What is EMDR and How Does i work?
What is EMDR?
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a trauma-focused therapy model that, thanks to social media and broader cultural conversations around mental health, has grown significantly in popularity over the past few years. Despite this recent surge of attention, many people don’t realize that EMDR has actually been around since the late 1980s, which is why there’s such a strong foundation of research and evidence supporting it today.
The model began when psychologist Francine Shapiro noticed something interesting: a connection between eye movements and a decrease in distress tied to painful memories. Through her research, she found that bilateral stimulation (alternating activation of the left and right sides of the brain, often through guided eye movements) taps into the brain’s natural information processing system. In other words, it helps the brain ‘digest’ traumatic memories, leading to the resolution of post-traumatic symptoms.
Since then, Shapiro’s discovery has grown into one of the most well-researched and evidence-based approaches for trauma. Today, EMDR is recognized by organizations like the World Health Organization and the American Psychological Association as a first-line treatment for trauma and post-traumatic stress.
Why does EMDR work?
I like to introduce EMDR to my clients using a metaphor: Imagine a time when you’ve eaten a really big meal way too quickly. When you’re hungry and devour a burger and fries in seven minutes flat, your body reacts… negatively. Your stomach probably hurts, you might feel sluggish, and you could get a bit of heartburn. You simply ate more food than your body could reasonably digest, and you feel discomfort as a result.
Our brains also have a sort of digestive system. Every experience we have is filtered through several key parts of the brain, and each part works to mentally digest the experience. These are the amygdala, our danger detector and fight-or-flight center; the hippocampus, which helps us place experiences in time and connect them with memory; and the prefrontal cortex, where we regulate emotions and use logic and language to make sense of ourselves and others.
Most everyday experiences are processed smoothly by this system, and are stored with our long-term memories. But trauma can be different. Like that oversized meal, trauma can be too overwhelming for the brain to process all at once. When that happens, the brain’s systems lose their ability to work together and create what therapists like to call disintegration. Instead of being stored as a past event, the traumatic material remains “undigested,” floating around in the nervous system, triggering distress in the present.
Trauma survivors often describe this disintegration in ways that make a lot of sense when mapped back to the brain:
“I know logically the abuse wasn’t my fault, but I still feel this deep shame.” Here, the logic center is disconnected from the memory and emotion centers.
“This happened over ten years ago, but when I get triggered it feels like it was yesterday.” The amygdala is still firing as if the danger is current, without the hippocampus orienting the memory in time.
“I know why I use this unhealthy coping mechanism, but I can’t seem to stop.” The prefrontal cortex understands, but regulation systems can’t override the survival-driven patterns.
This psychophysiological “indigestion” is why trauma can have such a profound and lasting impact on a person’s life, even many years after the trauma actually occurred. Survivors of trauma have often shared with me feelings of shame or self judgment about not being able to just “get over” what happened to them. My answer is this:
“Of course you haven’t been able to ‘just get over it.’ Trauma doesn’t work that way. Just as we wouldn’t expect the ligaments around a dislocated shoulder to heal without the bone first being set back into its socket, we can’t expect the nervous system to resolve trauma without guiding its processing system back into place.”
EMDR therapy facilitates the conditions needed for the brain and body to restore that integration, like setting the shoulder back into place, or cleaning an infection out of a wound.
Next week we will resume with how EMDR works to reprocesses trauma, join us again then!
