EMDR Therapy: What Is It and How Does It Work?

Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) was created by F. Shapiro to bridge the gap in care for treatment resistant PTSD. EMDR uses both somatic and cognitive level processing to fully desensitize the memory of the trauma. While this modality was originally created to treat trauma, it has since then been adapted to treat a wide variety of challenges such as anxiety, phobias, depression, substance use, and grief.

EMDR works through first identifying the traumatic memories linked in the same memory network, then uses bilateral stimulation in the form of eye movements, tapping, or auditory stimuli to trigger the brain into a state of reprocessing. When we have been traumatized, our brain stores the memory of the trauma in an unprocessed form, with the same beliefs, emotions, and sensations from the time of the event. Flash forward 20 years later, you may find yourself still flooded with the same emotions, sensations, and beliefs when that trauma is triggered. This is a natural survival response that has become stuck and EMDR helps to cause the brain to use its natural healing abilities to become unstuck. Once the memory has been fully processed and a more adaptive belief is correlated with the newly stored memory, the traumatic experience tends to lose its power, meaning you will no longer become activated when the trigger arises.

The stages in EMDR include:

• Phase 1: History-taking

• Phase 2: Preparing the client

• Phase 3: Assessing the target memory

• Phases 4-7: Processing the memory to adaptive resolution

• Phase 8: Evaluating treatment results

EMDR can be especially helpful for pre-verbal traumas (during infancy and early childhood) as well as for traumas that are too difficult to talk about in depth. From my experience, EMDR is an extremely powerful and invaluable method that has the ability to work quite quickly. Interested in learning more about EMDR therapy? Book a free consultation with us to see if EMDR would be a good fit for you.