EMDR Therapy
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing
EMDR therapy is an integrative psychotherapy approach that has been extensively researched and proven effective for the treatment of trauma, anxiety, substance abuse, and other conditions. It involves being guided through standardized protocols, which allow your brain to reprocess and heal from past experiences or future fears. Results are often achieved rapidly and are effective long-term. All of our therapists are fully trained in EMDR and available for scheduling services.
Human beings — including you — are far more resilient than we could imagine. Tap into your innate resiliency.
What is EMDR?
Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing Therapy is a neuro-based intervention that works with your brain and nervous system's natural ability to heal and orient to the present. It is considered one of the best practices for treating PTSD and other stress and trauma-based disorders. It also works with anything that is feeling stuck and causing “yuck” or distress to your nervous system.
How does EMDR help with trauma?
Adversarial experiences and trauma are stored in our brains and nervous systems differently than non-stressful information. When the system is threatened or perceives there is a threat, it prioritizes survival over all else.
The limbic system or mammalian brain initiates a reaction of fight, flight, or freeze/shutdown response. This reaction is based partially on the information in the present situation but is mostly based on what survival response worked to save your life previously.
EMDR helps reprocess past traumas so that the thinking logical part of the brain can make sense of that original trauma response that saved your life, and help the nervous system stay grounded in the present so that when something happens in the future, you can respond based on the current information versus being through into an old survival reaction.
Successful EMDR treatment doesn’t mean you will never get activated again; it means that you get activated way less often when it happens you recognize it quickly and know how to use your resources to get yourself back to a grounded state as quickly as is safe.
EMDR Results and Research
EMDR is one of the most well-researched types of therapy in the last 20 years. There are studies with experimental designs, case studies with incredibly rare disorders, studies looking at fMRI data before and after EMDR treatment and the list goes on. It is evidence-based, and the new research continues to come out every month to support its efficacy and show its uses with other populations and sets of symptoms.
EMDR is a science-backed method to help you heal.
Perhaps you’ve tried traditional psychotherapy and realized that talking about your trauma isn’t healing it, but rather making you feel more anxious. Maybe you feel as though you are always on high alert and can’t seem to manage or even identify your issues.
If you can relate, you are not alone. Unlike talk therapy, EMDR doesn’t require talking in detail about the distressing issue, but rather allows the brain to tune into its innate ability to heal and resolve unprocessed traumatic memories in the brain.
Interested in EMDR Therapy?
Use the form below to inquire about EMDR therapy, and we’ll reach out to you with next steps soon.
EMDR Frequently Asked Questions
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Many EMDR sessions will feel like other therapy sessions where your clinician asks you questions and get to know you. The power of a safe therapeutic relationship is important to all our clinicians. What EMDR is known for is eye movements and other forms of bilateral stimulation. Your brain is most efficient and well equipped to handle stressful information when it is being bilaterally stimulated. So many sessions will focus on activating a network, using bilateral stimulation, and letting your brain do what it is designed to do…heal. During active reprocessing, there is typically not very much talking but your therapist will be with you the entire time supporting you through attunement, presence, and purposeful questions.
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Every person and nervous system is different and therefore requires different things to achieve their treatment goals. For a single incident trauma, research has shown that most people have relief in about 3 sessions. For PTSD, the typical treatment is 6-12 reprocessing sessions. It is important to note, that with C-PTSD and dissociative disorders, the process is different and we like to tell people that they should plan to stay connected to us for at least a year so that we can navigate each holiday, change in season, and other environmental changes together.
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EMDR works to treat the underlying cause of symptoms and does not just look at behaviors. Through an Adaptive Information Processing framework, the theory behind EMDR, substance abuse is viewed as compulsive self-soothing. It honors that substances hijack neural pathways and networks and that typically early use was designed to help avoid emotional and/or physical pain. There is a growing body of research on the efficacy of EMDR for people with substance use disorders and it is commonly found at inpatient treatment facilities. The focus is to minimize urges and triggers so that the system can tolerate doing the underlying trauma work.
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EMDR is a neuro-based intervention that works with the whole brain and body. Traditional talk therapy relies mostly on words and speaking about emotions to help people heal. This is a powerful approach and has many uses, however, when it comes to healing adversarial, highly stressful, or traumatic experiences the part of the brain responsible for words and episodic memory essentially goes offline or shuts down. These experiences are then stored partially in long-term memory and partially in the limbic system and the body. The fragments of information that get stuck in the limbic system and body are stored without a sense of time and often without language. What EMDR does is helps you access the whole experience including body sensations, emotions, thoughts, images, and cognitions, and reprocess them so that they are integrated into one network that can be accessed by the whole brain. In short, it helps that thing that happened to you in the past FEEL like it’s in the past. It makes what you know in your head to match what feels true in your body.