Maybe you’ve heard Prince Harry talking about it, or maybe a friend has recommended it to you, but what is this EMDR thing, anyway? EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, and it is an effective way to treat trauma and anxiety.
EMDR is a powerful treatment option because it helps clients to process not just thoughts but beliefs, body sensations, memory, and feelings through the use of both sides of the body and the brain. Even better, it can be effectively conducted through in-office sessions, or in virtual visits.
Bi-lateral stimulation is one part of the EMDR process. This basically means that both sides of the body are being utilized, and both hemispheres of the brain. Since the left hemisphere of the brain tells the story, like a script, and the right hemisphere of the brain experiences the story, like how it feels in the body, we need to get them “talking” to each other to effectively process. Sometimes, we don’t have words or memories for what has happened to us, but we “feel” the experience inside of us. Sometimes, we are numb to the feelings and only have the narrative. Either way, by utilizing EMDR as a therapeutic mode of treatment for trauma and anxiety, we are allowing deep brain pathways, body pathways, and emotional pathways to have their information processed. This bi-lateral stimulation can be through eye-movement such as following a therapist’s fingers back and forth or a digital ball or light movement on a bar in front of you, through crossing arms/hands and alternately tapping your upper chest, by alternately tapping your legs with your hands, holding electronic pulsers that buzz back and forth in each hand, or even listening to audio tones which ping back and forth from ear to ear. All of these options are effective in allowing deep, deep processing to occur.
EMDR also targets experiences and thoughts stored in cognitive (brain) memory. Through the use of a planned protocol to help clients identify the potential roots of negative beliefs about themselves as a result of the troubling experiences, as well as using the intensity of the disturbance as a baseline, EMDR therapists guide clients through sets of bi-lateral stimulation approximately 40 seconds in length, and the client simply “notices” what each thread of thought, body sensation, emotion, or other mode of memory is revealed. This offers a sort of play-by-play of the experience and how it has been encoded in the past in the body. Our system holds trauma and must process it in a healthy way for trauma to resolve. EMDR allows this healthy way to process because it is a wholistic approach.
Trauma makes experiences feel like they are still currently taking place, but by being present in the moment with the therapist and the bi-lateral movement experiences, the past can be resolved without being too overwhelming as the client can attend to the here-and-now as well as process the past as it is stored in the body currently.
At the end of each set, the therapist asks the client to simply state the “headline” of what they have noticed as a result of that set, be it a body sensation, thought, feeling, or memory. The therapist knows what to listen and look for to know how to direct the client to the next step in processing.
As the processing stages proceed, the level of disturbance reduces, and healthier information can be integrated through the reprocessing process.
