Understanding EMDR Therapy: A Powerful Tool for Healing Trauma
EMDR therapy is a therapeutic technique that uses eye movement to help reprocess trauma. EMDR stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing.
First off, what exactly is trauma? One of the definitions I like to use to describe trauma is any event, circumstance, or series of events that makes you feel unsafe and exceeds your capacity to cope. This is often followed by a lack of support and resources to find a sense of security or stability again. Trauma can be a one time event or the combination of traumatic experiences over your lifetime. For many people, when they think of the things that may cause trauma, they think of war, violence, natural disasters, and life-threatening circumstances. These events certainly can cause trauma and lead to PTSD.
There are many other experiences that can cause trauma that are not as easily recognizable.
Growing up in a home where all of your physical needs were met, but not your emotional needs.
Betrayal trauma- being deceived, lied to, or experiencing a major violation of trust in a significant relationship
Losing a loved one who was a main support
Losing someone and not feeling a sense of resolve or peace with their passing
Growing up with a narcissistic parent or a toxic family dynamic
Getting sick and needing extensive medical intervention
Experiencing emotional and psychological abuse in a romantic relationship
Having to mask and cover up your true self because you learned early on that it wasn’t safe to be authentic.
Religious or spiritual trauma
Bullying or being targeted for your identity
Being unsafe in your community and experiencing lack of protection or support from your community.
These kinds of traumas are often complex and layered. If you experienced trauma in your childhood, this is even more likely. Because of this, it can be hard to recognize. If trauma was experienced over your lifetime or was normalized in your family, you may not recognize it as trauma. It may feel normal or like it wasn’t that big of a deal. Many people have trauma and don’t realize it. The thing is though, it is a big deal and it has an impact on you whether you are aware of it or not. Trauma impacts everything from your relationship with others, your relationship with yourself, your health (both physical and mental), and how you show up for yourself in your life.
Some of The Ways Trauma Can Impact You
Not feeling your emotions fully
Hypervigilance
Anxiety
Depression
Great difficulty allowing yourself to be vulnerable with people you trust
Not trusting yourself
Fearing that you’re actually bad on the inside or that there is something wrong with you
Believing that you are secretly incompetent or incapable of reaching your goals
High perfectionism and not allowing yourself to make mistakes
How EMDR Can Help Heal Trauma
When you experience traumatic events, it changes the way your brain processes information and emotion. During an extremely stressful event, your body’s stress response gets activated to help you respond quickly and effectively. This is the flight, flight, freeze, fawn response. Your brain is attempting to protect you and keep you safe by activating specific parts of your brain and body. It simultaneously slows down other non-essential processes like digestion and using the parts of your brain that control planning and weighing pros and cons.
You are not meant to stay in this state for long, but a lot of times this is exactly what trauma does. It keeps you in a stress state even when there is nothing stressful going on. This is why hypervigilance (heightened alertness and getting easily startled) is such a common experience for those who’ve experienced trauma. Trauma can also have the opposite effect and keep you in a state of numbness and dissociation. People who experience this impact of trauma often don’t feel much at all. It’s more like underreacting and feeling emotionally flat. Trauma can also show up suddenly through triggers. One moment you feel relaxed and fine, and the next your heart is pounding and you have the feeling of freaking out for no reason.
EMDR can help your brain release these stress states and heal trauma. It can help you to fully process memories and experiences that are getting stuck.
How EMDR Works
For such a significant brain process and impact, EMDR is really simple to do. In trauma therapy using EMDR, we decide on the area or memory that you would like to focus on. It could be something that’s currently happening that feels stressful and difficult to manage, or something from the past. Next, I hold up my fingers and move them quickly side to side across the computer screen while you follow with your eyes. It’s called bilateral stimulation, meaning that it stimulates both sides of your brain as your eyes move. This stimulation allows your brain to process distressing events and allows new neural pathways to form around memories and experiences.
