EMDR Therapy

We’ll learn about your nervous system and how your brain and body respond to stress / threats to try to protect you. We’ll explore emotion regulation skills so you can feel more confident managing emotions that come up inside and outside of sessions. I’ll teach you nervous system resourcing skills so you have some tools in your back pocket to access a sense of calm / peace. We’ll review the main targets (or things you’d like to focus on) for EMDR processing.

You’ll choose a target (memory / event / experience) to work on and I’ll help you identify images, emotions, negative beliefs, and body sensations related to it as well as past experiences connected to it.

This is the phase most people think of as ‘EMDR’, as this is where processing of memories and experiences occur. 

You’ll engage with several short sets of processing an experience of your choice. Think about this experience like engaging in a body / mind free association related to a certain topic. You’ll keep awareness of the present, while also allowing yourself to revisit past material in your brain and body, and while allowing spontaneous new thoughts, emotions, visuals, and beliefs to arise. While observing your internal experience, you will simultaneously engage in bilateral stimulation (BLS) which is a fancy umbrella term for back and forth movements (this can be with eye movements, tapping, sounds, etc.). 

You’ll continue processing material until you no longer feel the same level of distress, as you did prior. I’ll be there with you the whole time, periodically checking in and lightly guiding you if you hit stuck places.

This is the phase where you’ll integrate positive beliefs about yourself that you would like to connect to the past experience that you processed. Some common examples of positive beliefs that people connect to past experiences are ‘I am safe’, ‘I am lovable’, ‘I am enough’, etc. .

I’ll guide you through a mindful body scan exercise to help you identify if there are any lingering emotions and body sensations that need to be addressed connected to the experience you processed.

At the end of a session or after you complete processing a target, I’ll help you check in on the processing that occurred and help come back to a centered place through using some of the regulation and resourcing skills we worked on in the preparation phase of EMDR.

We’ll check in at the beginning of sessions about how past EMDR processing has gone and discuss any processing that has continued for you outside of our sessions. We’lll make a plan around continuing to process past targets or determine targets you’d like to work on next.

The length of EMDR therapy can vary widely from person to person depending on a person’s history, the resources one has coming into therapy, the nature of the experiences one wants to process (one time event versus repeated distress over years), and how much support one got after the traumatic experience.  

Often EMDR therapy can take longer for those with C-PTSD, as it might take a longer time to process an experience that occurred over years as opposed to something that happened one time.

One of the things many people find appealing about EMDR, is you don’t have to talk much  about your past experiences, if you do not wish to. 

In the beginning of therapy I will ask about your history to get an understanding of what you are hoping to work on. It’s up to you how much detail you’d like to share. Sharing about your experience can provide me with useful context and for some people it can feel healing to share their story with someone who can hold their experience with empathy and nonjudgement. However, it is not necessary for you to share everything if you don’t want to.

When someone engages in EMDR processing (or EMDR desensitization phase) a lot of the experience is internal, or being processed internally in the mind and body. I’ll check-in with you throughout the EMDR processing and if you wish to share parts of it with me you can.

Yes, research is growing that shows EMDR can help people with C-PTSD decrease symptoms of PTSD, depression, & anxiety.

A few sources: 

1(https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00534/full)

2(https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/imagery-rescripting-and-eye-movement-desensitisation-and-reprocessing-as-treatment-for-adults-with-posttraumatic-stress-disorder-from-childhood-trauma-randomised-clinical-trial/A97132EE142BA88DA207E8CCB0044475)

3 (https://spj.science.org/doi/10.1891/1933-3196.13.4.284)

4(https://academic.oup.com/swr/article-abstract/23/2/103/1637508?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false)

BLS also known as ‘bilateral stimulation’ is a term that refers to back and forth movements (with our eyes, hands, or feet) or alternating stimulation between our left and right side of the body (which can be done with sounds, buzzers, etc.).

I most commonly use tapping with clients (butterfly taps, butterfly hug, tapping on legs with hands, or tapping with feet) and eye movements. If you find buzzers or audio tones work better for you I am open to us using that as well. For me it is most important to find a form of BLS that works best for you and your processing. 

Even though EMDR has been studied extensively, and we know it is effective for processing trauma, we have still yet to determine the exact mechanism of how it works. There are several main theories for how EMDR works:

• Adaptive information processing (AIP) – Our brain has many memory networks and when a trauma occurs the event gets stored maladaptively in one of these networks. Traumatic memories get stored in our brain in negative emotions, beliefs, thoughts, and body sensations connected to the original experience. By engaging in EMDR processing we are able to work on the initial memory network, metabolizing our past experience and integrating it with adaptive memory networks. This allows us to integrate positive and empowering emotions and thoughts, alongside the past memories. This process impacts our present emotions, sense of self worth, self confidence, and reactions to current day triggers. 

• Bilateral stimulation (BLS) – is a fancy term that describes back and forth movements. BLS is theorized to help by taxing our working memory which allows us to process past memories without the same intensity or level of disturbance as when we are solely focused on the memory alone. Another theory is that the BLS provides an ‘orienting response’ that one’s brain and body will orient too, which in turn creates a relaxation response, which may interrupt the traumatic memory network and promote the formation of episodic memory and integrate that with semantic memory.  

• REM sleep – one hypothesis is that EMDR creates a REM-like (referring to the sleep stage, rapid eye movement) experience that promotes episodic memory integration.

EMDRIA has an abundance of blogs and free resources that help people learn more about EMDR.