EMDR Therapy
What Is EMDR Therapy?
The brain and body have an innate ability to heal from trauma. EMDR, which stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is a form of therapy that utilizes this ability.
The best way to understand EMDR is through a very simple analogy: when you suffer a physical injury and see a doctor, the doctor’s function is to remove any impediments to the body’s natural healing process. The doctor does not create new skin or bone cell growth—the body does all that. The doctor’s role is simply to make sure the body can perform its natural healing capacities.
EMDR therapy functions in a similar manner. The therapist utilizes either visual or tactile bilateral stimulation in combination with a protocol of questions that allow the client to reprocess traumatic memories and resolve current symptoms. In this way, EMDR helps people heal emotional wounds just as the body heals from physical wounds.
There is a great video demonstrating how EMDR works and what makes it effective on the official EMDRIA website.
How Effective Is EMDR?
There is a wealth of research on the success of EMDR as a treatment model. According to many studies, roughly 84 to 90 percent of single-event trauma victims no longer have PTSD symptoms after just three sessions of EMDR.¹ It is considered one of the premier approaches to trauma therapy by the World Health Organization, the American Psychological Association, and Department of Defense.²
What makes EMDR more effective than most forms of therapy is that it gets right to the root of trauma. It is a bottom-up approach rather than a top-down approach, meaning that it heals the core issues instead of just addressing the symptoms. Most forms of talk therapy are ineffective at treating trauma because they only engage the intellect. EMDR engages the body and the limbic system of the brain where trauma is stored. It bypasses the need to “talk through” trauma and allows you to heal trauma at its core.
In my practice, I use EMDR for adults who struggle with trauma, anxiety, relationship issues, and low self-esteem. I have found this approach to be remarkably successful in treating a wide variety of mental health issues.
How Does EMDR Therapy Work?
It usually begins by going over your psychosocial history as well as your goals for treatment. Together, you and I will create a Master Treatment Plan that identifies traumatic events from the past that are connected to current problems in your life.
Next, we’ll spend a couple sessions developing and practicing anxiety management skills in preparation for EMDR work. These can include guided imagery, mindfulness strategies, and other grounding techniques for helping you stay centered as you work through your trauma.
When that’s done, we will begin the desensitization and reprocessing phase of EMDR treatment. You will initially focus on your target memory while attending to either visual or tactile bilateral stimulation. In a natural, free-associative manner, the traumatic material will be reprocessed and integrated in a sequential narrative fashion like other memories, removing the emotional and physiological charge and impact of the memory.
Generally speaking, EMDR sessions are about 55 minutes in length. However, I am also able to offer 75 to 80-minute sessions if needed. Having an extra 20 to 25 minutes is often incredibly helpful if you need more time to reprocess your memories. It also gives you more time for closure and grounding at the end of the session.
IFS In Conjunction With EMDR
In addition to standard EMDR work, I bring a lot of other treatment approaches into the therapeutic process. Sometimes I use an approach called IFS (Internal Family Systems). The idea behind IFS is that each individual is made up of many different parts. Many of these parts are wounded by trauma and seek to protect you in ways that aren’t always helpful (e.g., part of you may be tempted to isolate rather than risk rejection).
IFS can facilitate communication and integration between different parts of the self, significantly decreasing internal conflict and repetitive patterns of behavior that no longer serve your best interests.
How Can EMDR Benefit My Life?
The beauty of EMDR is that when you’ve successfully reprocessed traumatic memories and desensitized current triggers, you will feel relief and start to see your life with a clearer perspective. In this way, EMDR therapy helps you reprocess painful memories and acts as a fast track to insight. It allows you to understand yourself on a deeper level and make decisions that move you toward better health and more satisfying relationships.
What’s more, EMDR resolves lifelong issues that traditional talk therapy can’t even touch. Most of the time, using talk therapy for trauma just results in minimal gains and overexposure to painful memories. After all, it requires you to talk about what happened. With EMDR, you need only share basic details about your trauma. EMDR therapy does not require you to believe that it will work. The EMDR protocol paired with bilateral stimulation will activate your mind and body’s natural healing abilities.
You Don’t Have To Keep Living In The Shadow Of The Past
Like a lot of therapists, I primarily relied on talk therapy before my training in EMDR. I was skeptical about EMDR—it sounded too good to be true. Then I began a training course for the approach and my confidence in it grew enormously. Today, I am an EMDRIA-certified EMDR therapist who uses the approach with the majority of my clients.
If you would like to try EMDR therapy for yourself and step into your future boldly and fearlessly, I encourage you to connect with me. To get started, you can use the contact form or call me at 949-682-5731.
