What is EMDR?

05:30

What is EMDR?

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talks

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Meditation

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EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) is a therapy that helps the mind process difficult or stuck experiences. Sometimes memories don’t fully settle, and they continue to affect how we feel and respond in the present. EMDR supports the brain to reprocess these experiences so they feel less overwhelming. It’s not about forgetting, but about changing the relationship to what happened.

Emdr Trauma Healing Mental Health Therapy Healing Bilateral Stimulation Grounding Techniques

Meet your Teacher

Melbourne VIC, Australia

Meet your Teacher

Melbourne VIC, Australia

Transcript

Hey guys so it's Reuben here and as a ACT therapist and EMDR therapist I want to just give you a little what is EMDR. So EMDR 101. So the tagline for this could be your brain already knows how to heal. It just got stuck. That's a really quick access little tagline. And so the big idea with EMDR is that some memories are old but still activate us like they are happening now. So for those people that are familiar with trauma that's what a flashback is right? The body reacts in the present. Heart races, Stomach drops, Feelings and thoughts flood in right? It's your body going into protection mode. It's not a weakness and this is the problem we can get so caught up in thinking there's something wrong with me. Why do I keep reliving this? Why can't I just get over that right? It's an uninterrupted healing cycle. Normally the brain processes upsetting events during rapid eye movement in sleep right? When the eyes go from side to side. The memories get filed so to speak like in the filing cabinet right? Emotional charge fades. It becomes something that happened not something that is happening. If the event was too overwhelming right? So a trauma is too overwhelming. What happens is the memory gets stuck. It's like blocked right? It's raw. It's like frozen in time like a splinter that never comes out. And EMDR standing for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing was developed by Shapiro in 1987 and it's now very well established and recommended by the World Health Organization. It basically helps the brain finish what it started if that makes sense. What happens when a trauma happens is it like it gets blocked but the brain has an amazing capacity to do that filing that I spoke about earlier right? But sometimes it gets blocked and this is how EMDR can be really really effective. It helps desensitize but also reprocess the trauma and in the people that I've worked with many many people that I've worked with have had amazing results and they'll say things like now I look now I look back at that memory it's just like a memory. It doesn't have the emotional charge that it used to. So that's how it works. Every time life bumps against us the pain feels fresh again and again unless we've had some kind of appropriate what's called adaptive information processing in EMDR AIP but this just means the filing the filing of the memory so there's no emotional charge left or very little emotional charge left. So EMDR helps the system finally process it. So it builds safety first off. There's grounding tools. There's also visualizations to help create like calm healing places as a resource to come back to when you're going through the therapy and then it's basically when you're ready about bringing the memory to mind with gentle willingness only when you're ready to lean into that and then work with that and in terms of the eye movement the eye movements that happen right very similar to rapid eye movement this is also known as bilateral stimulation the brain it activates bilateral stimulation by moving the eyes in this way and it's not just done through eyes it could also be done through auditory auditory sounds or it can be done with a light bar it can also be done with little pulses all of these ways activate that bilateral stimulation so both sides of the brain start operating and like I said it helps unblock what got trapped so I hope that makes sense and welcome any resources here on insight timing that can help you on your journey with EMDR could be could be a great resource as you work alongside your therapist in doing that I hope this video was helpful take care