What is EMDR Therapy?

EMDR stands for ‘Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing’ which was first developed for veterans returning from war and experiencing symptoms of PTSD. Over the course of its life, EMDR has been proven to be highly efficacious with many forms of trauma, distressing experiences, anxiety, depression, phobias, as well as OCD, and can be very effective with individuals of any age, gender, and culture. Most importantly, EMDR is known for reducing the intensity and emotion associated with the trauma memories, making it easier for clients to process trauma because clients are not asked to recall all the details surrounding the trauma event, in turn, reducing re-traumatization.

You’re intrigued aren’t you! 

Before we get into “how” EMDR therapy works, we need to understand the “why” so we will be getting ‘sciency’ for a moment…

EMDR Therapy

There is a theory that every human is born with an adaptive information processing system (AIP) which allows us to integrate both our internal and external experiences, creating and storing memories into networks that form our perceptions, attitudes and behaviours and can influence our pathology and/or mental health.

Overwhelming traumatic events, and/or distressing experiences, can disrupt this AIP system, leading to unprocessed information to be dysfunctionally stored in the memory networks. Then new distress in your current life can link to these old dysfunctionally stored memories which can negatively impact our self-worth, sense of safety, responsibility for self or others, and can limit our sense of control or choice. We also have adaptive (positive) neural networks which are sitting on little islands of their own in our brain, and yes, they are also disconnected from the dysfunctional memory. This means any positive thoughts/experiences you do have are not connected and that dysfunctional memory, so that pesky distressing memory continues to wreak havoc on your well-being as you continue to be triggered in your current daily life.

Let’s put this into an example…

Imagine a distressing memory of being yelled at by your parents for “never getting it right, or not working hard enough.” Fast forward to a current day trigger of your boss getting angry with you because you missed an important deadline. You may be thinking “I am worthless, I can’t get anything right and/or I am incompetent.” Your current day stress may be triggering that distressing memory from your childhood. While you may also have other experiences of success, feeling “I am worthy, I do get things right and/or I am competent” – each of those memories are in separate neural networks and therefore disconnected from your dysfunctional memory. What that means is, even though you may “know” you’re are competent, your brain is still pulling up the old unprocessed dysfunctional memory into your awareness as it’s been triggered by the recent encounter with your boss making you vulnerable to anxiety, depression, and somatic responses to stress. 

This is where the “how” part of EMDR therapy can help to explain how we can remedy this so you’re no longer triggered by current day stressors. The short answer: we process the distressing memories.

If you can imagine looking at the back of your hand while holding it up in front of your face, imagine the dysfunctional memory is the back of your hand and each finger (and thumb) represents thoughts, images, memories, experiences and sensations in the body. Those five items are the channels to the dysfunctional memory that keep it alive and well. Such a pain! EMDR cleans out those channels, getting rid of all of the “yuck” and then we connect those lovely adaptive/positive thoughts to the memory, so the memory is no longer an unprocessed dysfunctional memory but instead a processed adaptive memory. Let me be clear that we are not erasing anyone’s memory! We are simply cleaning out the yuck and connecting the old dysfunctional memory network to a positive neural network.

I know, I still haven’t exactly answered “how” but I’m getting there so please keep reading!

How do we clean out the yuck and connect these neural networks? 

Well, we ask the client to briefly focus on the traumatic memory and use something called bilateral stimulation which is how we reduce the vividness and emotion associated with the trauma. Bilateral stimulation can be done in a number of ways such as: following the clinicians finger back and forth, tapping the outside of your knees, chest butterfly where you tap yourself or we use thera-tappers which are also known as the “buzzies.” You decide which feels the most comfortable and we ‘go with that.’ The process of bilateral stimulation opens up the neural networks so we can access them. How? Well that’s a whole other blog and a lot of science talk so you’ll just have to trust when I tell you it’s highly effective and there is a plethora of science and research backing up how bilateral stimulation opens up neural networks. 

How do you/I know when the memory has been fully processed?

Great question. We will reevaluate your recently processed memory at the onset of the next session to ensure all of the channels of that distressing memory have been cleaned out and we have very specific guidelines to follow that help us know when those channels are clear and the adaptive/positive information is there. Intrigued?

You can learn more about EMDR on the EMDRIA website. For more information or to book an EMDR consultation, please contact us on our booking link. We have several therapists trained in EMDR and other bottom-up trauma treatment modalities.

Contributed by:
Amanda Lucia, MACP, RP (qualifying)

To learn more about Amanda, visit the Team Page.