What is EMDR Therapy?

Maybe you've heard about EMDR from a friend or online and you are wondering if it could help you. This post and the coming posts will help you l

earn more about EMDR and determine if this type of therapy is a good fit for you.

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing - a long title to describe how Eye Movements and Bilateral Stimulation (tapping left and right), combined with a specific protocol can help calm down the emotional response one has to trauma or other negative memories.

EMDR was founded by Francine Shapiro in the late 80's. The story goes that Francine received negative news and was very upset. She went for a walk in the park while thinking about this news and was moving her eyes left and right as she walked. She noticed she felt much less upset about the news afterwards. Francine then researched this idea and founded EMDR Therapy. EMDR is now suggested by the American Psychological Association and the World Health Organization as a first line of treatment for PTSD.

I know that EMDR can sounds very "woo woo" at first. And I'll admit that I also was skeptical when I first heard someone describe it to me early in my career.

To help with that concern, let me tell you a little why EMDR works in this post and posts to follow.

1) Your body is meant to heal itself.

Experiencing trauma can block the brain's natural way of recovering from distressing events. EMDR is designed to reactivate this natural healing process.

I like to tell my clients EMDR is like pushing a "jumpstart" button in the brain. Trauma and distressing events are frozen in the right side of the brain and are not filed away neatly like the rest of our life experiences. When the trauma is frozen like this it is also gets stuck with snippets of information from that original event - sounds, smells, thoughts, visuals, and even body sensations - all stored in no particular order. This is why people get "triggered" by a sound or smell - it takes them back to that frozen, distressing memory that hasn't been processed yet. This is often referred to as the AIP model of EMDR.

EMDR can help "restart" the brain's natural way of processing the information in order to file it away so it is no longer frozen in this way, helping clients feel less triggered day to day.

If you would like to learn more about Adaptive Information Processing and EMDR here is a link to the EMDR International Association's description: https://www.emdria.org/about-emdr-therapy/aip-model/