Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy is a cutting-edge therapy that enables people to heal from the symptoms of past wounds and mental stress. To understand EMDR, you have to first understand how trauma changes the brain’s ability to process information. Sometimes in life we experience overwhelming situations that cause our brain’s natural processing abilities to shut down. This state of "shock" prevents our brains from fully processing information and the sights, sounds, emotions and thoughts attached to the overwhelming event get stored in the brain in an unprocessed way.
Once the memory is stored unprocessed, you are vulnerable to being triggered which means you could be at work feeling capable and confident one minute and then the next minute you may feel small, embarrassed and like a failure. This emotional shift inside you happens because something in the present moment is similar to something associated with the overwhelming event of your past and your brain gets the past and present confused. Experiences like this can be frustrating because you know that the real you is the person before you got triggered but once you are triggered you seem to lose contact with that person and then spiral into self-blame.
EMDR seems to allow your brain to process the information that got stuck during the original overwhelming event. Using a method called Dual Attention Stimuli we briefly tap into the past event and then activate your brain’s natural healing ability by stimulating the right and the left lobe of your brain simultaneously through eye movements, tapping or auditory tones. This right/left lobe stimulation seems to calm the nervous system and allow information to process in the way it should have at the time of the original wounding event. After the information is processed, the symptoms attached to the material (nightmares, flashbacks, anxiety, emotions, thought processes) will minimize or disappear. Repeated studies show that by engaging in EMDR therapy people can experience in a short amount of time what used to take years of therapy to achieve.
For more information about this cutting edge therapy visit: http://www.emdr.com/what-is-emdr/
Once the memory is stored unprocessed, you are vulnerable to being triggered which means you could be at work feeling capable and confident one minute and then the next minute you may feel small, embarrassed and like a failure. This emotional shift inside you happens because something in the present moment is similar to something associated with the overwhelming event of your past and your brain gets the past and present confused. Experiences like this can be frustrating because you know that the real you is the person before you got triggered but once you are triggered you seem to lose contact with that person and then spiral into self-blame.
EMDR seems to allow your brain to process the information that got stuck during the original overwhelming event. Using a method called Dual Attention Stimuli we briefly tap into the past event and then activate your brain’s natural healing ability by stimulating the right and the left lobe of your brain simultaneously through eye movements, tapping or auditory tones. This right/left lobe stimulation seems to calm the nervous system and allow information to process in the way it should have at the time of the original wounding event. After the information is processed, the symptoms attached to the material (nightmares, flashbacks, anxiety, emotions, thought processes) will minimize or disappear. Repeated studies show that by engaging in EMDR therapy people can experience in a short amount of time what used to take years of therapy to achieve.
For more information about this cutting edge therapy visit: http://www.emdr.com/what-is-emdr/
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