EMDR is Transformational
Ever catch yourself saying, “I know it, I just don’t feel it”? Creating a connection between your understanding and your beliefs is exactly where EMDR Therapy comes in.
Backed by the World Health Organization and the American Psychological Association, EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) helps your brain to process distressing memories to stop triggering overwhelming emotional reactions.
Using guided bilateral movements eye movements, we rewire the way your mind holds onto pain, so you can finally feel the freedom your logical brain already knows is possible.
Common EMDR Therapy Targets
three common focus areas in my practice
Anxiety
EMDR Therapy for anxiety can help you learn the root cause of dysfunction in your nervous system. The result if EMDR Therapy for anxiety is a sense of relief and a strong belief in your ability to cope with anxiety.
Self-Worth
Negative beliefs about yourself, poor self-image, and low self-esteem impact your sense of self-worth and value. EMDR Therapy can help to identify and process core memories related to your self-image, while creating room for a new positive image.
Stressful Events
Special protocols can be used to help with processing recent and past stressful events. Using EMDR Therapy, a recent stressful event can be emotionally processed faster than with talk therapy, which is especially helpful for healing from painful life transitions or events such as a motor vehicle accident.
eye movement desensitization and reprocessing
EMDR Therapy
About EMDR
EMDR Therapy is a specialized technique to help the brain process emotional memories to a healthy state. The goal of EMDR therapy is to process painful events and transform negative beliefs into healthy coping. Processing emotionally painful events and creating positive beliefs can help improve your mood and increase your quality of life.
Using principles of neuroscience, the bilateral movements in EMDR Therapy mimics the same process that your brain automatically uses. In REM sleep, your brain digests events and turns them into factual memories. In EMDR Therapy, eye movements can be used to help jump-starting the self-healing process in your brain and continue the processing of past events. This process naturally happens for most of our memories, but traumatic and emotional memories often need additional processing. When your working memory is occupied with the EMDR process, this bypasses your cognitive biases and allows memories to become factual rather than emotional.
EMDR Therapy isn’t like exposure therapy. You don’t talk about all the details you can remember and all your thoughts and feelings about it. Unlike talk therapy, there’s no vivid storytelling, and yet, emotional processing happens, and rapidly.
Learn how EMDR Therapy can help you.
EMDR therapy can:
- Process disturbing memories into factual memories
- Result in strong emotions and emotion processing between sessions
- Reduce the clarity of an emotional memory (like any regular memory)
- Process negative thoughts (for example, "I am worthless," "I am unlovable," "I am powerless," "I am in danger," etc.)
EMDR therapy cannot:
- Create unrealistic positive thoughts
- Create untrue, unrealistic or inappropriate thoughts or responses
- Eliminate healthy responses (like your survival instinct)
- Change accurate descriptions of events
- Recover “repressed memories” or cause PTSD
emdr therapy
EMDR Treatment
Stress less and live more. You get to rewrite the rules.
EMDR Therapy Before and After
In the beginning of the EMDR Therapy process, you will be coached on strategies to help manage your mood. This can take several sessions. These emotion regulation techniques help you to safely process your experiences and any reactions that might arise in session.
In EMDR Therapy sessions, we target key emotional memories for processing You can think of this as accessing information files stored in your brain. Before EMDR Therapy, distressing memories still have all your original thoughts, feelings and sensations connected, and they feel active. After EMDR Therapy, the memories will feel like any other memory you can recall. One client said, “it just feels like it was an event that happened.”
What to Expect
During EMDR Therapy, you might spontaneously remember related memories to the target memory. Think of it like channel surfing your past experiences. Maybe you felt the same emotion or had similar thoughts in both memories. This is how our brain stores memories naturally. In EMDR Therapy, your brain scans historical information at a fast pace (4-5x faster than hypnosis), so you are able to resolve the trauma quickly.
The re-experiencing of images, sensations, thoughts, and emotions as you remember them is not expected with every set of eye movements, but it can occur. This is not like a PTSD flashback. It feels more like your mind moving from one moment to the next , as if you were channel surfing your memories.
After an EMDR session, it’s helpful to have time set aside before your next activity. Emotional processing can continue after we’re done, and you might feel tired or even energized. I’ve heard both of these reactions from clients. Having a special object, like a therapy notebook, or creating a self-care ritual around therapy can help you feel calm and present during and after EMDR Therapy sessions.
let’s work together
Reclaim your life. Recover from past experiences.
When you’re ready, head over to my booking calendar and schedule your first EMDR therapy session.
