The past can be haunting.
It leaves you feeling breathless and unable to focus. You can’t move forward or live a life that is fully in the present. When the past has a strong grip on you, you never really know how to handle it.
As humans, we go through a lot. Life can feel like a rollercoaster that is full of just as many ups as it has downs. Then when you go through something that shakes you to your core, it can make life feel all the more challenging.
Talk therapy, or traditional therapy, can be beneficial for many people. However, sometimes the past had such a stronghold that even that doesn’t help. What can you do if you tried therapy but it didn’t help? Thankfully, EMDR Therapy can help.
What Is EMDR?
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, or EMDR, is a type of therapy that can treat various mental health issues.
EMDR is an evidence based approach that can be useful when traditional talk therapy does not fully help. When someone has gone through something distressing, it can alter the way their brain functions.
EMDR was originally founded as a way to help people who were dealing with trauma or PTSD. Anybody, at any age, can go through a traumatic experience. Some of the most common situations that can be traumatic and cause PTSD are:
- Car accidents
- Abuse (childhood, domestic, sexual, physical, or mental)
- Witnessing a crime
- Being a victim of a crime
- Returning from war
It is important to note, however, that EMDR is now widely being used to treat a variety of mental health concerns, including anxiety, depression, and other mood disorders.
How Does EMDR Work?
If someone first reads about EMDR, they might think it sounds like a strange science expert and be scared of it. In reality, EMDR is a very harmless and safe way to get help.
There’s an eight-step process to most EMDR sessions. That doesn’t mean that there are only 8 sessions. Starting with a history intake, a therapist will work with their client to set the goals and specific memory they are trying to target with EMDR.
When you are going through something traumatic, the brain will basically shut itself off to help protect you from the situation. However, that doesn’t mean you don’t remember it or it won’t end up affecting you. When this coping mechanism is employed, it creates a disconnect between what you went through and what you remember.
Commonly, a lot of people believe that they have to remember every single detail of the trauma they went through. However, that is definitely not the case. EMDR can still fully work without every single detail.
What Happens In An EMDR Session?
During each phase where EMDR take places, bilateral stimulation of the eyes is utilized by a therapist. Basically, that is a fancy way of saying eye movements. Using specific words and guided exercises, a client will be walked through their memory using specific eye movements.
That might sound very new-age. These eye movements are based on the ways our eyes rapidly move during the REM sleep stage. It is during this stage of sleep that memories are processed. So when the trauma was ignored or pushed to the back of the mind as a way to cope, these eye movements help to bring them to the surface level. But in a safe way that helps to process the memories.
Going through something traumatic can really be hard on the human spirit. But it is through approaches such as EMDR that we can really see the true power of how capable we are to heal. Sometimes we just need a guiding hand.
If you are struggling with your past, don’t hesitate to reach out to us for trauma therapy.
