Demystifying EMDR
WRITTEN BY Michele Dial, LPC
HFC Lead therapist
EMRD?
EDMR?
EMDR!
This confusion is a fairly common start to a conversation about EMDR. The acronym is a bit lengthy, and the full name is a mouthful. EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. Try saying that five times fast!
So, what the heck does all of that mean?
Basically, we use back-and-forth eye movements to reduce your sensitivity (desensitization) to distressing or traumatizing experiences, and help your mind reconfigure the way you think about them (reprocessing). The goal is not to erase a memory. The goal is to lessen its impact on your daily living and file the incident away in the past so that you’re not constantly reliving it in the present.
Starting to make sense?
Let’s start at the beginning. Dr. Francine Shapiro, psychotherapist extraordinaire, discovered and developed EMDR in the 1980s. In the midst of some personal distress, Dr. Shapiro headed out for a walk, and noticed that her side-to-side eye movements seemed to be reducing her distress. Her curiosity piqued, she dove headlong into research, which has continued over several decades with thousands of subjects. Her studies, along with many independent studies, have found that eye movements do indeed decrease a person’s anxious response to traumatic memories. Once the intense emotional response subsides, the mind can then shift how we perceive an event.
What’s so special about eye movements?
Side-to-side eye movements are a form of bilateral stimulation, which means that both the left and right hemispheres of your brain are engaged when your eyes move back and forth across the center line between them. In fact, your brain already engages in this process just about every night during sleep. This is the phenomenon of REM sleep or Rapid Eye Movement sleep. Did you know that while you’re sleeping, your brain is actually hard at work sorting through all of the day’s input?
Your Brain’s Filing System
Sleep researchers study brain waves while a person is sleeping to track cycles in brain activity and body function. It is generally believed that the heightened brain wave activity during REM sleep indicates this sleep cycle is where most dreaming occurs, as well as data processing and memory consolidation. The brain’s very intricate automatic filing system sorts through all of the information and experiences that we’ve encountered throughout the day and determines what to keep and what to throw away. The keepers become knowledge and memories that are stored in appropriate areas of the brain, while the rest is forgotten.
Disruptions In the System
At times, something so disturbing or unsettling happens that the brain’s natural filing system is short-circuited and cannot appropriately process the incident into a past memory. Instead, the incident gets frozen in the nervous system with all its original sensations and emotions. Our bodies can carry these unprocessed experiences with us for years, even decades, and they often continue to plague us in the present. As time passes, especially if we experience multiple traumatic events, we may develop illogical negative beliefs about ourselves.
EMDR is believed to replicate the eye movements of REM sleep. When we engage in EMDR therapy, we light up the memory we are working with by invoking sights, sounds, sensations, and emotions that come with it. We then use eye movements to jumpstart the brain’s automatic filing system and aid in reprocessing the memory. Once we are able to lessen the distress response to a memory and deconstruct the negative belief that has developed, we work to instill a new, positive belief about the self.
As you can imagine, bringing all the components of this painful experience to the surface can be distressing in itself. So, before we begin the desensitization and reprocessing component, we do lots of prep. We assess a person’s support network, internal strengths and resources, and capacity for accessing past memories while staying fully grounded in the present. We also help clients develop tools for grounding and self-soothing so that they can manage any heightened distress between sessions. We use slower eye movements to help strengthen the effectiveness of these tools, and to help you get comfortable with eye movements before we dig into the harder stuff.
So how exactly do we do eye movements?
A therapist will sit slightly off-center to you and raise two fingers in front of your eyes, a comfortable distance from you – far enough away for personal comfort; close enough so that your eyes can follow their fingers. The therapist will then move their fingers back and forth across your sightline and ask you to follow their fingers with your eyes, not turning your head. Imagine watching a ping pong game and following the ball with only your eyes. We want to make sure that your eyesight moves across the bridge of your nose to the edge of your periphery on both sides. If there are physical limitations that prevent a therapist from using fingers to guide eye movements, other tools maybe used instead, like a light bar, a computer video, or a wand.
If you become tearful, if your eyes get tired, or if you have any other difficulties with eye movements, we have alternatives. Several of my clients find tactile buzzers effective with the added bonus of having a calming, soothing effect. Clients hold one buzzer in each hand, and I turn them on and off for each set. The buzzers vibrate in an alternating pattern to replicate the bilateral stimulation of eye movements. Other options include clients tapping on the tops of their knees or on opposite shoulders (the butterfly hug). Self-tapping can even be used for group EMDR. Audio stimulation is also an option. Using headphones, a beeping tone alternates from ear to ear. Research shows that eye movements and tapping are the most effective mechanisms. However, audio stimulation is particularly effective with chronic pain.
Can you do EMDR online?
Yes! All of these options are available to you for remote or virtual EMDR sessions with slight modifications. Self-tapping is a common option, and we also have video accommodations for eye movements.
If you still have more questions about EMDR, or how it’s used in trauma therapy, feel free to email me. I’m happy to chat with you and answer any questions you may have.
You can also find more info on these helpful websites.
EMDR International Association
EMDR Institute