Eye Movement Desensitisation & Reprocessing (EMDR)

EMDR has a specific structure and a therapist will work through several stages with you. These include assessment of your current symptoms and your readiness for EMDR, as well as understanding how your past has shaped your present. The therapist will also explain why you’re experiencing your current symptoms, and how trauma affects the mind.

One of the first stages is understanding how the client has become so distressed. What patterns have past events created, and what traumatic memories need to be processed to help them recover. We help prepare clients for the processing of traumatic memories in this stage. This can be a very powerful therapy and it’s very important that client safety comes first.

The next part of the therapy includes accessing the traumatic memories and starting bilateral stimulation. This involves stimulating either side of your brain in an alternating left-to-right fashion to help you access your subconscious mind and process what is stored in there and how it affects you.

This can be achieved by either making eye movements from side to side, listening to sounds in headphones that alternate from one ear to the other, or by tapping either side of your body. The eye movements may be similar to rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which take place as we dream.

Working in this way means we can reprocess the emotion-laden memories. The dual-attention focus means clients are anchored in the present, but also have one foot in the past.

Your therapist helps kickstart your natural healing process which replaces the negative or traumatic images or memories. You can view them in a different way so they don’t feel so distressing anymore. With EMDR there can be a remarkable change in how people feel, from feelings of terror or shame to calmness and empowerment.

Sometimes people only need around six sessions of EMDR therapy for it to make a dramatic difference, although some clients with more complex issues will require more. Following your assessment your practitioner will be able to give you an estimation of how many sessions may be required.

The following contraindications should be respected to safeguard the interests of both client and therapist. It may be quite safe to use EMDR with some of these conditions but your therapist will assess the risks with you prior to commencing your treatment.

 Contact lenses, bifocal or varifocal glasses must be removed prior to treatment
 Eye pain experienced when tracking movements – consider other stimuli
 Suicidal / violent tendencies
 Severe dissociative disorder
 Low tolerance of intense emotion
 Unknown cause of intense pain
 Suspected cardiac or respiratory problems
 Epilepsy

Being open to therapy and open with your therapist will help you get the most from your treatment.

It might be helpful to reflect on the following questions as these may be barriers to effective treatment;

• Am I using drugs and alcohol with any regularity?
• Is my life unsafe, very stressful and/or unstable?
• Do I have symptoms that predate the trauma?
• Do I suffer with chronic anxiety or depression that pre-dates the traumatic incident?
• Am I secretly, or openly, seeking a quick fix?
• Do I dissociate?
• Am I uncommitted to therapy?
• Am I impatient with therapy?
• Do I avoid giving my therapist feedback, being actively engaged in therapy, or avoid asking questions of my therapist?

If the answer to any of the above is yes, it’s probably a good idea to discuss this with your EMDR therapist. Remember, good therapy is teamwork. That’s true of any psychotherapy. but it’s especially true of trauma treatment.