EMDR

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It is a procedure used in psychotherapy to help you reduce the impact of experiences from the past that intrude on your present-day life. Usually, these experiences from the past involve a trauma such as assault, abused, and accident or a natural disaster. Even though the trauma may have happened many months or even years ago, you still feel its impact in your daily life through post-traumatic symptoms such as intrusive memories, emotional flooding, nightmares, anxiety, numbing, low self-esteem, and difficulty getting on with your life EMDR has also been used to help people; deal with anxiety and panic, grief, reactions to physical illness, and many other conditions where strong emotions are associated with life experiences. To date, the effectiveness of EMDR for problems other than posttraumatic stress has not been demonstrated by research.

Problems Coping with Trauma

In daily life we all use our minds to figure things out, cope with predictable stress, and reflect our emotions and our self-esteem. The experience of trauma overwhelms our capacity to cope and the trauma experience often gets stored in our minds in ways that make it very difficult to use our usual ways of coping, For example, even though we know that a traumatic event happened in the past, it becomes impossible for us to think about it without starting to feel emotions and other sensations that occurred at the time of the original experience.

We also typically develop a negative way of thinking about ourselves in relation to trauma, such as “I caused it” or “I’m a bad person.” These negative thoughts may influence how we think and feel about ourselves in other situations. EMDR activates you coping skills to deal with the present-day impact of the trauma. The EMDR procedure can help desensitize the images and feelings associated with the trauma. It can help you recognize and work on feelings and thoughts that come up with the trauma. And it can help you think differently about yourself in relation to the trauma.

The therapist will talk with you about yourself in an effort to understand the history of your difficulties and how they are affecting your current life. This may take one or two sessions. If EMDR is recommended, your therapist will explain the procedure. If you decide to go ahead with it, you and the therapist will construct a description of your problem that includes and image or picture that represents the past event, your negative beliefs about yourself in relationship to the event, how you would prefer to think about yourself in relation to the event (positive beliefs), your emotions associated with the event, and your physical sensations associated with the event. You will also be asked to give numerical rating to your degree of upset and the credibility of the positive beliefs so your progress can be monitored during the session.

Michael W. Keller