EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) is an evidence-based integrative psychotherapy approach that helps people recover from problems caused by traumatic or disturbing adverse life experiences. It is a form of therapy that focuses on reprocessing memories of these experiences. EMDR stops difficult memories causing so much distress by helping the brain to reprocess them adaptively to heal old pain and improve current mental health and wellness.
EMDR therapy is an eight-phase treatment that identifies and addresses experiences that have overwhelmed the brain’s natural resilience or coping capacity, thereby generating trauma symptoms and/or harmful coping strategies. Through EMDR therapy, clients are able to reprocess traumatic information until it is no longer psychologically disturbing.
EMDR aims to help the brain become “unstuck” and reprocess a memory so that it is no longer so intense. It also helps to desensitize the person to the emotional impact of the memory, so that they can think about the event without experiencing strong feelings.
It does this by asking the person to think about the traumatic event while they are simultaneously experiencing bilateral stimulation. This stimulation could be in the form of moving their eyes from side to side, listening to alternate sounds in each ear, tapping on each hand alternately or crossing the arms and tapping alternately on the chest. This alternating bilateral stimulation seems to effectively activate the adaptive processing system in the brain.
In the late 1980s, American psychologist and educator Francine Shapiro, Ph.D., (1948-2019) was walking in a park and discovered a connection between eye movement and a decrease in persistent upsetting memories. With this personal insight, Dr Shapiro developed her work from a hypothesis to a formal therapy process. She studied this effect scientifically, and in 1989, she reported success using EMDR to treat victims of trauma. Following this initial study, many treatments were conducted, leading to EMDR Therapy now having more published treatment outcome studies than any other treatment for trauma.
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