How Does Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR) Work?
Many of the people who are calling me for the first time have been in talk therapy for many years, but their PTSD symptoms continue to get worse – hypervigilance, avoidance, lack of safety in the body, difficulties regulating emotions especially when triggered, and being triggered into fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and shut down.
One very vital and important thing that talk therapy is excellent at is helping a trauma survivor trust again. Having someone show up week after week and maybe year after year and be attuned to your emotions, remember what happened the previous week, and build a caring and supportive relationship is invaluable. Therapists call this the “therapeutic relationship” and one of my favorite psychoanalysts, Donald Winnicot, called it a “holding space”. It is 45 minutes or 60 minutes, where you can fully be yourself with a full range of emotions and that person is consistent, empathetic, and nonjudgemental. Many of my adult trauma survivor patients are experiencing this type of caring relationship for the first time.
But talk therapy is unable to address the source of trauma and that’s where EMDR comes in. EMDR is about taking information that is not processed or digested by the body and putting it through the adaptive information process, so that the patient can learn from the experience rather than repressing or avoiding the trauma. The symptoms of PTSD are when a person has this dysfunctionally stored information but it is not linked to adaptive information it needs to fully process it and put the information in the past where it belongs. Otherwise, it stays in the present and manifests as trauma triggers and it is accompanied by negative thoughts and self-blame rather than a more accurate statement like, “I did the best that I could”.
EMDR was first developed by Francine Shapiro in 1989. She was walking in a park and the light and shadow flickered in her eyes as she walked unde the trees. She was thinking disturbing thoughts and the flickering caused her to feel better and less anxious about the thoughts. She started out with just desensitizing patient’s emotions and later added the reprocessing once she developed a protocol that helps with linking the adaptive information.
In the last 35 years, EMDR has evolved from a walk in the park to a worldwide trauma treatment. It has been recommended by both the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Institute for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS) for the treatment of PTSD. New innovations are happening all the time so that EMDR can help them live a life of peace where they know bad things happened in the past and that they will stay there.
