EMDR Therapy
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (or EMDR) therapy is an innovative treatment for processing traumatic memories. It’s one of the treatments available at Steadfast Christian
Counseling for people struggling with traumatic memories. To explain EMDR, we have to gain a better understanding of what trauma is.
Trauma is typically an experience or series of experiences that cause high levels of panic, pain, distress, destruction, or death. Trauma can be experienced as a singular event, a pattern of
events, or a routine daily experience.
Listed below are a few examples of traumatic experiences and their typical frequency. This list is of course not exhaustive:
- Single Event: Car accident, victim of assault or violent crime, work injury, natural disasters
- Random but Recurrent Events: Domestic violence, workplace or school bullying, prison/jail
- Routine or Daily Events: War, famine, severe child abuse/vulnerable adult abuse or neglect
How a person reacts and responds to a traumatic event is based on a variety of personal and societal factors to include our upbringing, faith or spiritual beliefs, general mood and temperament, and culture. As humans, we all have a basic biological response to trauma or fear, which is the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response.
If you’ve experienced trauma and your brain and body are unable to process it naturally through REM sleep, the brain and body look for other ways to process the experience and associated memories. The primary symptoms most people report when they are unable to process trauma fall into four categories. These symptoms listed in the table below are highly disruptive and may increase in intensity without treatment. EMDR is well equipped to resolve and reduce each category of symptoms.
- Intrusion: Intrusive nightmares or flashbacks (vivid re-experiencing of trauma awake)
- Avoidance: Avoiding people, places, smells, or sounds that resemble trauma
- Arousal: Body is constantly scanning for danger with a high startle response
- Negative Mood & Cognitive Changes: Mood changes include apathy, irritability, and sadness. Thinking changes include lack of focus, difficulty with short term memory.
Trauma treatments like EMDR aim to help the person re-process traumatic memories and reduce the emotional and physical responses that have become so distressing. EMDR is highly structured and begins with your therapist exploring your symptoms and health history to ensure that EMDR will be a good fit.
- EMDR therapy will focus on processing one memory at a time. This involves yo retelling the traumatic memory repeatedly.
- The therapist will incorporate bilateral stimulation. As you recall your memory, the therapist will have you react simultaneously with images, sounds or sensations that activate both sides of the brain. You may flit your eyes back and forth or stare at little flashes of light on alternating sides of a screen. The goal is to anchor the brain in the current moment as you recall the past.
- EMDR can cause negative symptoms in session and relaxation exercises will be introduced and practiced to calm your nervous system down.
- If you've experienced a core shift in your beliefs about safety, the world, and your faith - EMDR can be helpful in challenging those beliefs and reshaping the narrative.
EMDR at Steadfast
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) Therapy is an evidence- based approach to treating trauma that was developed by Francine Shapiro in the 1980s.
EMDR works by engaging similar brain mechanisms as those that are involved in REM sleep. During REM sleep, the brain processes the memories of the day and files them away for long term storage. Sometimes, when a traumatic or emotionally charged thing happens, it can be hard for the brain to process under normal circumstances. The traumatic experience almost become stuck, waiting to be filed into long term, but can’t get there because it is so sensitive to triggers.
EMDR helps to desensitize the experience so that it can be processed in the brain properly.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy at Steadfast is remarkable and can be a great onramp to healing for many people.
