What is EMDR Therapy?
EMDR - Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing is a therapy designed to relieve the symptoms of a traumatic event in your life. It is hands down the most effective and least painful way to relieve trauma I have ever used. Even better it is the least invasive and quickest way to be freed of the emotional overwhelm, flashbacks, triggers to anxiety, and fear that come from a traumatic event.
EMDR was designed by a brain scientist named Francine Shapiro. She noticed that when she was feeling intense emotions of anger and then went on walks, that after the walk the emotions felt less intense. As a true brain scientist would, she got curious about why and had a hypothesis that it had something to do with the way walking lights up both hemispheres of our brains. This in scientific terms is called Bilateral stimulation. It can be triggered when we do anything that moves both sides of our body. Like swimming, walking, running, bike riding and so on. When both hemispheres of our brain are working together we access the full capacity of our brains. Fast forward through the genius of a brain scientist's understanding of how a brain works. Dr Shapiro discovered that moving one's eyes back and forth also creates bilateral stimulation and lights up the brain's capacity to process information as well. She took this discovery into the lab and began having people think about distressing events in their lives while moving their eyes back and forth. Sure enough once they were done the events where not so distressing. EMDR was born!
When we experience a traumatic event the capacity for the left and right hemispheres, the frontal lobe, of our brains is limited and often stopped altogether because another part of our brain called the Limbic brain takes over. The Limbic brain is in the very back of our brain. It is evolutionarily the oldest part of our brain. That means many animals even reptiles have this same part of the brain. It is sometimes called the Reptile brain. It is the Flight, Fight, or Freeze part of our brain. It takes over by shutting down all other parts of the brain to put all efforts into surviving the threatening event. This is very effective for survival but the outcome of turning off our frontal lobe (the right and left hemispheres of the brain ) is that our memory of events gets distorted. Important details are lost, cause and effect, emotional experiences, and understanding are lost. This results in the post-traumatic symptoms most people experience, like intense fragmented emotions that are hard to understand, feelings of shame and fault, and most importantly no time orientation.
The lack of time orientation that the limibc brain has seems to be the most problematic in my observations. The brain can hear, smell, or feel something in the present time and think that the traumatic event is happening again and trigger the whole nervous system back to flight fight, or freeze. If this was a bug in a computer we would fix it and tell the limbic brain what you are experiencing is a memory from the past, not an event happening right now. EMDR does that fix that bug! The EMDR process keeps a person in the present time with bilateral stimulation while remembering the event. Once reprocessed in real time the limbic brain relaxes and can understand that the threat was in the past.
Bilateral stimulation can occur by moving the eyes back and forth, tapping a persons knees back and forth, putting ear phones on with a toning in each ear back and forth, or my favorite providing hand held buzzers that alternate buzzing back and forth.
With the Frontal Lobe engaged while going through a traumatic memory, there is so much healing potential. While doing bilateral stimulation that lights up that frontal lobe you have the full capacity to understand nuances of your emotions and intentions, details that occurred. My favorite part is that you can experience what kind of support you needed at the moment. Then you can reprocess that event and experience what it would have been like to have that support. It turns out that EMDR while sounding very scientific and cold is actually a very creative process.
When people are done they always say “That was it! It’s over?” they are amazed at how quickly something that had such a debilitating control over their lives could be gone so quickly. Then they say “Thank you so much! You are amazing!” And then I say “ You are welcome but I did not do anything to heal you. You did. All the solutions came from you, I just helped you access them.”
If you are curious about this process or have more questions feel free to contact us at www.ShadeTreeFamilyCounseling.com. We will be happy to go into more detail about this process to help you determine if it is the right path for you.