EMDR therapy is the leading treatment for trauma.
Using EMDR can allow the brain to heal. Depression, stress, addiction are often a result of trauma.
What is trauma?
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Trauma affects everyone differently.
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It doesn’t even have to be something that happened to you directly, you can still be affected.
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Trauma can be abuse, neglect. Generally, it’s something that was upsetting to you.
What does EMDR mean?
It stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.
It’s a way for your body and memory path to get over a trigger that wasn’t able to heal and adapt.
Who benefits from EMDR?
People who have unusual reactions to situations in life that just don’t make sense and catch you off-guard. For example, you may find that sometimes you are behaving by holding on to things you actually want to let go of (some might use the word hoarding), eating more or less than you want to, carrying out actions when you’re alone that you may do in secret. You can’t figure out why you would do this and it doesn’t really make logical sense. You may get sad, scared, angry or anxious at specific times or circumstances.
That is happening because a trigger tied to a memory has caused a road bump that comes out in the way you feel or behave.
EMDR can let you reprocess what happened and move on from it, into a new attitude, new behavior, a better response to triggers so they are not so jarring for you. Research shows EMDR to work better than antidepressant medication for treating depression.
Connection to addiction
EMDR can be useful for healing the triggers for addictions, compulsive behavior and other ways of coping. We learn these ways of coping with pain, but they may cause their own problems in our life. Sometimes to cope with experiences in life that are traumatic (abuse or neglect you have suffered, an assault, a tragedy, or multiple traumas), you may have also tried to “self-medicate” with gambling/alcohol/food/shopping/sex/drugs to numb out pain and discomfort. It works somewhat. It works in the moment to change the way you are feeling.
When people do these things, they are trying to help protect themselves from the stress they experience and just keep on living. If they are trying to numb, EMDR works on both the feeling of distress (the initial trauma) and the desire to numb what happened. As you might imagine, it can be incredibly freeing to remove the pain and to break the connection with using addiction as a coping technique. A coping technique that can go too far and sometimes get out of control. This is a reason EMDR is such an effective therapy.
EMDR is not hypnotism
People ask frequently if this is hypnotism. It is not. With this approach, you are still in the present (although may be recalling the past). You are still aware of what is going on around you.
Helpful links
EMDRIA talks about what EMDR therapy can treat, and a lot more