The EMDR Way

Resourcing and Reprocessing

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing. It is a therapy used to help people recover from distressing events and the problems they have caused, like flashbacks, upsetting thoughts or images, depression or anxiety.

EMDR is recognised by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and the World Health Organisation (WHO), which also recognises it as an effective treatment for children.

When a person is involved in a traumatic event, they may feel overwhelmed and their brain may be unable to fully process what is going on. The memory of the event seems to become “stuck” so that it remains very intense and vivid. The person can re-experience what they saw, heard and smelt and the full force of the distress they felt whenever the memory comes to mind.

EMDR aims to help the brain “unstick” and reprocess the memory properly so that it is no longer so intense. It also helps to desensitise the person to the emotional impact of the memory, so that they can think about the event without experiencing such strong feelings.

It does this by asking the person to recall the traumatic event while they also move their eyes from side-to-side or tap left and right. These side-to-side sensations seem to effectively stimulate the “stuck” processing system in the brain so that it can reprocess the information more like an ordinary memory, reducing its intensity.

I integrate EMDR into ongoing sessions where it feels supportive, I also offer EMDR for single traumatic events that have happened in your life. If EMDR is appropriate to your process, this is something that can be woven into ongoing embodied work sessions, this will involve taking a trauma history, resourcing, finding the connection between present day triggers and past experiences and accessing these past target memories to reprocess them.

Bilateral stimulation may be part of an integrated process rather than a specific EMDR structure.

For more information: EMDR: The basics – EMDR Association UK – Overcoming trauma with expert help