EMDR or Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing, is a type of psychological therapy developed by Shapiro (1989) and is used in the treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It is also effective in the treatment of anxiety, phobias, traumatic bereavement and complex PTSD.
EMDR helps to process distressing events that have happened to you. It harnesses the brain’s natural capacity to process information. Using a method named bilateral stimulation (simply watching the therapist fingers moving from side to side or watching a light moving from your left to right visual field), this action mimics what occurs naturally in the brain during REM sleep, speeding up information processing and enabling the person to feel less distressed by the memory of the event. With guidance from an experienced therapist, the memory can start to feel more distant, better understood, less distressing and firmly in the past.
There are several benefits to this method of processing trauma. The first is that it works quite quickly. Another plus point is that people do not need to talk in detail about their trauma during therapy. There is even a blind protocol where the person need not talk about the trauma at all, but they must obviously think about it internally. EMDR can also be used for anticipatory anxiety to prepare people for upcoming anxiety provoking events. In the latter stages of the therapy we develop a “future template” where the person mentally prepares and rehearses how they would most like to feel and behave in certain situations. People often report a mixture of outcomes, from feeling more peaceful, a sense of closure, knowing they were not to blame, more self compassionate and understanding of themselves and others.
Sea change 