What is EMDR? Sydney EMDR
EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. EMDR is a therapy that was initially created for Trauma and PTSD, but is now also used for Anxiety, Phobias and Depression.
When I first became a Clinical Psychologist, I do not recall EMDR even being mentioned during training during Masters. When I heard about it, it was seen by others as a bit ‘woo woo’ and not evidenced based.
Fast forward many years, and now there is a very strong evidence base for EMDR. I have also seen it work with several of my clients. So what is it?
EMDR does not treat trauma, but rather the symptoms and impact of trauma. It doesn’t change what has happened to you, but more the impact of trauma on your current life.
Let’s take a made up client called Tom, who has a strong belief ‘I am weak’. He had many experiences of being physically and verbally bullied, as well as excluded in his teen years in high school.
Most of the time, he lives his life like normal. However, every now and then he feels triggered. Perhaps by a nightmare, perhaps being left out at work or not invited out with his friends, or watching a TV show where someone is bullied.
These triggers result in emotional dysregulation for Tom; it can feel almost like the memory is happening again or he can feel a strong reaction in his body that feels out of proportion to the current situation. It doesn’t feel like a normal memory.
Often when we experience traumatic experiences, they can be unprocessed; it’s almost like the memory has remained frozen in time. Tom doesn’t like thinking of this trauma. What’s the point? It feels horrible, and there isn’t anything he can do to change the past. It’s done now.
However, this unprocessed trauma has stayed with him for months, years, or even decades.
EMDR helps people reprocess memories that haven’t been properly processed.
In EMDR, together with your therapist you will identify a negative belief the experience made you feel about yourself (e.g. ‘I’m weak’) and the more positive belief you’d like to think about yourself in that situation (e.g.’ I’m strong’ or perhaps ‘I can learn to be strong’). After picking one memory to work on, Tom would be asked to imagine the memory. At the same time, Tom will be engaging in bilateral movement (following therapists fingers going back and forth; tapping his shoulders) and will be asked periodically what he notices (sensations, thoughts, feelings etc).
The purpose of bilateral movement is to engaging working memory. Your working memory is activated when you are reading this document. Working memory is like a bench top for our brain. Because bench space is limited, only some information stays in focus long enough to be encoded into long term memory, while the rest naturally falls away.
The eye movement or tapping helps tax and engage your working memory. The combination of recalling the original memory, plus taxing working memory, can sometimes helps the memory lose its emotional charge. Essentially you have one foot in memory and past and one foot in present. Over time what we generally find is that this reduces the vividness of the original memory a lot. Some people experience a perceptual shift when they think about the memory.
Your therapist will assess your suitability for EMDR, and will also help you with a more detailed explanation for the therapy adapted to your personal circumstances.
I offfer EMDR in my Sydney office, but also over Zoom. I’ve found both to be effective.
My name is Rebecca Anderson and I am a clinical psychologist and EMDR therapist in Sydney, Australia.
Photo by Soroush Karimi on Unsplash