EMDR is a Somatic Therapy for relief from any patterned responses (ie. body sensations, thought, feeling, belief, or habit based) that cause more grief & stress than ‘ah-ha’ moments with practical learning value for the future.
It uses trauma-informed meditations on any one specific, uncomfortable memory detail (ie. body sensations, thought, feeling, belief, or habit based) present in a problem/triggering circumstance we’re struggling in today, to identify common experiences that involved it, and usually 1 or several main times in the past that really reinforced our traumatic experiencing of it and other details surrounding it in problem situations today.
EMDR uses these associations to then activate our mind’s natural learning & memory storage systems, for trading out sources of traumatic learning that f*** up our experiences today, for the self/ experience improvement kind that’ll make each new experience better than those before it.
EMDR promotes healing on the memory network level.
This means that EMDR Therapy can be used to reconfigure how we perceive any 1 or 2 specific events, but more proactively aims to reconfigure developmentally mismatched or stunted beliefs/ belief systems resulting from any number of events, that introduced us to the patterns of
…traumatic responses we reengage almost as templates from which we (usually unfortunately) interpret new experiences.
By aiming to heal entire memory networks based in trauma…
EMDR often doesn’t require us to reprocess or even bring up all of our traumatic experiences, details, or narrations of them.
EMDR Therapy’s series of phases involving mindfulness and evidence based cognitive & behavioral modification techniques releases us from the past, present, and future impacts of related clusters of experiences at once, because they share the same or very similar unhelpful perceptions.
EMDR’s 8 phases aren’t really something potential clients can benefit from understanding…
aside from the fact that they are chronologically organized in a way that optimizes future memory activation of one’s preferred takeaway learning messages, as opposed the outdated, unhelpful, and uncomfortable ones whose habitual triggering must be extinguished first.
EMDR Therapy’s can be more practically understood for clients in these following steps:
1. Activate cognitive attention
2. Utilize sensory aware to
3. Access learning storage of unhelpful details
4. Engage in memory learning reconsolidation for experiencing more practical/ comfortable triggers in the future.
EMDR Therapy requires a trained (in the least) therapist to walk you through the above steps using specific interventions
...to shift through the above steps most safely and effectively. One more commonly recognized intervention involves eye-movements or tapping (bilateral stimulation).
These are the most commonly used ones, and research suggests that utilizing eye-movements seem to produce the most sustainable trauma healing results, but are not the only forms of bilateral stimulation used in EMDR Certified Therapy sessions, with creative practitioners who understand the process and each directives purpose better than the back of their hand.
For instance, some therapists use side-to-side sounds, others might have use side to side object placement, animal petting, or in my case- body swaying, stepping, 'air patty cake,' or even watching mesmerizing side to side GIFs on a big screen.
As an EMDR-C Therapist, I've found that EMDR Therapy's options for bilateral stimulation are limitless, so long as they fulfill their intended purpose*, and a client's specific attentional needs**, and learning style.***
*Purpose- ie. using a similar side-to -side process akin to the eye-movements that occur underneath closed lids when engaging in the info processing that occurs naturally during our REM sleep
**Attentional Needs-ie. distracting enough to take the edge off of upsetting material in need of reprocessing, while not being challenging enough that it becomes a hinderance to one's activation of upsetting details
***Learning Style- ie. how a client tends to store memory information in the form of pictures, experiences by age, specific body sensations, etc..., which is helpful to know because it can sometimes be the easiest way to activate their trauma reprocessing, which will require identification, retrieval (safe revisiting), and new learning to store in a similar to the old kind, so that it will more likely be accepted by mind and body on less conscious levels as the one to trigger instead of the old, previously traumatic learning.
Safely reorganizing any form of reoccurring traumatic details that get triggered when new experiences more or less consciously remind us of the crappy past experiences from which they came is a sensitive process.
Looking back on my career and personal experiences in and out of talk therapies before participating in EMDR, I see traditional talk therapy methods for trauma healing as being hit or miss depending on a combination of complete chance and a specific therapist's understanding of how to most effectively guide client-therapist conversations towards reoccurring details, within the patterns of problems clients are experiencing, to artfully extinguish the emotional charge the details carry, before consistently reinforcing a client's preferred learning messages from the past to become more reflexively accessed than their previously traumatic ones.
When I practiced as a Trauma-focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapist (TF-CBT) before my EMDR journey, I admit I was not very aware of the above... and begrudgingly admit my trauma healing success stories to sheer chance, my compassion, and whether a client was willing and able enough to narrate parts of their trauma in the hopes of being enough to heal it...
Long story short, EMDR Therapy involves much more than eye-movements, tapping, and trauma.
EMDR involves healing learning and memory based patterns of unhelpful perceptions that f*** up the qualities of life we experience today... with our varying degrees of conscious awareness of how pervasive their impacts can be.
Whether therapy is a completely new experience for you, or a 'been around the block kinda thing,'
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