You may have heard of EMDR from friends or family that have experienced it in therapy, or maybe when Prince Harry spoke publicly about using it to heal symptoms of trauma following the death of his mother, Princess Diana. For many people, EMDR sounds confusing, nebulous, and downright weird. EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. Its name is a mouthful for sure and does little to clarify what it is. I’m here today to break it down for you, so it’s easier to understand. EMDR was discovered on accident by Stanford psychologist and professor, Francine Shapiro in the late 1980s. While on a walk one afternoon, she began to reflect on a traumatic memory that frequently haunted her. While processing this memory and spontaneously moving her eyes back and forth as she peered up at the beautiful trees on either side of her path, she noticed that she felt remarkably different about the memory following her walk. Although she could still call up the memory and acknowledge that it was a terrible occurrence, it no longer carried a physical and emotional charge within her body and psyche. Have you ever had the experience of going about a normal day in relative peace when something triggers a painful memory from your past, and all of a sudden, it feels like your nervous system has been hijacked? You tense up, your mood changes, negative thoughts arise, and your heart begins to race. Why? Nothing has changed in your current circumstance, and yet here you are, re-experiencing a painful event from your past with all its associated unpleasant emotions, thoughts, and body sensations. You might think things like, “Get me out of this hell! What is going on? Why is this happening? I was fine one minute, and in the next, I’m completely derailed!”

YOU CAN’T TALK YOUR WAY OUT OF IT

I have been a talk therapist for 20+ years, and although I have seen and experienced great success with this modality, there have been times when talk therapy plateaus. Sometimes, we reach a point in therapy where there are no more gems to mine from the experience, nothing else to learn or gain. Something still feels stuck. We have talked a story to death, analyzed it from all different directions, and intellectually gained a wise understanding of what happened and why, and yet, our bodies appear to have not received the memo! Our bodies continue to react when triggered, even though we know better. This is so frustrating and sometimes even debilitating. But, we can’t help it. Our nervous systems take over, and our bodies follow suit. Then, we feel anxious or depressed about still struggling with this thing that happened a long time ago. Why can’t we let it go and move on?

Trauma Gets Stuck in Our Bodies

Trauma is anything difficult that happens to us that we weren’t prepared to handle, overwhelms our coping abilities, and continues to disrupt our current functioning. Trauma does not always live in the forefront of our minds, but instead seems to lurk in the back…until it gets bumped or triggered by something in the present. I love metaphors, so it’s helpful for me to think of trauma as a thorn that gets embedded in our nervous system. Over time, tissue grows around it, and we become less aware of its existence. We adapt and move on. It’s just part of our makeup now. We don’t even realize that it’s still infecting us. Until one day, our trusty coping mechanisms break down and stop working. Maybe trauma begins to rear its ugly head when we become enraged or threatened, leading us to feel out of control and do something we regret. Maybe through avoidant behaviors, trauma holds us back from fully engaging in life and pursuing our dreams. Maybe trauma manifests as disconnection and disassociation from our own bodies and from each other. Maybe trauma leads to substance abuse and numbing behaviors. Whatever the reason, the cure for trauma is often the excavation of the thorn. When talk therapy can’t do that, we turn to EMDR and other body-based therapies for healing and recovery. EMDR circumvents the long and arduous process of talk therapy by going directly to the thorn inside the body, extracting it, and moving it through the memory network. It can now be filed away with all our other memories, no longer running in the background, tripping us up. You can recall the memory if needed, but it no longer has the power to overwhelm or undermine you.

So How Does It Work?

EMDR works through the mechanism of bilateral stimulation. Like in the case of Francine Shapiro’s alternating eye movements, bilateral stimulation is the use of a stimulus presented to both sides of the body while simultaneously processing a painful memory. Other examples of bilateral stimulation (BLS) include the use of tactile tappers or buzzers held in the hands, alternating audio sounds from headphones, or manual self-tapping on one’s own body. The purpose of BLS is three-fold. First, it allows you to stay firmly grounded in the present as you revisit a painful memory from the past. For example, some people worry that revisiting a trauma will pull them down a rabbit hole from which they cannot escape. BLS prevents you from reliving the painful event by keeping you grounded in conscious awareness. This is not hypnosis! Second, the speed of BLS gets the memory network flowing and moving again. Like a raft that has become stuck and entangled by brush on the side of a river, the aim of EMDR is for trauma to become disentangled from the stuck places within our minds and bodies, so that it can more easily move out and through. In other words, a jarring image or uncomfortable emotion or sensation can, under normal circumstances, halt processing due to the involuntary fight, flight, freeze responses. With BLS, those charged memories get neutralized, and we’re able to stay open and receptive to adaptive processing and healing. Third, bilateral stimulation is calming. It boosts the release of serotonin and dopamine in the brain, reducing stress responses that may arise during processing.

What Can You Hope For?

In my experience as a therapist, I have never seen a therapeutic approach work as quickly and effectively as EMDR when it comes to treating and healing trauma. Of course, everyone processes differently and at different speeds, but I have seen clients process and heal complex traumas in 1-2 50-minute sessions. Other clients may require 8-10 sessions to heal. Surprisingly, the severity of the trauma does not seem to correlate with length of treatment. What you can expect at the end of treatment is a nervous system that is better regulated. What used to trigger uncomfortable emotional and physical responses no longer bothers you. The thorn has been removed, so you don’t have to worry about bumping it. Your world can now expand. You may still feel sad about what happened, but you no longer feel held back or controlled by it. And most importantly, you no longer carry a negative belief about yourself associated with the trauma such as “It was my fault,” “I’m bad,” “I can’t trust myself or anyone,” “There’s something wrong with me,” “I have to be perfect,” etc. Positive, more adaptive beliefs are installed with BLS, and people report they are able to move forward with greater ease.

Does it Really Work?

After Francine Shapiro experienced spontaneous healing while on a walk that fateful day in the 1980s, she took her compelling results back to her colleagues at Stanford and eventually developed a standardized protocol following years of extensive research and empirical studies that were conducted. Probably because EMDR does seem a little “out there” and “woo woo,” EMDR is the most extensively studied and empirically supported therapy for trauma. It is endorsed by the VA, the American Psychiatric Association, the World Health Organization, the US Department of Health and Human Services, and the US Department of Defense. The VA uses it primarily to treat Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Ongoing EMDR research shows positive clinical outcomes in the treatment of depression, OCD, chronic pain, addictions, and other distressing life experiences. Francine Shapiro and her colleagues published results indicating that more than 7 million people have been treated successfully by 110,000 therapists in 130 countries since 2016.

How do I Learn More?

The EMDR International Association at https://www.emdria.org, is a great resource for learning more about EMDR. There you can find trained therapists and also access the latest research studies in field of EMDR. The EMDR Institute at https://www.emdr.com/what-is-emdr/ is another vaulable resource. If you live in Arizona, you can work with me! I provide EMDR therapy both in person and virtually. Reach out to me for more information at www.walkswithwhitney.com.