How does EMDR work?

If you follow anything to do with mental health, you likely have heard about EMDR.  Whether it’s because Prince Harry talked about it with Oprah, or other therapists on Instagram who share about this successful way of doing therapy.  But what is it and how does it work?

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.  Dr. Francine Shapiro discovered the technique when she went for a walk in New York many years ago.  Dr. Shapiro noticed that when she used bilateral stimulation (both sides of the brain) while thinking about a particular memory, she was able to lower her emotional response and better cope with the effect of that event.  (She has also said that had she known it was going to be used so widely she probably would’ve given it a different name.)

So how does EMDR work?  I’ll walk you through the explanation that I usually use when describing this therapy to my clients. 

EMDR works on the premise that when we experience a traumatic event, we have a combination of three things that are stored within us. 

Negative belief – We come to have a negative cognitive belief about ourselves as a result of something traumatic.  An example that I might use is that if I go out into a parking lot after work, and there is someone standing by my car and is upset at me for how I parked and starts yelling at me.  My negative belief might be “I am not safe” or “I am stupid”. 

Emotional reaction – When we experience a traumatic event we quite often experience overwhelming or big emotions.  So if we use the example above, then the emotion I might experience could be fear or anger or shame.

Physical response – In the moment of the traumatic event, or even in the remembering of it, our bodies respond in a certain way.  So if I’m in that parking lot, my shoulders might tense up, or my gut gets all tight.

Now, according to EMDR approach, you brain takes the combination of that negative belief, the emotional reaction and how your body responds, and it makes links to other times that combination has shown up in your life.  So for the example above, my brain would take the combination of “I am not safe” with fear and tight shoulders, and connect all the other times I have had that combination to events in my life.  A neuropathway is formed.

So when you sit down with an EMDR therapist, they will help you identify those three components to the memory you want to process, and then start the EMDR process.

Eye Movement

According to www.emdr.com, the best way to explain the eye movement part of the treatment is “Eye movements are used to engage the client’s attention to an external stimulus, while the client is simultaneously focusing on internal distressing material. Shapiro describes eye movements as “dual attention stimuli,” to identify the process in which the client attends to both external and internal stimuli.”  So the EMDR therapist has you follow their hand or a light stick or some other guide back and forth as you remember the event you are processing.  

One of the things that I love about EMDR is that it helps you process a memory in the past while remembering that you are currently in the present.  You are looking at the memory as if it is a movie or a scene to watch, rather than be immersed in it.  Your therapist will do a few eye movements and then stop, touch base with you, and then go back to the eye movement.

As you do the eye movement, the next step starts to happen.

Desensitization

EMDR aims to lower your physical and emotional response to the memory you are processing.  You will likely be asked “On a scale of 1 to 10, how disturbing is that memory now?”.  The goal is to bring that disturbing down to a 0. 

And when you are able to bring that down to a zero, then the next step can happen. 

Reprocessing

As you lower your emotional and physical response to a memory, a few things can happen.  You can look at the events and notice things that you didn’t remember before.  Maybe you notice that someone else was with you in the room, whereas before you felt so alone.  The reprocessing is different for each person and memory.  But it is so powerful, because it starts to give you a voice and understanding where there wasn’t any before.

Once you feel that you have been able to reprocess the memory or change your relationship with you, then your therapist will do what is a called a “positive installation”.  This is a slower version of the bilateral stimulation with eye movement, and it actually helps solidify the new relationship with that memory and event so that you no longer respond so emotionally and physically. 

This is a very quick way of explaining what EMDR is and how it works.  There are sure to be a lot more technical ways to describe the process and definitely something that can be explained in relation to you and your experience when you sit down with your therapist.

I am so thankful to have this tool as a way of doing therapy because I have witnessed its effectiveness both in myself and a number of clients.  And I’m happy to say that there are a few of us on our team that are able to provide this as a way of working with you and helping you heal and move forward in your mental health journey.  That being said, EMDR is not for everyone.  It’s important to discuss this further with your counsellor before jumping in. You can read more about EMDR here.

If you are interested in learning more, please reach out to us.  We can set up a free 15-minute phone consultation or a full session so that you can discuss whether EMDR is a good fit for you and your goals for counselling.