress you experience.
Why EMDR Therapy Works
Francine Shapiro’s Adaptive Information Processing Model (AIP) hypothesizes that unprocessed information during a disturbing event changes the way emotions and sensations are stored causing them to be in a sense, frozen, with the memory. This lack of processing, according to the AIP theory, is responsible for many psychological disorders. EMDR taps into the brain's natural process of storing information and adds adaptive information to change the beliefs and disturbance levels associated with the event. This results in resolved symptoms and reframed thoughts and beliefs.
Begin EMDR therapy in Walnut creek, CA Today
Want to be free from painful past experiences holding you back? Flourish Mindset can provide you with skilled EMDR therapy to help you thrive both personally and in your relationships. EMDR has been recently named the most cost-effective treatment for adults with PTSD. Hanna Stensby, LMFT was trained by EMDRIA-approved affiliate HAP and she has additional training in Attachment-focused EMDR therapy from the Parnell Institute.
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Resources:
EMDR International Association. (2022). What is EMDR Therapy? EMDRIA.https://emdria.org
Shapiro F. The role of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy in medicine: addressing the psychological and physical symptoms stemming from adverse life experiences. Perm J. 2014 Winter;18(1):71-7. doi: 10.7812/TPP/13-098. PMID: 24626074; PMCID: PMC3951033.