What is EMDR?
Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a powerful psychological therapy that can help you to heal from the impact of traumatic or stressful life events. Attachment-informed EMDR may also be helpful where your symptoms are the consequence of early childhood experiences with your primary caregivers. These may be a lot more subtle than major traumas, but can still have a huge impact in your adult life.
How does EMDR work?
As with any form of psychotherapy, we can’t yet be completely sure how EMDR works in the brain. However, we do know that when a person is overwhelmed by a distressing event, their brain cannot process information as it normally does. The event can become frozen in time, so that when remembering it, the person feels as if they are reliving it, because the images, sounds, smells, and body sensations haven’t changed. Such memories can have a lasting negative effect which interferes with the way a person sees the world and the way they relate to other people.
EMDR seems to activate the brain’s inherent adaptive information processing system, enabling it to process the information that got stuck at the time of the distressing event. EMDR does not erase the memory, but reduces the emotional charge, so that the person can remember the event without becoming overwhelmed. Often during EMDR, the person will gain helpful insights, and at the end of successful EMDR therapy, will feel lighter, freer and more whole.
About Trauma and EMDR
What to expect
Initial session
If you are interested in exploring whether EMDR is the right way forward for you, the first step is to book an initial session. This session will give you the opportunity to ask any questions and get a sense of whether I am the right therapist for you. I will also be making an assessment about whether EMDR is advisable for you at this time, and if so, how I can best help you.
History and preparation
If we both decide to go ahead with EMDR, a few sessions (usually between 2 and 4) will be spent on taking a full history, preparing you for the process and agreeing a treatment plan.
Processing memories
Once you are sufficiently resourced and prepared, we will be able to start working on past upsetting memories, in accordance with the treatment plan. Processing a memory does not mean talking about it. You will be asked to recall the target memory and to move your eyes from right to left, following the light bar I use for bi-lateral stimulation. After a while I will pause the eye movements and will ask what you are noticing now; usually you will notice some sort of change with regard to thoughts, images, feelings or body sensations. We continue in this way until the memory loses its painful intensity and becomes a neutral memory of something that happened in the past.
During the processing, other associated memories may also heal at the same time. Because of this linking of related memories, you may well experience dramatic and rapid improvement in many aspects of your life.
EMDR is a complete therapy, addressing not only the past event(s), but also present triggers and future concerns.