EMDR Therapy

“Let it go. Let it go…”

If only real life were as simple as the song lyrics. You’d love nothing more than to do just that, but you can’t.

Every time you see it – every time you hear those familiar sounds – every time you smell or taste certain things – the whole traumatic event keeps flooding back.

It’s as though you’re reliving the whole horrible thing all over again.

You want to be in control, but you’re frozen.

Trapped in that one moment in time – the one you’d most like to forget.

One minute, you’re going about your daily activities – the next, you’re in the middle of a full-blown panic attack, or you’re enveloped by grief and sobbing uncontrollably.

You never know where or when something will trigger you, and it’s starting to get in the way of your life.

You may have tried many things, from holistic therapies to medication, but nothing seems to work. Sometimes, you feel like giving up. You think you’ll never be happy – that life will never be normal – again.

But don’t lose hope! There is a way: through EMDR.

Research has found Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, an integrative psychotherapy approach, to be highly effective to treat trauma because it uses your brain’s natural healing power to help you overcome your trauma.

EMDR treatment occurs in multiple stages. First, I’ll ask you some questions about your experience and share some initial coping skills for emotions that you may experience as we progress in your therapy.

In the midst of treatment, we will identify the target we want to overcome and assign an image, a negative belief, and related emotions and sensations; however, we’ll also try to find positive thoughts and feelings of truth about the positive thought. Our goal here is to reduce the negative response to the experience while plugging in and reinforcing the positive.

The last elements involve calming and learning self-soothing strategies to help you deal with triggers that once caused you to freeze or lose control.

How does EMDR work?

No one knows exactly how any form of psychotherapy works neurobiologically or in the brain. However, we do know that when a person is distraught, their brain cannot process information as it does ordinarily. One moment becomes “frozen in time,” and remembering a trauma may feel as bad as going through it the first time because the images, sounds, smells, and feelings haven’t changed. Such memories have a lasting negative effect that interferes with how a person sees the world and how they relate to other people.

EMDR seems to have a direct effect on how the brain processes information. Once we go through the steps, your brain can resume normal information processing. Following a successful EMDR session, you no longer relive the images, sounds, and feelings when something brings the event to your mind.

You still remember what happened, but it is less upsetting.

Many types of therapy have similar goals. However, EMDR appears to be like what occurs naturally during dreaming or REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. Therefore, you can think of EMDR as a physiologically based therapy that can help you see disturbing material in a new and less distressing way.

Are you ready to let it go? To get your life back and move beyond?

If you are ready to know more and schedule a free 15-minute consult, call me at (540) 492-0773.

I would love to hear from you!