EMDR

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)

EMDR therapy doesn’t require talking in detail about a distressing issue. EMDR instead focuses on changing the emotions, thoughts or behaviors that result from a distressing experience (trauma). This allows your brain to resume a natural healing process. While many people use the words “mind” and “brain” when referring to the same thing, they’re actually different. Your brain is an organ of your body. Your mind is the collection of thoughts, memories, beliefs and experiences that make you who you are. (Cleveland Clinic professional, 2023)

The way your mind works relies on the structure of your brain. That structure involves networks of communicating brain cells across many different areas. That’s especially the case with sections that involve your memories and senses. That networking makes it faster and easier for those areas to work together. That’s why your senses — sights, sounds, smells, tastes and feels — can bring back strong memories.

Disturbing events can be stored in a person’s memory in an isolated memory network for several years. Such memories can be referred to as “old material/information” that becomes familiar and keeps getting triggered repeatedly. In another part of that same person’s mind most of the information that is needed to resolve such disturbing events is not connected or linked up. Same mind, but not connected. EMDR- Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing will help the two networks link up and become connected. New information can enter that person’s mind and resolve the “old material.”  As the person processes that information, old events, pictures, sensations, or emotions may arise. The “old” information/ “material” can become “scenery,” but it does not have to “pull” the person in, or grab hold of the person and weigh them down, emotionally as it once did. EMDR connects and corrects the old information and material that once “weighed” the person down by allowing the new information to sort it out, appropriately.  (Andrew Dobo, Psy.D., 2018)

Our brains are a very natural healing mechanism, very much like our bodies as we want to heal when faced with an injury. EMDR is helpful for adverse life experiences, not just trauma. EMDR therapy is like what happens during REM sleep when we sleep and our brains sort things through and let go of things that we don’t need.  It’s a very similar mechanism.

More information about EMDR can be found at https://www.emdria.org/& EMDR Therapy: What It Is, Procedure & Effectiveness (clevelandclinic.org)