What Is EMDR?

The core tenet of EMDR is that people have an innate tendency to move towards health and wholeness and they have the inner capacity to achieve them.

When there has been disturbing or traumatic events in our lives they can cause disruption. A person's innate ability to process and integrate the experience/s within the central nervous system can be impaired. The experiences become encoded in the nervous system in a maladaptive way causing any number of symptoms such as: anxiety, depression, flashbacks, nightmares, panic, reoccurring negative thoughts, etc. The left and right brain are unable to metabolize the event so it becomes frozen in the body/brain and disrupts our lives in a myriad of ways.

HOW DOES EMDR WORK?

The client and the clinician work together to safely activate the memory of the disturbing life event. We then use dual attention stimulation (for example: moving the eyes left to right or using a tone in the left and right ear) while memory is activated. This process of getting the left brain to communicate with the right brain facilitates normal information processing and integration so that the disturbing memory or experience is metabolized. It is no longer stuck in the nervous system wreaking havoc on other parts of your life. You retain the memory/experience as part of your past, but it does not infect your present or have the same "charge".

CASE EXAMPLES OF HOW EMDR WORKS?

Case 1

A woman is sexually assaulted in college. She begins to have flashbacks of what happened to her. When she smells a certain cologne she becomes nauseous. It is hard for her to concentrate and she is not sleeping well. She keeps pushing forward thinking that in time she will feel better as she gets some distance from the traumatic event.

Three years later, she begins to seriously date someone. When they are intimate she has difficulty breathing and wants to flee. She becomes frustrated, depressed, sad, and anxious because so much time has passed and she feels she should be "over" the sexual assault. She is confused because she has been able to be intimate casually since the assault. She is confused why, in a relationship with some one she trusts, she is having these reactions. She pulls back from socializing because her self-esteem has diminished. She feels broken, as though she will never be herself again.

A friend convinces her to try therapy. In therapy, she and her clinician work on the current troublesome reaction to being intimate with her partner. The clinician begins the preparation phase of EMDR. When the client is ready to engage in EMDR, she goes to a recent memory of being intimate. A memory of the sexual assault emerges. The clinician and the client work to make sure the memories don't overwhelm her. While the client is safely "in the memory". the clinician helps her to engage in dual attention stimulation (eye movements left to right). After "processing" the trauma and the disturbance related to the event- the client starts to see her symptoms decrease. She smells the cologne but it does not make her nauseous. She is sleeping better and the flashbacks are gone. She can remember all of what happened to her, but when she is being intimate with her partner she is present with him and not linking him to the assault.

Case 2:

A man is having trouble with is boss. He feels the boss is being unreasonable, but he can't figure out how to stand his ground and has fear of losing his job. He is frustrated with himself because even though he is 42, he feels like he is 10 when he tries to talk to his boss. He feels crazy because he knows he has the right to hold his ground but he can't do it. He starts to feel depressed, angry, and badly about himself.

He begins therapy and after EMDR preparation is completed, he and his clinician target the interaction he had with his boss last week. When they bring up that memory and then do the dual attention activity, the client remembers an argument with his father when he was a child. He remembers is father becoming very angry, unable to listen to or honor his side of the story, and punishing him severely. The client is surprised that the interaction with his boss takes him back to those memories with his father. The clinician and client safely work on this and other childhood memories and reprocess them so they are no longer lodged in the client's nervous system.

After reprocessing, the man finds that he is able to speak up to his boss. He is able to be reasonable, articulate, and effective advocating for himself at work. He also finds that he is able to be more direct with his wife about his needs. He witnesses his relationship with his wife and children improving. He begins to feel confident about his life and his ability to navigate his roles as employee, husband and father and achieve his goals. His depression lifts. The client remembers the negative experiences in his childhood but does not feel they are infecting his present day life.