EMDR
What is EMDR
EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It is an effective, gold standard treatment for healing from emotional distress related to highly stressful situations such as trauma. When the body keeps the score of what has happened to you, it is not uncommon to experience symptoms such as difficulty sleeping, easily triggered by reminders of the event and being on edge. EMDR can help get to the root of the problem by exposing oneself to the distressing events in short increments and adding in bilateral stimulation and powerful resourcing skills to help tolerate the difficult memories.
How does it work?
The idea is that traumatic events, which are overwhelming, are not stored like other memories - they remain active and intrusive. The bilateral stimulation used in EMDR involves a dual focus of attention, requiring you to focus on something happening in the present (for example, following tapping your legs) while thinking about the event in the past. This enables the brain to process and store the memory correctly.
Why is it so effective?
Part of why EMDR is so effective is that it safely exposes people to the memories that they’d rather repress and avoid. Adding in bilateral stimulation, which activates both sides of the brain, people have access to the language/logic of the left hemisphere as well as the emotional response in the right hemisphere.
Negative beliefs about ourselves/others/the world often get associated with theme memories and can trigger the trauma/emotional response when they are activated. EMDR helps us to desensitize the emotional response by exposing ourselves to traumatic memory and allowing for our body minds to adapt and reprocess the memory using our Adaptive Information Processing
Adaptive Information Processing
EMDR relies on the Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model, a theory about how your brain stores memories. This theory, developed by Francine Shapiro, PhD, who also developed EMDR, recognizes that your brain stores normal and traumatic memories differently.
During normal events, your brain stores memories smoothly. It also networks them, so they connect to other things you remember. During disturbing or upsetting events, that networking doesn’t happen correctly. The brain can go “offline” and there’s a disconnect between what you experience (feel, hear, see) and what your brain stores in memory through language.
Often, your brain stores trauma memories in a way that doesn’t allow for healthy healing. Trauma is like a wound that your brain hasn’t been allowed to heal. Because it didn’t have the chance to heal, your brain didn’t receive the message that the danger is over.
Newer experiences can link up to earlier trauma experiences and reinforce a negative experience over and over again. That disrupts the links between your senses and memories. It also acts as an injury to your mind. And just like your body is sensitive to pain from an injury, your mind has a higher sensitivity to things you saw, heard, smelled or felt during a trauma-related event.
This happens not only with events you can remember, but also with suppressed memories. Much like how you learn not to touch a hot stove because it burns your hand, your mind tries to suppress memories to avoid accessing them because they’re painful or upsetting. However, the suppression isn’t perfect, meaning the “injury” can still cause negative symptoms, emotions and behaviors.
(borrowed from the Cleveland Clinic).
For more information visit:
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/22641-emdr-therapy
