Understanding EMDR: The Essentials

Hi,

My name is Susan Guttridge.

I'm a master degree counselor and EMDR clinician,

And I'm so glad you're here.

EMDR is a somatic evidence-based therapy designed to foster deep healing from trauma and emotional stress.

It's a powerful modality that helps your brain reprocess and organize upsetting memories,

Allowing deeply painful experiences to finally lose their emotional charge and stop dictating the present.

In this video,

I want to take you behind the scenes of how EMDR works so you can understand the science behind how this therapy helps you reclaim your resilience.

First off,

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.

And,

As we start talking about it,

It's helpful to also understand how the brain naturally stores information.

So during a normal day when non-stressful things are happening.

Your brain easily processes your experiences and files them away as past events,

Knowing the difference between what is happening right now and what belongs in the past.

But when we experienced something deeply stressful or overwhelming,

That natural filing system gets interrupted,

The brain becomes flooded,

And instead of the memory being filed away safely,

It's like the filing cabinet gets jammed.

In my work,

I often talk about the difference between cognitive brain and the felt sense.

You might know in your cognitive brain,

Your logical mind,

That you are safe right now.

But in your body,

The felt sense of that memory can spike up so fast that it feels like the danger is still very real.

It's as if the memory is stuck in present tense.

To address this,

EMDR therapy was developed by Dr.

Francine Shapiro and it operates on a very hopeful concept.

Think of it this way,

Your body knows how to heal a physical wound.

If you cut your hand,

Your body intuitively begins a protocol to close the wound.

Your brain has that same natural drive to heal from emotional stress.

However.

Sometimes the emotional charge connected to difficult experiences acts like debris in that wound,

Preventing the natural healing process from finishing.

Through EMDR therapy,

We identify and remove those blockages,

So the stuck emotions,

Thoughts,

Images,

Physical sensations,

Allowing your brain to do the work that it already knows how to do.

Moving these memory fragments into long-term memory where they can finally be stored and be addressed.

Now let's talk about the eye movements or bilateral stimulation because this doesn't have to just be eye movements.

We can also use a bilateral sound that you listen to or alternating tapping.

Regardless of the method,

The goal is to stimulate both sides of the brain while you briefly hold that upsetting memory in mind.

This does two things.

First,

It creates a tax on your working memory.

Because your brain is busy following the sound,

The movement,

Or the tapping,

It has fewer resources to fuel the memory,

Making the image naturally feel less vivid and more distant.

Second,

It keeps you grounded.

It's like keeping one foot on the safe shore of today while briefly dipping a toe into the stream of the past.

Because your body feels safe in the present,

Your brain can finally look at the past without being hijacked by it.

The goal of EMDR is desensitization.

We want to get to a place where you can recall the event,

But the sting of it has faded.

So you'll be able to say something like that happened and it's over now.

I'm safe.

It's a powerful path towards healing and reclaiming resilience.