What is EMDR Therapy?

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is an extensively researched, structured, and effective mind-body psychotherapy method proven to help people recover from trauma (including racial trauma, complex trauma, and PTSD) symptoms, anxiety, depression, dissociation, obsessions, compulsions, chronic pain, addiction and recovery, and other distressing life experiences and negative self-beliefs. EMDR introduces a Healing process that is an activation of your  brain's natural ability to heal psychologically, just as your body does with a physical wound. We are wired to heal and achieve equilibrium. EMDR can accelerate therapy by resolving the impact of your past traumas and allowing you to live more fully in the present as an active participant in your life.

This treatment approach, which targets past experience, current triggers, and future potential challenges, results in the alleviation of presenting symptoms, a decrease or elimination of distress from the disturbing memory, improved view of the self, relief from bodily disturbance, and resolution of present and future anticipated triggers.

The Brain’s Response to Trauma and Stress

Old disturbing memories can be stored in the brain in isolation; they get locked into the mid-brain and nervous system with the original images, sounds, thoughts and feelings involved. This old distressing material just keeps getting triggered, over and over again, which impedes learning and healing from taking place.

In one part of your brain, you have your Neocortex (responsible for thinking, speech, logic, sense of time, executive functioning, higher- order thinking skills, meaning making, willpower, and wisdom.), in another part you have your Limbic brain (responsible for emotion, mood, learning, filtering information, memory, movement, and alerting to danger - flight/flight/freeze/fawn reactions, feeding, pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding, attachment), 
and you have your Brainstem which is part of the midbrain (responsible for physical functions such as scanning the environment for threats, the messages of sensation, alertness, arousal, deepest body-level experiences, breathing, heartrate, digestion, and relaying the information to the upper parts of the brain). The brainstem works in conjunction with the limbic system in order to respond to danger, and neither have a sense of time, but can make sense of information when there is communication with the neocortex, so the intention of these three brains is to work together in an integrative 
manner. However, when the limbic system gets triggered and over-activated, blood flows centers 
on the limbic brain and suspends blood flow and oxygen to the left prefrontal cortex (part of the 
neocortex), which may lead to a response of “what’s happening to me” and an awareness of what’s happening while distressed,
and no ability to process or make sense of it (left brain-logical-neocortex) because the lanes of communication between the limbic-logical brain and emotional-reactive/responsive neocortex are blocked.

When these responses in the limbic brain system are activated and re-activated, the body goes into auto-pilot mode or survival mode, and will do whatever these parts of the brain tell it to do, regardless of what rational thought might be saying. 
This part of the brain seeks to fulfil its purpose of protection, which isn’t actually a bad thing, it just has to learn how to and communicate with the Neocortex before prompting an automatic response.

  Once EMDR starts, a new neuro-fiber bridge is built, (corpus callosum), which connects the Neocortex thinking brain to the Limbic emotional reactive side of the brain, allowing for the lanes of communication to widen and a  smoother, efficient flow of traffic, so that new messages are sent from the brainstem through the nervous system to reduce distress.  

Bilateral Stimulation

With bilateral stimulation, we are replicating a process that your body naturally does every night in REM sleep wherein your brain is processing unconscious material and making sense of things that occurred throughout your day through spontaneous dream sleep eye movements. In EMDR sessions, fast bilateral stimulation prompts a physical interest response in the brain, which widens the lanes of communication of the bridge between the limbic and neocortex sides of the brain, promoting more room for information to flow towards resolution of trauma and adaptive information processing.

EMDR encourages the client to briefly focus on the distressing thought or trauma memory while simultaneously experiencing bilateral stimulation, such as Eye movements similar to those during REM sleep, that will be recreated simply by asking you to watch the therapist’s fingers or an object moving backwards and forwards across your visual field or by asking you to utilize some other form of left right stimulation, such as self tapping, drumming, or auditory stimulus. The bilateral stimulation will last for a short while and then stop. Then your therapist will do a simple check on what you are experiencing, which may include changes in thoughts, images and feelings, so all you need to do is share feedback on what is happening, without judging whether it should be happening or not. 

There are no right answers in this process.  Let whatever happens happen, and just notice that.

Your therapist will track and guide you through adaptive processing, which involves the series of repeated sets of bilateral stimulation, breathing, body scanning, and you sharing what’s coming up for you. This process connects the parts of the brain that allows for the memory tends to change in such a way that it loses its painful intensity and simply becomes a neutral memory of an event in the past, filed away, or like a black and white photo instead of in HD full motion picture.

Here’s a video from the EMDR International Association explaining EMDR

References & Resources:

About EMDR Therapy. 1995-2022. EMDRIA EMDR International Association. Retrieved from https://www.emdria.org/about-emdr-therapy/

Shapiro, F. (2012). Getting past your past: Take control of your life with self-help techniques from EMDR therapy. New York: Rodale.

Shapiro, F., & Forrest, M. (2016). EMDR the breakthrough therapy for overcoming anxiety, stress and trauma (2nd ed.). New York: Basic Books. EMDR Therapy Evaluated Clinical Applications updated 2019-02

Shapiro, F. (2001). Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing: Basic principles, protocols and procedures (2nd Ed.). New York: Guilford Press.