What Is EMDR And How Does It Improve Your Mental Health?
In the world of personal healing and therapy, EMDR is a fairly new form of treatment that is quickly gaining more and more popularity thanks to the amazing results it delivers for so many of its users.
To help you decide whether you want to jump on board the EMDR train, this article will cover the following questions:
What is EMDR therapy exactly?
What are the benefits of EMDR or mental health?
How is EMDR different from other therapy modalities?
How does the EMDR process work?
How do I get started with EMDR?
So, let’s not waste anymore time and jump right into it!
What is EMDR?
EMDR or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing is a comparatively new and interactive therapy modality that is commonly used to treat or alleviate any type of psychological distress associated with traumatic memories.
EMDR therapy works based on the client following fast and rhythmic eye movements that are instructed by the trained therapists while at the same time recalling the traumatic experiences or memories associated with the trauma. Over the course of several sessions, EMDR has shown to lessen the severity of the impact of the memories and triggers that are associated with a specific stressor or trauma.
What are the benefits of EMDR on mental health?
Most commonly, EMDR therapy is used for people dealing with trauma and/or PTSD and those who struggle to talk about their past experiences. However, according to the EMDR International Association, the treatment can have a positive impact on a wide variety of additional mental health concerns, including:
Anxiety, panic attacks, and phobias
Chronic Illness and medical issues
Depression and bipolar disorders
Dissociative disorders
Eating disorders
Grief and loss
Pain
Performance anxiety
Personality disorders
Stress-related issues
Sexual assault
Sleep disturbance
Substance abuse and addiction
Violence and abuse
How is EMDR different from other therapy modalities?
EMDR therapy is a non-traditional form of therapy since it does not involve extensive talk therapy or medication in any way. Rather than trying to logically analyze past emotions, thoughts and behaviors, EMDR works by allowing the brain to recall the traumatic memories when it is slightly distracted (by the eye movements) which consequently dampens the severity of the trigger and aids the natural healing process that the brain is able to resolve.
Of course, the process may look different for everyone but in general, for many people EMDR therapy can usually be completed in a limited amount of sessions and does not require years of open-ended talk therapy.
How does the EMDR process work?
EMDR therapy is officially broken down into eight phases, each of which can take longer or short depending on your unique circumstances and needs.
The eight phases of EMDR are the following:
History & Therapy Planning
As with any good therapy treatment, the EMDR process will start with your therapist getting a detailed overview of your history, assessing your situation and working together with you to identify specific traumas, triggering memories or current distress that you’d like to address in your sessions.
2. Preparation
In the preparation phase, your therapist will make sure to explain your entire treatment plan to you. You will go through the different procedures with you, practice the eye movements that will be involved in the treatment and make sure that you feel comfortable and confident about the process before moving on to the next phase.
3. Assessment
Once you’re fully prepared, you’ll progress to the assessment stage where your therapist will begin to activate the targeted memory or trigger in order to assess different components of that memory. This includes the images you recall when you think about the memory, the emotions and thoughts that it triggers for you as well as the body sensations that emerge.
4. Desensitization
In this stage, the eye movements or other stimuli come into play. After getting an idea of what your reaction to a specific memory looks like, your therapist will guide you through these standardized procedures. After each stimulation, they will ask you to let your mind go blank and see what comes up from there. Whatever does, will then be used by your therapist as the focus of attention to continue the desensitization process until you reach a point when you can report no further distress. If at any point, you feel like you can’t handle the impact of the memories or you become too distressed, then your therapist will be there and use established procedures to calm you down to a more regulated state.
5. Installation
Once the memory can be thought of without being distressing anymore, you and your therapist will determine more positive images, emotions, thoughts and sensations that are to act as the “replacement” for your past traumatic ones. You will then be asked to focus on these instead of the distressing ones.
6. Body Scanning
To finish off the memory processing part of each session, the sixth phase of EMDR involves a body scan that helps your therapist assess if there is any residual stress or tension left in your body. If there is, they will continue to work through them with you until your nervous system returns to a regulated state.
7. Closure
The Closure phase is used to end each session. If the entirety of the traumatic memory wasn’t fully processed or you’re nervous about facing any psychological struggle in the time between sessions then this is the phase where your therapist provides techniques and instructions to help you calm down from your session and feel safe and secure until your next one. They might also ask you to keep a log of any memories, emotions, thoughts, etc. that come up in between your sessions.
8. Re-evaluation
The next time you see your therapist, the session will always start with a re-evaluation in which they can assess your overall psychological state, the impact of previous sessions on your trauma processing and the kind of memories that might have emerged in the meantime so they can make an informed decision on setting goals for the current session.
This entire process will be repeated in each session until the impact of your negative memories has been completely or at least drastically reduced and you feel like your traumas have become less disabling. Each session can last somewhere from 60-90 minutes.
How to get started with EMDR
Overall, EMDR therapy can be an amazing alternative to traditional forms of therapy because it has little to no side effects at all, especially compared to some prescription medications. In the short term, the treatment process of recalling your traumas can cause an increased awareness of these issues as well as short term distress as you focus on these memories. However, in the long run, if the treatment is effective, you should be able to reach a state where you won’t be impacted by them as strongly as you might be now.
A great first step is to talk to a therapist to decide if EMDR would be a good fit for your circumstances and to decide whether you’re in a good situation to cope with the short-term distress that may arise during the process.
If you’d like to learn more about EMDR and how the process works, we’ve hosted an entire workshop with our amazing advisory board member Kate Bandmann for The Self Care Space members. In the workshop, we covered all the basics you need to know as well as some simple follow-along exercises that you can do at home. If you’d like to sign up to access this recording or any of our other workshops, or learn more about all the different features and benefits of our membership, you can do so here.
xoxo,
The Self Care Space
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