EMDR, Hypnotherapy, Counselling, Somatic Therapy, NLP
EMDR Eye Movement Desensitisation & Reprocessing
What is EMDR
Eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) is a type of guided therapy that may help you feel less distress caused by memories, thoughts, and emotions related to traumatic experiences.
Traumatic experiences can be sudden, out-of-the-blue things that happen to us, like an accident or assault, or they can be ongoing experiences, like growing up in an abusive household. Recognising that you may need help feeling safe again and rebuilding your confidence is a huge first step.
As a newer psychotherapy approach, EMDR is proving to be a popular tool for the many Australians experiencing mental health conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
When it comes to trauma counselling, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests EMDR is an innovative and effective treatment for people who have not had success with other therapies such as congnative behavioural threrapy (CBT)
How Does EMDR Work
EMDR is a type of desensitisation treatment that works by helping you:
- Recognise that a distressing experience is part of the past rather than an ongoing experience in the present
- Recall a traumatic memory without experiencing the emotions of it all over again
- Reorganise where a traumatic memory or difficult experience is stored in the brain.
Traumatic experiences can leave us with memories that are fundamentally different to the ones we typically form. Unlike a standard memory that feels like part of your past, a traumatic memory or ‘flashback’, can cause you to relive all of the emotions from a traumatic event over and over again.
A key aspect of EMDR involves silently recalling a memory while your brain is manually prompted to go into a memory processing mode similar to that seen in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.
This is done by the therapist moving thei finger with your eyes or use tapping, vibration, or sounds. Along with some light verbal guidance, this stimulation is a bit like giving your brain a helpful nudge, encouraging it to sort through and make sense of emotional experiences that might have been too overwhelming to deal with before.
EMDR can reduce the emotional impact of traumatic memory by enabling you to look at it in a new way and then find a safe and non-disruptive place for it in your mental filing cabinet.
Benefits of EMDR
EMDR has a strong evidence base for treating trauma-related distress and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
When compared to traditional talk therapies such as cognitave behavioural therapy (CBT) EMDR is a popular alternative because it can be more time efficient, less confronting and easier to complete.
On average, people need between three and seven EMDR sessions compared to other types of therapy like CBT. CBT can take months or even years and often involves ‘homework’ that’s done outside of a session.
Given that the impacts of trauma look and feel different for everyone, it’s important to remember that the healing process will also vary. This means you might process a traumatic memory in a single 90-minute EMDR session while someone else might need seven or more.
One of the biggest benefits of EMDR is that you’re not typically required to talk about the details of your trauma, have extended periods of exposure to triggers, or do any further work outside of the session.
Benefits of EMDR:
- Time effective: Results can be achieved in a significantly shorter time frame compared to other trauma treatments
- Less confronting: EMDR doesn’t require you to talk about your trauma in detail
- Easier to complete: EMDR has a higher completion rate compared to trauma treatments such as exposure therapy.