EMDR Therapy

EMDR (eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing) therapy focuses on trauma. Developed in the late 1980s, EMDR uses bilateral stimulation (like eye movements, auditory tones, or tactile pulses) to help the nervous system integrate and metabolize lots of information very quickly. In essence, it jump-starts your brain, and entire body really, to stitch together many, many fragmented pieces of trauma memory.

Why does this help?

First, disturbing things happen to all of us. We don’t always think we’ve been traumatized – in fact, we often downplay our feelings about negative events. But if something sticks with us, triggers negative beliefs about ourselves (e.g., “I’m a failure”), there’s some level of trauma there. But that sort of memory (e.g., “what happened that night”) doesn’t always get stored like everyday memory. It’s often splattered throughout the nervous system in the form of anxiety, anger, shame, and thoughts about ourselves that feel miserable.

EMDR takes these splattered bits of memory and pulls them into a coherent whole. Quickly . . . Sometimes before a client even realizes it. When bits of trauma, like thoughts and emotions, are integrated in this way, they lose their power to make us panic or hate ourselves – the anxiety drops out of them and the memories can simply be filed away.

EMDR is a whole-body process, yet is non-invasive and gentle. And EMDR can be used to treat everything from panic attacks to relationship problems. I even use it to help students, professionals, and artists do better at the things they love to do.