EMDR Therapy

What is it?

EMDR stands for eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing.  It is a therapy that helps individuals recover from traumatic events that have occurred in their life.  The aim of EMDR is to stop difficult memories causing so much distress by helping the brain to reprocess them properly.

EMDR is best known for treating PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) but it can also help with a range of mental health conditions in people of all ages.

 How does it work?

Being involved in a traumatic event is often distressing and overwhelming and for some people, their brain is not able to fully process what is going on afterwards.  Subsequently, the memory of the event becomes ‘stuck’ so that it remains very intense and vivid.  

When the traumatic event becomes ‘stuck’ in a person’s memory it is not unusual to experience ‘triggers’ such as sounds, smells, taste, what was seen, intense emotional feelings etc, which can all bring back the trauma as if it is happening again - referred to as a flashback.  What can also be distressing is that a flashback can happen without any warning, which adds to the intensity and fear, and it is not unusual for a person to withdraw from day-to-day activities such as going to work, socialising with family and friends, going to the gym etc. 

The aim of EMDR is to help the brain reprocess the memory so that it becomes ‘unstuck’ and the emotions associated with the trauma are no longer as intense.  This therapy can help to desensitise the person to the emotional impact of the memory so that they are able to recall the event but without experiencing the distressing emotions and no longer feeling overwhelmed.

Generally, this is achieved by helping the person recall the traumatic event while they also move their eyes from side-to-side – referred to as bilateral processing.  In some instances, side-to-side eye movement can be replaced with tapping.  This side-to-side movement seems to effectively stimulate the ‘stuck’ processing in the brain so that it can reprocess the information in the same way as an ordinary memory, thereby reducing the intense emotions and flashbacks.