This video will help you understand how EMDR works and whether it can help you.
And at the end of this video I will share the number one thing that you can do now to
begin to recover from anxiety and trauma.
I will also share with you the main thing therapists do to make sure that somebody is
ready to move forward with EMDR processing.
I have been working with EMDR for over a decade.
I had been certified and I've helped hundreds of people recover from anxiety and trauma.
Now EMDR therapy is actually a comprehensive therapy technique.
It's not just the eye movement piece.
That's the part that everybody pays attention to because it seems a little weird, but um,
it's actually a comprehensive technique that incorporates cognitive behavioral therapy.
It incorporates psychodynamic therapy, it brings in a body centered therapy.
It's very holistic and it's very integrative.
So for example, all trauma treatments and all phobia treatments incorporate an element
of desensitization and an element of reprocessing.
Now desensitization sounds like, you know, is what it sounds like.
It is a process of desensitizing the person to the event, to the trauma or to the thing
that they are afraid of.
And then once the person is desensitized and doesn't have as strong an emotional reaction
to that thing or event, then the event can be reprocessed.
The beliefs about the self and about the world can be changed and can be seen differently
to help the person remember the event more adaptively and move forward more clearly in
their life.
And the regular process in therapy of talking over a trauma or talking about something very
often does desensitize it even without the EMDR.
But in my experience, the bilateral stimulation that goes with EMDR speeds up that process
in an incredible way.
The bilateral stimulation portion of the EMDR process is what we call the active processing
stage.
And the person will sometimes watch the therapist's finger move, they'll move their eyes back
and forth.
I actually use a light bar in my office and I will share with you what that looks like
here.
And um, you can also hold tappers that alternate a tap.
You can have a headphone on that alternate sounds, but all of these techniques are stimulating
both hemispheres of the brain, the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere.
So the bilateral stimulation of the brain gets the whole brain working both hemispheres,
and it really helps to integrate the memory.
So it integrates the emotional portion of the memory with the logical portions of the
memory.
It also helps the person connect with they're feeling when they remember the memory, and
then also the feeling of safety of being in a therapist's office.
And it is very important to feel as safe as you can with the therapist you're doing this
with because you also will move in between being aware of, Hey, I'm safe here, but I'm
not feeling safe when I think about this.
And moving in between those two things, again, is helping to process the emotions and process
the memory.
So I believe that EMDR helps to stimulate the brain's own natural ability to process
information and to heal itself.
So can EMDR help you?
EMDR is highly, highly effective for post-traumatic stress disorder.
Single incident trauma, recent traumatic events, which would be acute stress disorder, phobias,
all sorts of phobias, fear of flying, emetophobia, agoraphobia.
It's highly effective for panic attacks and it's also very effective for life transitions
for those times in life where your head and your heart might be in a different place and
you can't quite sort through.
It doesn't have to be something as severe as a traumatic event.
So in those instances EMDR is extremely effective.
And then there are a number of other types of situations where EMDR can certainly help,
although it will be a more extended course of treatment.
And that would include complex post traumatic stress disorder, extended childhood abuse,
depression, particularly if there's a traumatic route to the depression and associative disorders.
So that gives you a sense of the kind of things that EMDR can help with.
So the thing that every well trained therapist will do prior to beginning active processing
with the client is something called a safe place exercise.
And this exercise assesses whether a client can access feelings of safety when they are
safe with EMDR.
It is super important that the client have enough emotional regulation tools that they
can do some emotional regulation in between sessions.
So what I want to share with you right now, which is really the number one thing you can
do to help recover from anxiety and trauma on your own is for you to access feelings
of safety on as regular a basis as you can.
The key question is can you feel safe when you are safe?
So I have prepared for you a series of three guided visualizations and I call these the
aah! mini series aah! being that sense of like aah! relaxation and it is a mini series
of three guided visualizations that I do with my clients in my office and I recommend that
they practice them in between sessions and these are some visualizations that you could
do on a daily basis to help increase how often you allow your body to physiologically relax
while you're alert and to feel safe when you are safe.
You can access these visualizations for free and I really, really hope that they are helpful
for you in the next couple of weeks.
I will be releasing videos specifically on using EMDR with anxiety disorders and are
using EMDR with PTSD.
So please subscribe and hit the bell.
So you're notified when my videos are released on Tuesdays.
And if you found this video helpful, please comment below with the word helpful and any
other comments you might have and please share it with a friend who might benefit from it.
And I look forward to the next time.