I Am Interested in EMDR but Don’t Really Know How It Works.

Are you curious about EMDR but not really sure what it is or how it can help? Here is how we typically break it down for people:

When we experience traumatic or overwhelming life events, those experiences are not able to integrate the way that natural learning occurs. When we have not been able to process through an experience, the images, negative beliefs, emotions, and sensations can get easily triggered in our present life when our body senses something similar to the original threat. You can think of these events as getting stuck in your brain like a rock. 

This is very familiar to us when we think about our skin. If you have a cut, as long as it is cleaned it will heal and there likely won’t even be evidence of it anymore. That is because the body is designed to heal itself, but if there are rocks or dirt in the cut at best it will heal deformed and at worst it will cause an infection that will then start to affect seemingly unrelated parts of your body. It is a very similar process when we think of how unhealed trauma affects our life. 

Let’s use the example of a car accident. Let's say you were in a car accident a month, year, or even several years ago. If that event has not been processed, getting in a car today might activate feelings of fear, sweaty palms, a racing heart, and the belief that you are not safe. Barring some rare episode of truly being disoriented to place and time, most people would factually be able to answer that the car accident happened x amount of time ago and there is no present threat at the moment today. However, the problem is not that your logical brain doesn’t know that as a fact.. The problem is that your whole body is screaming at you that you are not safe now. It is like that rock is lighting up in your brain preparing you for possible danger.  

This is how trauma works – it creates hypervigilance in the body in order to prepare you for more danger. The problem is that we are not meant to live in a hypervigilant state. Living in this state can produce more distress over time, so we need to find a way of safely revisiting these past events in order to truly heal from them. EMDR has proven to be one of the ways of doing so. The idea is that bilateral stimulation (left and right stimulation of the brain at the same time) removes what is preventing your brain from healing itself, similar to what cleaning a cut can do for that healing process. Going back to the car accident example, after reprocessing you might be able to say something like “I was in a car accident, it was really terrible when it happened AND I feel calm in my body as I think of it now.”

Just like with any other form of therapy, the earlier in life that trauma occurred, whether or not it was ongoing, whether we had safe attachment figures early on in life, or if the trauma occurred at the hands of those who were supposed to love us and help us feel safe all play a very important role in how quickly any therapy including EMDR will work and how long it will take to heal. Healing is typically not a singular event but a process that happens over time as your system learns that those events are over and you are safe now. This is just the beginning of a very complex topic. We hope this was a good insight for you and welcome outreaches with any questions.