What happens when you are traumatized? Most of the time, your body routinely manages new information and experiences without your awareness.  However, when something out of the ordinary occurs and you are traumatized by an overwhelming event (e.g. a car accident) or by being repeatedly subjected to distress (e.g. childhood neglect), your natural coping mechanism can become overloaded. This can result in those disturbing experiences remaining frozen in your brain or unprocessed.  Such unprocessed memories are stored in the limbic system of your brain in a raw and emotional form, rather than in a verbal story mode. The limbic system maintains traumatic memories in an isolated memory network that is associated with emotions and physical sensations and disconnected from the brain’s cortex where we use language to store memories.  The traumatic memories can be continuously triggered when you experience events similar to those previous difficult experiences. Experiences during a session may include changes in thoughts, images, and feelings such as anxiety, panic, anger, or despair are continually triggered in the present.  Your ability to live in the present and learn from new experiences therefore become inhibited.  EMDR helps create the connections between your brain’s memory networks, enabling your brain to process the traumatic memory in a more natural way.

What is an EMDR session like? EMDR utilizes the natural healing ability of your body. After a thorough assessment, you will be asked specific questions about a particular disturbing memory. Eye movements, similar to those during REM sleep, will be recreated simply by asking you to watch the therapist’s finger moving backwards and forwards across your visual field. Sometimes, a bar of moving lights or headphones is used instead. The eye movements will last for a short while and then stop. You will then be asked to report back on the experiences you have had during each of these sets of eye movements. Often, the memory itself is long forgotten.  The painful feelings such as anxiety, panic, anger, or despair are continually triggered in the present.  Your ability to live in the present and learn from new experiences therefore becomes inhibited.  EMDR helps create the connections between your brain’s memory networks, enabling your brain to process the traumatic memory in a more natural way.

Can anyone benefit from EMDR? EMDR can accelerate therapy by resolving the impact of any past trauma and allowing you to live more fully in the present.  However, it is not appropriate for everyone.  The process is rapid.  Any disturbing experiences, if they occur at all, last for a comparatively short period of time.  Nevertheless, you should be aware of, and willing to experience, the strong feelings and disturbing thoughts that sometimes occur during sessions.

How long does treatment take? EMDR can be a brief, focused treatment or part of a longer psychotherapy program.  Each EMDR session is typically 50 minutes but you can request a longer session with your counselor.

Will remain in control and empowered? During EMDR sessions, you will remain in control, fully alert, and wide awake.  This is not a form of hypnosis, and you can stop the process at any time.  Throughout the session, the therapist will support and facilitate your self-healing and intervene as little as possible.  Reprocessing is usually experienced as something that happens spontaneously and new connections and insights tend to arise naturally from within.  As a result, most people find EMDR to be a natural and empowering therapy.