EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)

EMDR involves moving your eyes in a specific way while processing traumatic memories. EMDR’s goal is to help you heal from trauma or other distressing life experiences. EMDR focuses on changing the emotions, thoughts or behaviors that result from a distressing experience (trauma). This allows your brain to resume a normal healing process. Note that while many people use the words “mind” and “brain” interchangeably, they are actually different. Your brain is an organ of your body and your mind is a collection of thoughts, memories, beliefs and experiences that make you who you are. Your mind relies on the structure of your brain which has networks of communicating brain cells across many different areas. That network makes it faster and easier to work together. That is why your senses; sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touch can bring back strong memories.

Francine Shapiro, PhD, recognized that your brain stores normal and traumatic memories differently and subsequently developed EMDR on the Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model. During normal events your brain stores memories smoothly and networks them so they can connect to other things you remember. During disturbing or upsetting events that networking doesn’t happen correctly. The brain can go “offline” and there is 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 does not allow for healthy healing. Trauma is like a wound that your brain has not been allowed to heal, therefore your brain did not receive the message that the danger is over. Newer experiences can link up to earlier trauma experiences and reinforce negative experiences over and over. This also happens with memories that are suppressed and even these memories can still cause negative symptoms, emotions, and behaviors.

When you undergo EMDR, you access memories of a trauma event in very specific ways. Combined with eye movements and guided instructions, accessing those memories helps you to reprocess what you remember from the negative event. The 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.