What is EMDR?
EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, and it's a completely safe, natural, and drug-free treatment that can dramatically improve the results of therapy.
Who Can Benefit from EMDR?
EMDR can help those suffering from stress, depression, anxiety, nightmares, flashbacks or unwanted thoughts, especially when these problems have their root cause in traumatic events of the past.
EMDR can help heal both the victims of major-event trauma – such as assault, child abuse, or combat – and repetitive-event or lower-intensity trauma – such as bullying or shaming.
How is EMDR Different?
Instead of simply supplying you with strategies for coping with the unpleasant symptoms of a traumatic past, the goal of EMDR is to help your brain ‘digest’ those traumatic experiences so that those symptoms no longer occur.
What Problem Does EMDR Solve?
Ever notice how automatic and physical your responses are to certain situations? Even though your brain knows that the current situation is probably not like the traumatic events of your past, your body just doesn’t ever seem to get the message.
This is because when we experience something traumatic, sometimes our brain doesn’t properly process and file away the event, and thus the negative emotions and physical sensations of the original event become trapped in our body, in our ‘motor’ memory instead of our ‘narrative’ memory.
How Does EMDR Work?
EMDR helps the brain process these memories properly and release them from our body using an 8-step process that
How Does EMDR Work? (cont.)
includes something called ‘bilateral stimulation’.
With bilateral stimulation your therapist uses simple exercises to alternately stimulate the left and right halves of your brain, for example by having you follow their hand with your eyes as they move it back and forth across your field of vision.
Augmenting therapy with bilateral stimulation unleashes the natural healing power of your brain, so that negative, inappropriate or inaccurate beliefs and feelings can at last be replaced with more positive, appropriate, and accurate beliefs and feelings.
Is EMDR Based on Scientific Research?
At least twenty positive controlled outcome studies have been done on EMDR, with dramatic results in particular as regards the treatment of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). Some studies show that after only three 90-minute sessions, 84%-90% of single-trauma victims no longer suffer post-traumatic stress. Others show that 77% of combat veterans no longer suffer PTSD after only twelve sessions.
Who Recommends EMDR?
EMDR is recommended by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the American Psychological Association, and the U.S. Departments of Defense and Veteran Affairs. It is also recommended by the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health and its equivalent organizations in the United Kingdom, France, Sweden, and Israel.
Don’t Wait …
EMDR is practiced by over 70,000 clinicians worldwide and has helped millions of people, so please call or email us today to see how EMDR can help improve your life and relationships.