EMDR
An effective therapy for trauma and difficult life events
EMDR, which stands for Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing, is an evidence-based therapy recommended by the UK’s National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) for treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
EMDR processes traumatic memories, which eliminates or greatly reduces both trauma symptoms and emotional distress.
Signs of unprocessed trauma may include feeling intense emotion when you are reminded of the event, having intrusive thoughts of what happened, re-seeing the incident in the form of flashbacks, experiencing increased anxiety and/or needing to avoid reminders of the event due to how distressing it feels.
How Can EMDR Help?
EMDR is designed to help you process traumatic memories and distressing experiences. It works effectively for a wide range of challenges, including:
- Treating trauma and PTSD with clinically proven results.
- Improving emotional resilience and self-esteem.
- Addressing panic disorders, phobias, and low mood.
- Supporting recovery from grief and chronic pain.
Why We Provide EMDR
We really enjoy providing EMDR therapy because it produces great improvement and often much faster than many other types of therapy. We are trained in all three levels of EMDR for adults. We have also completed additional training in utilising EMDR to process traumatic births and/or traumatic losses.
EMDR for Children and Adolescents
We have completed training in adapting EMDR to help children and adolescents process difficult memories. EMDR can help children as young as two years old. With very young children, their parent and us would write a story about the difficult event and then read it together in a session. The parent taps the child’s shoulders to help process the memory.
For 5-6 year-olds, children may draw pictures while stimulating both sides of their brain, or play with toys at the end of the session. EMDR sessions for children are often not as difficult as parents may fear, and many children enjoy them.
For more information about EMDR:
- Anxiety and panic attacks
- Depression
- Stress
- Phobias
- Sleep problems
- Complicated grief
- Addictions
- Pain relief
- Phantom limb pain
- Self esteem and performance anxiety
When a person experiences a traumatic event, their body goes into fight, flight or freeze. As a result, the brain priorities ‘survival’, which can stop memory processing from occurring in the usual way. Instead the memory gets “stuck”. Trauma symptoms are the brain’s way of communicating that this has happened. You may notice that memory hasn’t processed fully because when you recall it; it feels fragmented, very sensory, very vivid and/or emotionally intense.
During an EMDR session, the person is asked to recall specific details from the traumatic event, whilst also moving their eyes from left to right. This is called bilateral stimulation (BLS). BLS may happen by: following the therapist’s fingers, tapping one’s own shoulders (alternating left then right); watching a light bar or via headphones playing sound in alternate ears.
BLS mimics the rapid eye movements that occur naturally when processing information at night, during REM sleep. This tells the brain to manually process the “stuck” memory, making the memory into a normal memory and putting it into the past.
EMDR helps the brain “unstick” and reprocess the memory, so that it is no longer intense and vivid upon recall.
An EMDR therapist will start by doing an in-depth assessment. This usually involves spending one or two sessions discussing your life history, the trauma itself and how they relate. A treatment plan is developed from this assessment and understanding.
Next, you will be helped to understand impact of the trauma on you physically and emotionally and you will learn strategies to help you emotionally and to prepare you for the trauma processing.
EMDR stimulates the brains natural capacity to self heal. It involves less talking, than many other therapies. This can be very helpful when an event feels too difficult to talk about or if it causes you strong bodily reactions, when discussed.
Read here.
If you feel EMDR could be helpful for you and/or you would like an assessment to further explore its appropriateness for you or your child, then please do fill out the contact form below.