Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing 

What is EMDR therapy?

How does EMDR therapy work?

EMDR therapy involves an eight-phase process that ensures your safety and readiness while working through traumatic memories:

1. History and Treatment Planning: We collaboratively explore your background and identify specific targets for reprocessing. We will build a “map” of the parts of your nervous system wherein you are wanting to reduce activation. We will also engage in assessment for dissociation and explore attachment as needed. This stage is usually interwoven with the preparation stage. 

2. Preparation: You’ll learn coping techniques to manage distressing emotions during and between sessions. These can include things like mindfulness, butterfly tapping, and cognitive techniques. This step is integral for ensuring safety during reprocessing of difficult content, as it allows you to build your window for tolerating distress. Think of it like teaching someone how to swim before throwing them in the deep end of a pool with no support. It also allows you to build dual awareness, which is your ability to keep one foot in the present with your therapist and one foot in processing a memory/experience. 

3. Assessment: We identify the activating negative beliefs, emotions, and body sensations tied to past experiences. 

4. Desensitization: Using bilateral stimulation, we help your brain reprocess the traumatic memory. This is what most people picture when they think of EMDR, such as the “follow my fingers and think of X…”

5. Installation: Positive beliefs replace negative ones, fostering a more adaptive perspective of past experiences that no longer keeps you stuck in your day-to-day life. We “re-store” these memories so that they are no longer physically and emotionally activating to you. 

6. Body Scan: We ensure physical sensations related to the memory are resolved and address lingering sensations via bilateral stimulation as needed to clear them. 

7. Closure: Each session ends with techniques to ensure emotional stability, often utilizing the skills gained in the preparation stage to ensure you aren’t leaving session in an activated state. This is another important step to ensure client safety when digging deeper. 

8. Reevaluation: Progress is reviewed to determine next steps, including looking back at the memory map, considering current triggers, and the future. We assess for generalization of reduced subjective distress across targets and restart the protocol as needed with a new target to enhance desensitization.

I’ve tried everything else, so why should I try EMDR?

• Fast and Effective: Many clients see significant improvements in just a few sessions.

• Non-Invasive: For many, the daunting thought of talking with a therapist in great detail about their trauma is a deterrent to getting the help they want. Clients do not have to provide the therapist with as much detail during reprocessing as long as safety is maintained and the content is moving. 

• Versatile: EMDR can be tailored to suit your unique needs and goals.

• Nervous system-based: Talk therapy is a very helpful tool, but EMDR goes deeper into your nervous system to heal the somatic responses to trauma that linger in your body

EMDR has been adapted to be just as effective over telehealth. We can utilize eye movement software over a shared screen or self-tapping techniques. The beauty of doing trauma work over telehealth is that clients are able to stay within their own safe spaces, such as on the couch with their favorite blanket, with their pets, and in comfortable clothes. Helping clients feel safe in their bodies is imperative to doing this kind of work successfully, so being in one’s own space can actually facilitate healing. Doing this work over telehealth can also reduce barriers clients would have when getting to a more traditional therapy office, such as accessibility concerns, driving to get to session, or managing a busy lifestyle.