EMDR – A path to getting your life back

What do you do when you wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, gripped with fear because you have just relived a terrible experience in your dreams? What do you do when you start to feel like danger is around every corner and you are losing hope and close relationships? What do you do when you use drugs, alcohol, or sex to try feel something, all the while hoping it will help you feel nothing? How do you get your life back? If you are experiencing these types of distress and live in Phoenix, you may start looking for a trauma therapist in Phoenix that does Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy.

What is EMDR?

EMDR is a therapeutic method that a mental health counselor implements to help your brain process the painful event/s so that that the pain it caused and the fear of it occurring again does not intrude on the present moment and keep you from enjoying or taking part in your everyday life. At the end of EMDR treatment, your mind and body know that this event (or events) happened, that you made it through that experience/s alive (albeit with scars). Further, it creates new pathways in your brain that allow you to hope in your future and your resiliency.

In his book, Light in the Heart of Darkness: EMDR and the Treatment of War and Terrorism Survivors, Dr. Steve Silver explains, “Part of the brain’s duties is to solve problems.” With trauma, the brain asks questions like:

“Why did that happen?”

“What did I do to make it happen?”

“Why wasn’t I strong enough to keep it from happening?”

“How can I protect myself in the future?”

EMDR uses bilateral stimulation and the therapist’s interweaving questions to help the client’s brain find answers to these questions and new neural pathways to gain clarity and perspective on the event. Even more powerfully, EMDR helps the brain find new ways to handle future challenges and build an awareness of its resiliency.

What to expect in EMDR

 The first few sessions with your therapist will be getting to know your therapist and creating goals for your therapy. This stage of preparation will also include assessing the ways that you practice emotional regulation and building those skills. You are not going through this process alone. The therapist is there to be a kind guide through the entire journey. Consequently, it is important that you feel like you feel some level of safety and trust with your therapist. A good therapist is always open to questions about your fears around therapy and talking about the risk involved in trusting them with your story. You may be anxious to “get to work” on your painful memories, but it is important to learn ways to calm your nervous system and build trust with you therapist before jumping into the work.

The next step is to choose the memory that you want to target. The therapist will take you through some exercises and questions to help you decide the one you want to address. This step is important because it is in line with the foundation of therapy, which is the consent of the client is of utmost importance before moving forward in any way. You as the client, are in charge of the direction of the exploration, the pace of the therapy, and the amount they disclose. The therapist is there as support for you and your brain as you both work to make sense of your experience/s and avoid causing you more harm.

After choosing the memory, the therapist begins to set up a mental image with you of the desired memory you want to target, also incorporating emotional content, self-referential thoughts, and bodily sensations. Scientists are still working to understand how EMDR specifically works on the brain and what makes it so helpful. What does seem to be true is that it uses bilateral stimulation to create a dual focus on the sensation of the visual, tactile, or auditory inputs and the act of remembering the traumatic event. You will focus on the memory of the event and may follow a light or finger with your eyes back and forth, hold small vibrating pads in hands, or listen to oscillating sounds with earphones to stimulate the right and left hemispheres of your brain.

A couple of things will happen for you. The first thing the bilateral stimulation does is reduce the emotional flooding that often occurs when a traumatic memory is revisited. You will feel intense emotions, but the dual focus creates a mental and experiential distance from the event, allowing you to be more of an observer of your abuse and/or neglect rather than powerlessly reliving the trauma. The second is that it helps overload your brain’s working memory system so that it can be aware of your unconscious experience. Researcher Alan Baddeley called the working memory the “mental workspace” of the brain. Most humans spend a lot of time here taking in information, processing it, and making decisions for short term needs. An example of this would be waking up and thinking through your day and the list of things you need to do. You assess the time you have; you rank the tasks based on importance; you combine tasks based on proximity to each other; you decide how much energy you have; and you come up with a plan for the day. This is helpful for handling normal life, but this space can become so loud and engaging that more emotional reasoning and knowledge of your deeper mind gets drowned out. Bilateral stimulation can help you listen past the clutter of this part of the mind and listen to your deeper mind’s questions, intuition, and truths that it holds. You have more than likely had experiences where you have heard the whisper of your mind of some truth that you know you ought to do or become clear about your intention or reaction to an event. It may have been early in the morning when things were quiet or when you are on a camping trip or vacation when the normal buzz of life is not so loud. It is this deep part of the mind that EMDR can help you access to hear your own wisdom.

Over time your distress around the event/s begins to lower and you could end up having very little to no distress when the event is brought up. After the distress is lowered, the next step is to begin to imagine how you want to handle situations that may be similar to or remind you of a past trauma. This mental experience of seeing you act in line with your values and your strength is the last meaningful step of EMDR to take back your life.

It should be noted that EMDR is emotionally intense, and you can experience a heightened awareness of your body and the anxiety and fear that it holds. In the short term this can be frightening and emotionally painful, but clients often find that they are more resilient than they give themselves credit for and appreciate the ally of their therapist in the process. At our practice, EMDR is often interspersed with traditional talk therapy to give breaks in the intensity of this modality. Talk therapy can get to some the same internal places that EMDR does, but it takes longer. A helpful analogy is to think of therapy like riding a horse. Talk therapy is like riding the horse at a walk, and EMDR is like riding at a gallop. You will decide the pacing and the therapist is there to aid the process along the way at whatever speed you need.

How we have seen clients receive help from EMDR

After doing doing conventional trauma therapy in Phoenix for over a decade and EMDR for the last 7 years, we have seen many clients tell their story for the first time in therapy. With EMDR we have seen them reduce the disruption caused by their trauma and begin to experience hope for their future. For some of our clients they have achieved a new awareness of how young they were when they were abused. Instead of feeling the old sense of responsibility or judgment, they have gained a new compassion for their younger selves. Others have discovered their resiliency in unexpected places. Some clients froze when they were attacked. In EMDR it has been helpful for them when a therapist has introduced the possibly that their body defended them by staying still and quiet. Instead of feeling complicit in their abuse or powerless, they become aware of their body’s natural defense strategy of Fawning. We see clients accept their survival and trust their resiliency with EMDR. They are not triggered by the situations, places, or activities that once terrified them. They can dream about what tomorrow can bring. They can risk being in relationships. They are not afraid and hyper-vigilant. And, in the end they have gotten their life back.