Eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is a mental health treatment technique. This method involves moving your eyes a specific way while you process traumatic memories. EMDR’s goal is to help you heal from trauma or other distressing life experiences.
EMDR is not merely a technique using eye movements, but a complex, integrative method that utilises very precise protocols.
EMDR therapy doesn’t require talking in detail about a distressing issue, instead focuses on changing the emotions, thoughts or behaviours that result from a distressing experience (trauma). This allows brain to resume a natural healing process.
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 brain stores normal and traumatic memories differently.
During normal events, the brain stores memories smoothly. It also networks them, so they connect to other things you remember. During disturbing or upsetting events, networking doesn’t happen correctly. The brain can go “offline” and there’s a disconnect between what we experience (feel, hear, see) and what our brain stores in memory through language.
Often, the brain stores trauma memories in a way that doesn’t allow for healthy healing. Trauma is like a wound that the brain hasn’t been allowed to heal. Because it didn’t have the chance to heal, the 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 senses and memories. And just like the body is sensitive to pain from an injury, mind has a higher sensitivity to things one saw, heard, smelt or felt during a trauma-related event.
This happens not only with events we can remember, but also with suppressed memories. Much like how we learn not to touch a hot stove because it burns your hand, 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 behaviours.
Triggers
Sights, sounds and smells with a connection or similarity to a trauma event will “trigger” those improperly stored memories. Unlike other memories, these can cause overwhelming feelings of fear, anxiety, anger or panic.
An example of this is a post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD ‘Flashback’ , where improper storage and networking causes the mind to access those memories in a way that’s uncontrolled, distorted and overpowering. That’s why people with a history of flashbacks describe feeling as if they were reliving a disturbing event. The past becomes the present.
Reprocessing and repair
When one undergoes EMDR, you access memories of a trauma event in very specific ways. Combined with eye movements and guided instructions, accessing those memories helps you reprocess what you remember from the negative event.
That reprocessing helps “repair” the mental injury from that memory. Remembering what happened to you will no longer feel like reliving it, and the related feelings will be much more manageable.
Some of the routinely treated clinical problems with which EMDR has been employed with considerable success:
- Post traumatic Stress Disorder/
- Acute Stress Disorder
- Generalised Anxiety Disorder
- Depression and Depressed mood
- Sleep Disorders
- Phobias
- Addiction Management
- Anger management
- Chronic Pain Management
- Panic Attacks/ Panic Disorder
- Dissociative disorders
- Personality disorders
And more…
EMDR is used in conjunction with clinical hypnotherapy, and other self help techniques as defined by the individual needs. EMDR is not suitable for those with a detached retina or glaucoma.