We tend to carry painful emotions and beliefs with us from the past. For example, feeling guilty that you didn’t do more or react in a certain way during a traumatic event. We can form negative beliefs about ourselves from this, like “I always mess up and I never get it right," “I’m bad inside and nobody would ever want me," “I am a failure,” or “I am not lovable." These beliefs and negative feelings can feel impossible to challenge and disprove. EMDR can help shift these beliefs and give you greater access to your whole self and more dynamic truths. For example, you might realize during EMDR, “I was just a kid and what happened to me was not okay," “I know that I’m doing the best that I can and I can give myself a break," or “I know that I can trust myself." My clients are often shocked that they experience these thoughts and actually believe them. It’s the difference between just saying something to yourself that you would like to be true and actually believing and feeling that something positive is true.
Preparing for EMDR
We tend to have a lot of guards and defenses that protect us from re-experiencing trauma or distressing events. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing because it helps you to survive and continue functioning. It’s protective. EMDR tends to cut through those defenses rapidly and access the root of your experiences. Because of this, it’s important to prepare yourself by learning how to ground and stabilize your nervous system. Your trauma therapist should help you prepare by teaching you different stabilization / coping techniques and helping you decipher which ones work best for you. Here is an article I wrote with examples of body-based coping skills you can use to calm your nervous system so that you can fully integrate your EMDR session without overly activating or overwhelming yourself. Body-Based Coping Skills to Help You Relieve Anxiety. It’s also common for people to experience a calming, peaceful sensation when they finish EMDR. As a trauma therapist, I always make sure you are grounded and supported during sessions so you are not overwhelmed and can go about the rest of your day after session.
What You Might Experience After An EMDR Session
Tiredness. During EMDR, your brain processes a lot of old feelings, experiences, and beliefs while also integrating new information. It’s kind of like a brain workout and it can make you feel tired.
Strange dreams. It’s common to have intense or weird dreams after an EMDR session. We don’t know exactly why this happens, but my personal theory is that dreaming is part of your brain's way of processing and storing memory. It makes sense to me that EMDR would impact dreams as it helps to fully process memories by integrating new information and forming new neural pathways.
Feeling emotionally raw. As I discussed earlier, EMDR cuts through defenses and gets to the core of an issue. It helps stuck emotions and memories get unstuck. This is a good thing, but when it happens you might feel that your emotions are more on the surface and easily accessible. This generally lasts a few hours to a few days.
Increased access to powerful realizations and the things trauma blocks you from seeing. Like how you can trust yourself now even though you made a bad decision before, how you're strong enough to set boundaries or face fears, and how the thing that you’ve blamed yourself for all of these years was not actually your fault.
EMDR in combination with trauma therapy or anxiety therapy can help create change in yourself. It can help you go from trying to believe in and take care of yourself to actually believing in your worth and value. Working with a trauma therapist can help you relieve anxiety, heal trauma, and manage stress more effectively.
I work with a unique group of people called cycle breakers. Cycle breakers recognize the unhealthy and problematic patterns that exist in the families they grew up in. They challenge the status quo and actively seek to make themselves healthier so they do not repeat the same negative behaviors and patterns that were modeled to them. They seek healthier communication, more fulfilling relationships, self-trust, and healthier ways to cope. They want to heal so the cycle of generational trauma stops with them. They want a better future for themselves and the next generation.
In my work as a trauma therapist, I use somatics and body-based techniques to help you process and heal trauma. We store trauma in our bodies so doing this kind of work helps you release trauma while increasing your capacity and confidence. Working with a trauma informed therapist can help you get clarity and heal. My goal is for my clients to walk away from sessions feeling more in touch with their self-worth and more confident in their ability to give themselves what they need to build the life that they truly want. I offer trauma informed therapy and anxiety therapy in North Carolina. To explore working together, schedule a free 20 minute consultation. The consultation gives you a chance to ask questions and an opportunity to meet me before you commit to therapy.
Hanna Woody is a Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor in Asheville, North Carolina. She has over 12 years of professional counseling experience and specializes in breaking cycles of generational trauma, childhood trauma, and the Enneagram. Certified in the Embodiment Tradition, she has over 150 hours of training and teaching experience. Hanna is in private practice and provides online mental health therapy, Enneagram coaching, and Enneagram training.
Therapy in Asheville, Raleigh, Charlotte, Winston-Salem, Greensboro and all North Carolina regions.
Therapy for Childhood Trauma, Anxiety Therapist, Childhood Trauma Therapist, Therapy for Cycle Breakers, Narcissistic Abuse Recovery, Enneagram Therapy, Enneagram Therapist, Enneagram Coaching