Trauma can deeply affect an individual’s mental health and quality of life. At Touchstone Trauma Therapy, we specialize in using Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) to help individuals heal from their traumatic experiences.
What is EMDR for Trauma Therapy?
EMDR is a powerful psychotherapy technique designed to alleviate the distress associated with traumatic memories. Through a structured approach involving eight phases, EMDR helps the brain reprocess memories of traumatic events, significantly reducing their lingering effects.
What Types of Trauma Can EMDR Therapy Help With?
EMDR therapy is a versatile treatment that has been proven effective for a wide range of traumatic experiences. Here’s a look at some common types of trauma that EMDR can help address:
- Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD):
- Description: PTSD often follows severe, life-threatening events like military combat, natural disasters, terrorist incidents, serious accidents, or personal assaults.
- How EMDR Helps: EMDR therapy helps process these intense memories, reducing their lingering effects and helping to restore a sense of normalcy. Clients often notice an increase in self-esteem and a sense of increased trust in their own ability to handle difficult life events going forward. Clients also notice that their nervous system tends to calm down in general, making it easier to navigate and enjoy life.
- Childhood Abuse and Neglect
- Description: This includes physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, as well as cases of severe neglect during childhood.
- How EMDR Helps: EMDR can be particularly effective in accessing and reprocessing memories that may be deeply buried in an individual’s mind from childhood. EMDR is a modality that can address deep attachment wounds that have made it difficult to connect, be vulnerable, and feel safe within close relationships.
- Anxiety and Panic Disorders
- Description: Disorders characterized by spontaneous panic attacks and intense anxiety about potential threats and/or a strong feeling that one is unsafe or excessively vulnerable.
- How EMDR Helps: EMDR helps modify the traumatic memories that often underlie anxiety disorders, decreasing symptoms and over time, potentially resolving the symptoms associated with the disorder.
- Accidents and Surgery Trauma
- Description: Trauma resulting from vehicle accidents, major surgeries, or other sudden medical interventions.
- How EMDR Helps: EMDR helps individuals process and integrate these traumatic events, aiding in emotional and physical recovery. The memory can effectively be stored in long-term memory rather than in the limbic center of the brain where it is experienced as being “relived” over and over.
- Grief and Loss
- Description: Intense sorrow caused by the death of loved ones, or the loss of something deeply significant.
- How EMDR Helps: EMDR therapy assists in processing the distressing emotions tied to loss, facilitating the mourning process and aiding healing.
- Witnessing Violence
- Description: Trauma that occurs from witnessing violence or atrocities, which can have a profound effect even without direct personal harm.
- How EMDR Helps: EMDR processes these shocking and distressing observations, helping to alleviate stress symptoms associated with them.
- Natural Disasters
- Description: Trauma caused by hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, and other catastrophic events.
- How EMDR Helps: EMDR addresses the intense fear and helplessness felt during and after the disaster, promoting recovery from these extreme stressors.
How Does EMDR Work for Trauma?
The 8-Stage Model of EMDR
- History and Treatment Planning: The therapist gathers a detailed history of the client, focusing on traumatic events to create a targeted treatment plan.
- Preparation: The client is taught techniques to handle emotional distress to ensure they feel safe and in control throughout the therapy process. These Resourcing Skills are utilized during the processing of the traumatic material and can also be used outside of the sessions and between sessions.
- Assessment: Each traumatic memory is identified, and a protocol is developed with the client in preparation for processing. The protocol identifies such things as the emotions connected to the traumatic memory, the negative cognitions associated with the memory being processed and the body sensations felt when connecting with the traumatic memory.
- Desensitization: While focusing on the memory being targeted, bilateral stimulation is utilized. The process of utilizing bilateral stimulation while processing the traumatic memory begins to lessen the emotional impact associated with traumatic memories. It also helps the client to think and feel differently about the memory. New cognitive associations and meanings are made during this stage of EMDR.
- Installation: Positive beliefs and associations are reinforced to replace the traumatic memory’s original negative cognitions.
- Body Scan: The client is asked to note any residual physical sensations linked to the trauma and these are processed further.
- Closure: The session ends ensuring the client feels better than at the start, maintaining stability. Specific rating scales are used to assess the level of distress at the beginning, before the processing, and then following the processing, to ensure the level of distress has decreased significantly.
- Reevaluation: Progress is reviewed in subsequent sessions, ensuring the client continues to heal. New trauma memories can also be selected to work on and can be processed, as needed.
Benefits of EMDR in Trauma Therapy
- Rapid results: Many clients experience a quick decrease in trauma symptoms.
- Reduces emotional distress: By reprocessing traumatic memories, EMDR helps clients achieve emotional stability. Many clients notice an overall sense of increased well-being, safety, and self-confidence that they can navigate life stressors effectively.
- Broad applicability: EMDR has proven effective for various trauma-induced conditions including PTSD, anxiety, and depression. For many clients, there is an increase in desire to engage in social and relational activities, or to begin to pursue long-desired life goals, because there is an increased sense of safety, self-confidence, and calm.
What’s the Next Step?
If traumatic memories are impacting your life, EMDR therapy might provide the relief you seek. At Touchstone Trauma Therapy, we are committed to supporting your journey toward recovery. Contact us to discuss how EMDR can be tailored to your specific needs or read more about our approach to EMDR.
