Demystifying EMDR

What is Trauma?

The human experience is an intricate  journey that involves joy and pain, love and loss, relief and stress. In our complex world, times of stress become inevitable and many of us will face at least one traumatic event in our lifetimes. Trauma, by definition, is not necessarily something negative that happens to us, but something that overwhelms our capacity to cope thus creating changes in our brains and leaves us different as we move forward. Evident changes can show up in our behaviors, our mood, anxiety, sleep, our physical health, our thoughts about ourselves (such as: “the world is against me”) and leaves us feeling more vigilant or wanting to bury it and avoid it altogether. Traumatic events can involve a single isolated incident, or in the case of complex trauma,  the buildup of repeated chronic events centered around neglect, rejection or abandonment. For many, this personal suffering is compounded by the collective trauma that results from pandemics, climate change or systemic racism. 

How Does Trauma Affect Us?

When we experience trauma in any form, it can diminish our sense of belonging and connections with other people. It can cause us to lose faith in the trustworthiness of others or to feel betrayed by family, community or country. In some cases it can lead to a loss of identity or a spiritual crisis. One might even question whether or not there is goodness in the world. Many of us also carry the legacy wounds of unhealed trauma from previous generations which are unconsciously passed down in the form of emotional and physical tension. These hidden wounds can lead to a higher sensitivity to anxiety or depression, greater susceptibility for post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety and medically unexplained chronic pain or illness. 

What is EMDR?

Initially used to treat people with traumatic memories, EMDR is now recognized to additionally treat phobias, PTSD, anxiety, chronic pain and depression. Developed by Francine Shapiro in the late 1980’s EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a complex and progressive therapy that helps people heal from trauma or other distressing life experiences. From its inception, EMDR therapy has been research focused and has proven to be effective through evidenced based data. Seven of 10 studies reported EMDR therapy to be more rapid and/or more effective than trauma focused cognitive behavioral therapy.

Our brains have a built in, natural mechanism to recover from traumatic events. This process involves communication between the amygdala (the alarm signal for stressful events), the hippocampus (which aids in learning, including memories about safety and danger), and the prefrontal cortex (which analyzes and controls behavior and emotion). While many times traumatic experiences can be managed and resolved spontaneously, they may not be processed, integrated and organized by an internal wisdom that ensures clarity and relief without help. Stress responses are part of our natural fight, flight, freeze or fawn /people please instincts. When distress from a disturbing event remains, the upsetting images, thoughts, emotions and patterns of behavior may create feelings of overwhelm, of being back in that moment, or of being “frozen in time”. The unprocessed experience becomes stored in the emotion part of the brain without a time and date stamp and when we are triggered it feels like the original event is happening now. 

EMDR and trauma

Have you ever noticed that sometimes your emotion exceeds the moment? As though upon reflection, you realize that your emotional response doesn’t really fit the situation at hand? It’s not that you’re overactive, it’s that at some point in your life, you’ve had to randomly employ a survival strategy (fight, flight, freeze or fawn) and now your central nervous system is ready to protect you.

Fight or Flight

However, in the aftermath of trauma and unprocessed experiences, our systems automatically deploy the same strategy when we come close to the edge of something similar to the original event, but now that survival mechanism is no longer effective. Furthermore, it doesn’t feel like a choice- it’s an automatic  response to a trigger. This is an indication that a previously similar experience has been encoded in a maladaptive way.

How EMDR works

We are enthusiastic about being EMDR therapists as we have seen first hand how our clients have found an increase in their choices of how to respond to normally triggering situations, found a sense of empowerment from a place of personal responsibility over themselves, their responses, their patterns of behavior and their personal inner meaning. What makes EMDR particularly unique is that it is a self-healing process in which the client is doing the work by themselves and the therapist is only creating the conditions for the healing to occur. This is in juxtaposition of hoping that “the doctor” or some external authority will provide the answer to healing.

A Sigh of Relief 

Moreover, EMDR steers away from the content of the experience; away from the recounting of the narrative which can keep the experience pathologically looping and prove to be incomplete in addressing the somatic residual effects on our central nervous system(increased heart rate, rapid breathing). When we remain in the cognitive realm only, we are using the part of the brain that we used to learn something new in school. This is only one aspect of the brain and insufficient in integrating the whole experience of learning. EMDR concerns itself more with experience; it moves information from our lower brain (our emotion/primal brain) to our higher brain. One way to think about the distinction between the two is that the former is akin to reading about learning to ride a bike and the latter is actually riding the bike. EMDR then is then a full brain and body integrative experience. 

Our bodies bear the burden of trauma and many people are left feeling disconnected from their bodies, flooded by intrusive sensations or emotions, hypervigilant to surroundings, keyed up with anxiety and panic and wanting to shut down with fatigue, distractions (in the forms of overworking, overeating, incessant scrolling, etc) or depression. Because traumatic wounds such as abandonment or rejection can occur before we are verbal, the brain may not even recall memories, but the body might still carry the burdens of the trauma in the form of tension, chronic pain or medically unexplained illness. When experiences begin early in childhood, they can also interfere with a sense of self and one’s ability to establish nourishing, meaningful and reciprocal connections in adult relationships since trauma affects us on all levels of being (mind, body, spirit).

Ultimately, what we have found in our work, and what we are eager to share with you is that this intervention can broaden one’s capacity to turn towards distress (of all levels- from minor to major) while simultaneously remaining connected to inner resources and strengths leaving you feeling clear headed, grounded, spacious, relaxed and becoming a compassionate witness to your mind and to your personal history. Our greatest hope is that people know that they can increase their sense of freedom in body and mind and that our system is designed to institute balance and wants to always move towards health. Within each of us is a hidden potential, a wellspring of untapped natural resources we can use to heal our psychological wounds and help us better navigate challenges we face in our lives. 

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