Insight Counseling & Wellness Center offers a range of psychotherapy services. One of our areas of specialty is EMDR.
What is EMDR?
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a psychotherapy that allows people to heal from disturbing life experiences.
Numerous studies show that EMDR therapy helps people heal quicker and with long-lasting results. EMDR therapy does not require talking in detail about the distressing issue and you won't have to complete homework between sessions. Rather than focusing on changing the emotions, thoughts, or behaviors resulting from the distressing issue, EMDR therapy allows the brain to resume its natural healing process. Just like when you take a splinter out that may have caused an infection in your hand, your skin is able to resume the healing process.
How does EMDR work?
EMDR uses the dual awareness of thinking about a target while you are experiencing Bilateral stimulation which is most typically done with eye movements or tappers that you hold in your hands. We target memories that have been stored in the amygdala (short-term, emotional center, and alarm center of the brain) and the processing of EMDR moves the memories to the hippocampus (long-term memory storage). EMDR doesn't make you forget memories, rather it stores them properly.
Sometimes you might experience stress, fear, or sadness when you think of a past life disturbance which means that your body and brain are responding as though it is happening in the present moment. After EMDR many clients have reported that their target memory feels like it happened a long time ago and that they don't feel their usual response when they think about it.
For example, one client sought out therapy to work on the stress and grief of losing her grandmother as a teenager. Upon completion of 5 EMDR sessions, she no longer felt her stomach clench up and an overwhelming sense of fear when she thought of her grandmother. Another example was when someone who had experienced a single episode of childhood abuse by a family friend was able to process and get relief from years of stored shame and discomfort after one session of EMDR.
What are the eight phases of EMDR?
Phase 1: History taking
Phase 2: Preparation
Phase 3: Assessment
Phase 4: Reprocessing & Desensitization
Phase 5: Installation
Phase 6: Body Scan
Phase 7: Closure
Phase 8: Reevaluation
EMDR therapy is an eight-phase treatment. This means that you and your therapist will work for several sessions to develop trust, get a good sense of the history related to what you want to work on, and develop resources to utilize for coping and emotional regulation. Eye movements (or other bilateral stimulation) are used during phase 4 to provide the reprocessing of memories and emotional desensitization to the memory.
In successful EMDR therapy, the meaning of painful events is transformed on an emotional level. For instance, a rape victim shifts from feeling horror and self-disgust to holding the firm belief that, “I survived it and I am strong.”
Unlike talk therapy, the insights clients gain in EMDR therapy result not so much from clinician interpretation, but from the client’s own accelerated intellectual and emotional processes. The net effect is that clients conclude EMDR therapy feeling empowered by the very experiences that once debased them. Their wounds have not just closed, they have transformed. As a natural outcome of the EMDR therapeutic process, the clients’ thoughts, feelings and behavior are all robust indicators of emotional health and resolution—all without speaking in detail or doing homework used in other therapies.
More than 30 positive controlled outcome studies have been done on EMDR therapy. Some of the studies show that 84%-90% of single-trauma victims no longer have post-traumatic stress disorder after only three 90-minute sessions.
Another study, funded by the HMO Kaiser Permanente, found that 100% of the single-trauma victims and 77% of multiple trauma victims no longer were diagnosed with PTSD after only six 50-minute sessions. In another study, 77% of combat veterans were free of PTSD in 12 sessions.
There has been so much research on EMDR therapy that it is now recognized as an effective form of treatment for trauma and other disturbing experiences by organizations such as the American Psychiatric Association, the World Health Organization and the Department of Defense. Over 100,000 clinicians throughout the world use the therapy. Millions of people have been treated successfully over the past 33 years.
Source: some of the information on this page was drawn from https://www.emdr.com/what-is-emdr/
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