Traumatic experiences can significantly impact our health and well-being, often causing devastating post-traumatic stress responses. EMDR, short for “Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing”, is a therapy technique that is consistently proven to support individuals in healing from trauma.
To understand how EMDR therapy works, it is helpful to understand how trauma can interfere with your brain's ability to process information and naturally recover from stress. In everyday life, our brains heal themselves all the time. You've resolved and worked through many difficult life experiences without the help of EMDR countless times.
However, sometimes we experience events that our bodies register as exceptionally threatening, intense, or stressful - when this happens, the memory of the event gets kind of stuck during the brain’s processing of it and the event is stored in what is we refer to as a “state-specific” form. This means that the images, feelings, beliefs, and sensory information associated with the traumatic event can remain present, and at times it can feel like we are experiencing the event over and over again.
These traumatic memories are considered “unprocessed” and can impact our beliefs about ourselves and the world.
EMDR can be supportive in reprocessing the disturbing event and decreasing the amount of distress associated with those memories. A trained EMDR therapist will use EMDR therapy techniques to help you reprocess traumatic events in your brain (and body) so that normal healing can resume and you can live more fully in the present.
After reprocessing an event through EMDR Therapy, the information about the experience is the same, but the way that you understand the experience, the feelings around it, the meaning you make from it, and how the experience impacts your daily life is what changes.
Following trauma therapy, you'll be able to understand your difficult experiences from a different perspective - one grounded in safety. Alleviating your symptoms will allow you to heal and move forward.
*In addition to PTSD symptoms, EMDR has also been found to be a highly effective treatment for Anxiety disorders, Depression, Panic Attacks, Phobias, Addictions, Chronic Pain, OCD, Attachment Wounding, Complicated Grief, and Stress Reduction.
More Information about EMDR can be found below:
