The Rowan Center uses EMDR to help our clients process trauma, but what exactly is it, and how does it work? Our Clinical Director, Luke Robbins, LCSW, explains!
What is EMDR?
EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is an evidence-based psychotherapy modality that enables people to heal from the symptoms and emotional distress that are the result of disturbing life experiences, as well as to process or finish processing lessons, experiences, and information that the brain hasn’t stored in ways that are helpful to the client. It is an eight-phase modality that research studies have shown to be effective in treating all kinds of mental health conditions and symptoms, especially trauma.
How does the brain process experiences?
Please keep in mind that this is one of many theories out there about how the brain processes information and experiences.
When we experience something, it gets stored as short-term memory until it gets fully processed into long-term memory. Once that happens, the different elements of an experience, like the sights, the sounds, the smells, the meaning, and the thoughts, get stored separately in their appropriate places. Think of a giant interconnected fishing net rather than an alphabetized filing cabinet. Sleep seems to be integral to this process in helping to make that conversion happen, and in helping to store information adaptively or in a helpful way.
How does EMDR help clients?
When a disturbing event occurs, it can get locked in the brain with the images, sounds, thoughts, feelings, and body sensations of the experience. And if enough time passes after the experience and the information has still not yet been processed and stored adaptively, it can get stuck that way. EMDR seems to stimulate the information and allow the brain to process the experiences.
When maladaptively or unhelpfully stored information is activated, we can get to where we re-experience the information and the pain but receive no benefit of it being processed. Some of the treatment components specific to EMDR help to keep the client partially grounded in the present and partially activated in the memory. And this state of dual awareness, as it’s called in EMDR, is what we believe allows the processing to finally happen.
Why do you practice EMDR?
So for one, I have benefited greatly from EMDR as a client myself. I actually regularly see my own therapist for EMDR.
But perhaps my favorite thing about EMDR as an intervention is that it’s the client’s own brain that is doing the healing, and it’s the client who is in control of the entire process.