How Does EMDR Work?

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy or EMDR is an incredible therapy that has been proven to treat trauma and PTSD. But what’s so incredible about EMDR is that how it works is quite simple.

EMDR accesses your brains natural reprocessing state. Every night when you go to sleep, your brain enters a sleep cycle called REM sleep. During REM sleep, your brain sorts through all the events from your day and decides what things need to be remembered and what things can be forgotten.

Your eyes actually move back and forth really fast during this sleep cycle, just like the eye movements or bilateral stimulation that happens during an EMDR session.

So let’s say something bad happened today or at least your brain got really distressed by whatever happened. Without the right support, like an adult to help soothe you if you were a child or the learned skills of regulation that you were taught as a child, you’ll go to sleep that night and while in your REM cycle, your brain won’t be able to process that bad thing that happened and will just leave it in the corner, unprocessed.

As time goes on, your brain makes connections to everything you experience and anything that resembles that bad thing that happened, gets thrown into the pile. That’s why one thing, whether it was big or little, can grow over time into overwhelming anxiety, depression, dissociation, PTSD, and more.

Trauma is just a bunch of unprocessed memories.

The bigger that pile grows, the more evidence our brain has to believe something. We call this maladaptive information. It’s not helpful and it creates beliefs that cause us to feel unsafe, unloved, out of control and so on, even when in reality, we aren’t any longer.

So this is where EMDR comes in.

Sitting with your therapist, you’ll create a road map of key targets for your brain. These key targets are the major memories that everything else is connected to.

Your brain is a beautiful and highly adaptive thing. It knows how to do it’s job. But sometimes when the information it needs to process is just too big or unfamiliar, it needs our help.

So we provide the first target or starting point for your brain to reprocess. It remembers what we’re asking it to look at, sees the pile of crap in the corner or now a room full of bad memories, and with the bilateral stimulation that we control, either eye movements or tapping or auditory clicks, your brain enters the reprocessing state.

And this is where the magic happens. And the magic is you and your brain.

Imagine your brain as someone opening up the door to this room or rummaging through the pile of crap and sorting what we need to look at and what we can get rid of.

As this happens, you’ll feel some or many of the feelings and sensations that happened when the bad thing happened. The same thoughts and pictures will float through your mind. And while your brain is focused on these things and in that reprocessing state, the heightened distress will come down.

This is the desensitization part of EMDR.

As the distress comes down and you’re able to think a little clearer about what happened, your brain will begin to take some of your good experiences from life, or adaptive information, and compare it to the bad experiences that we’re reprocessing. Turning these bad or maladaptive experiences/information, into adaptive ones.

This is the reprocessing part of EMDR.

So imagine getting into a car accident. It can obviously be very traumatic and no one is going to say this is an experience that you need or everyone should have. But if you get into a car accident and then live the rest of your life afraid of cars, driving, intersections even, it’s not adaptive. You need to be able to not live your life in fear.

So using EMDR, we can release those overwhelming feelings of fear and distress that happened during the car accident, and we can learn from that experience. Instead of “I almost died!” or “My life is over now that my body isn’t the same.” We can adapt those beliefs to “I’m so happy I wore my seatbelt,” or “I will never go that fast again and be that reckless,” or “I’m so thankful to have lived to tell my story and positively influence others to drive safely.”

EMDR doesn’t erase what happened or make us forget, it just allows us to move on from the bad experiences that we all face and live a life full of love and joy.