Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a therapeutic approach utilized to work with distressing and traumatic memories. The ideology behind EMDR is that they have there’s many different psychological difficulties there causing this distressing life event which have not just been stored in the memory properly but are also said to be unprocessed or often are found to be blocked. EMDR is one way to help process traumatic memories that need assistance in becoming processed.
What is different about traumatic memories?
You choose the normal memories are stored by a part of the brain called the hippocampus everything you know you can think of a hippocampus as a sort of library in which catalogs or processes events and stores them in the right place. However, some dramatic events that happen such as accidents abuse violence anything like that car accidents are so overwhelming that often the hypo campus doesn’t do a very good job of filing this information. When this happens, memories are stored in their untreated unprocessed form. What this means is that this trauma and the memories are easily triggered, leading them to replay over and over and cause more distressed to the person who is experiencing them.
What can you expect during EMDR sessions?
There are several steps in EMDR treatment, but some of the key components of this are:
- Where the person thinks of the troubling memory, then they look to identify and imagine the worst moment of that memory
- When they identify a negative belief about the worst moment and the therapist may ask what is the worst thing that that moment says about you
- Then they are asked to identify emotions in any kind of bodily feelings or sensations link to that moment
- Processing stage some one of the key things is that they look at the image and the belief while they’re told to think about that while at the same time making left to right eye movements or while paying attention to tapping sensations or sounds that are alternatively given from left to right.
- To allow your mind to go with or whatever comes up and just notice what happens
- This process will be repeated until the memory causes less distressed and this will happen in one or two sessions
Why do they use rapid eye movements?
The reason why you need to make eye movements is so that you’re asked to kind of pay attention from one side to another while thinking about this memory. One way to pay attention from left to right is to follow the therapist finger as they move it from side to side in front of your line of vision. Another way that therapists use uh emdr is to ask you to pay attention to sounds or they use a tapping sensation which occurs in a sequence from left to right.
This movement of side to side from left to right is called bilateral stimulation. Bilateral stimulation has been found to help with memory processing and there are several actual theories that help to explain why this is needed. It’s important to be able to find a form of bilateral stimulation that you were comfortable with because that’s the only way it will work properly.
What are some of the things that EMDR are used to treat?
There is good evidence that EMDR is an effective treatment for PTSD otherwise known as post-traumatic stress disorder and is often recommended by the national Institute for health and care excellence or otherwise called nice for PTSD. The evidence to suggest that car is used to treat other order disorders as well is a little less clear but often there is significant research going on currently. EMDR may be an effective treatment for other types of conditions particularly if they involve traumatic memories or other distressing memories but much more research is still needed at this time.
How long does a treatment session take?
This is a common question that comes up in therapy EMDR sessions are sometimes slightly longer than a typical therapy session can last up to 90 minutes. The number of sessions needed will depend on the severity and the type of trauma which you have experienced. Typically, it’s estimated that between 8 to 12 sessions may be necessary to treat simple traumas with more sessions necessary for multiple traumas.
References:
Shaprio, F. (2001). Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing: Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures (2nd edition). Guilford Press.
Solomon, R. M., Shapiro, F. (2008). EMDR and the Adaptive Information Processing Model. Journal of EMDR Practice and Research, 2(4), 315.
