Hello! I’m Joy Carman, a therapist at Bradenton Counseling Center. I have been utilizing EMDR as a therapeutic intervention since 2008 to help clients move forward in their lives. It is a very gentle and empowering therapy which started in working with clients who had experienced past traumatic events and PTSD. Since then, there are many more ways EMDR can help with anxiety, depression, phobias, OCD, addiction, alcoholism, and even grief!
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a psychotherapy that enables people to heal from the symptoms and emotional distress that are the result of disturbing life experiences. Repeated studies show that by using EMDR therapy people can experience the benefits of psychotherapy that once took years to make a difference. It is widely assumed that severe emotional pain requires a long time to heal. EMDR therapy shows that the mind can in fact heal from psychological trauma much as the body recovers from physical trauma. When you cut your hand, your body works to close the wound. If a foreign object or repeated injury irritates the wound, it festers and causes pain. Once the block is removed, healing resumes. EMDR therapy demonstrates that a similar sequence of events occurs with mental processes. The brain’s information processing system naturally moves toward mental health. If the system is blocked or imbalanced by the impact of a disturbing event, the emotional wound festers and can cause intense suffering. Once the block is removed, healing resumes. Using the detailed protocols and procedures learned in EMDR therapy training sessions, clinicians help clients activate their natural healing processes.
There has been so much research on EMDR therapy that it is now recognized as an effective form of treatment for trauma and other disturbing experiences by organizations such as the American Psychiatric Association, the World Health Organization, Veterans Administration, and the Department of Defense. Given the worldwide recognition as an effective treatment of trauma, you can easily see how EMDR therapy would be effective in treating the “everyday” memories that are the reason people have low self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness, and all the myriad problems that bring them in for therapy. Over 100,000 clinicians throughout the world use the therapy. Millions of people have been treated successfully over the past 25 years.
Eye movements (or other bilateral stimulation) are used during one part of the session. We do this as a partnership. After we determine which memory to target first, I’ll ask the client to hold different aspects of that event or thought in mind and to use his eyes to track my hand as it moves back and forth across their field of vision. As this happens, for reasons believed by a Harvard researcher to be connected with the biological mechanisms involved in Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, internal associations arise and the clients begin to process the memory and disturbing feelings. In successful EMDR therapy, the meaning of painful events is transformed on an emotional level. For instance, a rape victim shifts from feeling horror and self-disgust to holding the firm belief that, “I survived it and I am strong.” Unlike talk therapy, the insights clients gain in EMDR therapy result not so much from clinician interpretation, but from the client’s own accelerated internal processes. The net effect is that clients conclude EMDR therapy feeling empowered by the very experiences that once debased them. Their wounds have not just closed, they have transformed. I like to tell people that sometimes we have lots of “pieces of the puzzle” and after we’ve finished the EMDR process, “all those pieces of the puzzle fit together.”
EMDR therapy involves attention to three time periods: the past, present, and future. Focus is given to past disturbing memories and related events. The next step is to focus on current situations that cause distress. We then focus on the future – developing the skills and attitudes needed for positive future actions. A good analogy is when you’re using a hairdryer and it blows the circuit, and you have to go out and reset the breaker. This is much like EMDR where your “emotional breaker” is reset, so you can move forward in your life empowered!
EMDR can sometimes be a very short-term therapy, unlike talk therapy, which can sometimes last a lot longer. I like to share with clients it “kickstarts” us forward to where we’d like to be!
*Excerpts from https://www.emdr.com/what-is-emdr/
