EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. This form of therapy helps people heal from trauma and other distressing life experiences (EMDRIA, 2020). EMDR is designed to help individuals process negative experiences by guiding you with changing how your mind and body respond to stress. Treatment involves dual attention stimulation (also called bilateral stimulation), by using tapping, audio, and eye movement, in reshaping how you process disturbing events.
Here are different types of trauma that people experience:
Acute trauma develops from a single incident, like a car accident or getting robbed. Chronic trauma is trauma that occurs repeatedly over an extended period of time, like child abuse or domestic violence. People can survive the same event, yet have drastically different reactions to it. People experience trauma in their own way, and may not think of a negative event in their lives as such, as a way to cope, or try to manage their emotions around a past circumstance. Surviving a traumatic event does not have to be a life sentence.
Life happens on life’s terms. Most people have had experiences that feel like you got sucker-punched if you think about them too hard. This is because trauma keeps your brain in a loop of what happened, and your mind does not process the event as a past occurrence, but rather as an event that continues to transpire whenever it comes up in your memory. EMDR helps your brain to process the event, so your mind can store the memory as something that happened in the past. Then, when you think of the distressing experience, you do not feel the way you did when it happened. In a nutshell, EMDR puts the past back in the past.
Some of what EMDR Therapy is useful for includes assistance with:
EMDR can also help you heal from:
Finding an EMDR therapist that feels safe for you is a really big deal. The counselors at Shurmatz Counseling strive to provide both the tools of EMDR and healing strategies while in a nurturing, compassionate, and the nonjudgmental therapeutic relationship. We will work together in helping you shift your thoughts, so that your past memories will be less impairing, and won’t keep you from functioning the way you need to on a day-to-day basis. EMDR is effective via teletherapy AND in-person treatment!
Positive Outcomes of EMDR Therapy:
