EDMR therapy

What is EMDR?

EMDR stands for ‘Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing’. It’s a type of mental health therapy which enables recovery from emotional distress, anxiety, depression and trauma.

What can EMDR help with?

EMDR was originally developed in the 1980s for the treatment of post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD) in war veterans. Today, EMDR is used to help treat a wide range of difficulties, including:

Trauma and PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder, including complex PTSD)
Anxiety
Panic attacks
Phobias
OCD
Depression
Addictions
Medically unexplained, psycho-somatic complaints eg. Fibromyalgia and Allergies
Stress and burnout
Self-esteem issues
Performance blocks
Undesired behavioural and emotional patterns

How many EMDR sessions will I need?

EMDR is an accelerated therapy. Individual factors such as your circumstances and how severely you have been affected will determine how many sessions are needed. However, EMDR is typically delivered for an average of 6-12 sessions, although some people benefit from fewer, and some from more sessions. This is considerably quicker than long-term talking therapy that can take years.

How does EMDR work?

Most of the time our minds routinely manage new information and experiences without us being aware of it. However, sometimes our natural coping mechanism can become overwhelmed. This overload can result in disturbing life experiences being stored in a part of the brain as if they were static or ‘frozen in time’, remaining in a raw emotional state as ‘unprocessed’ experiences.

When everything works as it should, the mind has the ability to heal itself naturally, in the same way as the physical body does. Much of this natural repair work occurs during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Our REM sleep helps us to reprocess our experiences naturally, and EMDR therapy uses a similar process to change and reprocess those anxieties that have become anchored in our brain’s memory network.

EMDR creates connections between both sides of the brain, reproducing Rapid Eye Movements without the sleep. This resets the brain’s natural ability to repair itself so that past, problematic experiences can be reprocessed and updated with present, more positive information. In this way, EMDR therapy can change and improve negative thoughts, self-beliefs, emotions, physical sensations and stuck patterns of behaviour

What happens in an EMDR session?

The EMDR method uses ‘bilateral stimulation’ (i.e. it works with both sides of the brain). This might involve using left-to-right eye movements guided by the therapist’s fingers, or hand-tapping, or various electronic devices such as buzzers, a light bar or alternating sounds through headphones.

The client takes an observing role, focusing their attention on external movement, touch, or sound. At the same time, they think about the problematic experience. This observing role creates an emotional distance between the client and their difficulty. This state of ‘dual awareness’ enables a shift in how the client views the problem and creates a new, healthier mindset.