Thank you for your interest in EMDR therapy. The EMDR community of clinicians initiated their extensive EMDR training even after their Masters’ degrees (and many times their full license to practice clinical psychotherapy or PhD program) to be a beacon of real resolve from underlying pain. Suffering can be transformed! Diving into your pain does take courage. Many times, the worst part though is that when the trauma(s) happened you went through it alone. This time you will not face it alone.
About EMDR
EMDR (Eye-Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing) is one of the best researched, most effective psychotherapy treatments for a wide range of issues, including:
- PTSD
- Recent traumatic incident
- Panic attacks
- Pain
- Grief
- Childhood trauma
- Sexual assault
- Many more issues
What can you expect from EMDR Therapy?
You should not expect in the first appointment to start EMDR therapy. Instead, early in your work with an EMDR therapist, you can expect for your therapist to gain a thorough history, guide assessment tools, and make sure good coping skills for in session and outside of session are in place.
EMDR therapy has been around for decades. It is a well-researched and comprehensive 8 phase model. The early phases of the model include preparation and stabilization for the upcoming EMDR sessions. In these phases you are preparing for EMDR treatment by identifying memories, sensations, thoughts, or unremitting symptoms that are stuck-points to your own psychological natural healing. Deciding on a treatment plan or target for processing is a collaborative process with you and your therapist. You may process a disturbance from the present, past, or future.
During EMDR processing, the client calls to mind the disturbing issue or incident including the image, emotions, thoughts, and physical response. The therapist facilitates processing using a form of bilateral (right to left) stimulation, or BLS, and breaks up the processing into sets of palpable segments with constant checking in with you. You are encouraged to let whatever material comes up in those sets to be processed, as we know it is connected in that neuro-network (or memory network).
During EMDR therapy, the client may experience intense emotions or sensations, but by the end of the session or target, most report a great reduction in the level of disturbance. In the end, clients can recognize dramatic shifts in the emotional charge that they used to feel when they first looked at the targeted material. And there can be dramatic shifts in client’s ability to offer themselves compassion, insight, forgiveness, and finality of the pain.
As Francine Shapiro, EMDR creator, said in her own words, “Changing the memories that form the way we see ourselves also changes the way we view others. Therefore, our relationships, job performance, what we are willing to do or are able to resist, all move in a positive direction.”
Please go to https://www.emdria.org/about-emdr-therapy/ to watch a video about EMDR and see the articles and endorsements about this therapy.