Trauma and EMDR Therapy
Trauma is defined as a deeply distressing or disturbing experience. Traumatic experiences can range from a small single-incident to more long-term, repetitive, and complex ones. As children, adults and families, we all face obstacles and experience traumatic events which shape our personalities and behaviors. When your sense of safety and trust are shattered, it’s normal to feel overwhelming emotions and symptoms, or even disconnected and numb. At times, the symptoms of trauma, especially in childhood, may manifest in different ways later on in life, leading to maladaptive responses, such as depression, anxiety, feeling “stuck”, excess stress, physical health/somatic symptoms, low sense of self-worth, difficulty creating healthy attachments, self-destructive behaviors, restlessness, substance use, and self-harm/suicidal ideation. My passion lies in helping children and adults break free from the emotional hijack of traumatic experiences. I am dedicated to helping you go with your pace and comfort level in tackling some of these deeper issues with modalities, such as EMDR.
What Is EMDR?
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a powerful, evidence-based psycho-therapy that enables you to heal from symptoms and emotional distress that are the result of disturbing life experiences. When an upsetting event is experienced, it can become locked in the nervous system with the original picture, sounds, thoughts, feelings, and body sensations. Your perceptions and behaviors are based upon your past experiences, and this becomes encoded in your memories, affecting your behaviors, emotions, and self-worth even years later. Memory reprocessing through EMDR can help speed up/activate your natural process of healing so you can start feeling more like you again. The right-left brain stimulation reaches into the limbic brain in a way that “talk therapy” alone cannot, calming the reactive survival brain, and creating changes in the brain.
How Does EMDR Work?
EMDR focuses on addressing deep, embedded memories and traumas. EMDR uses bilateral (right/left) eye movements, sounds, or tactile stimulation, which repeatedly activates the opposite sides of the brain, releasing emotional experiences that are “trapped” in the nervous system. EMDR is not hypnosis-you will be awake, alert, and in control at all times. Similar to how computers can “freeze” when overloaded or incorrectly process information, the same applies with human brains. But just as computer software can be updated, EMDR can help reprogram the memory of a traumatic event to more positive or neutral emotions, essentially taking the emotional charge out of traumatic memories. By helping you identify past unprocessed experiences at your pace, I will guide you in developing new insights and perspectives, while helping you integrate stored negative beliefs, feelings and memories, with helpful, adaptive information in the brain. These “files” or memories are now archived in a correct part of the brain, which can ultimately help you gain a more peaceful state by relieving negative symptoms and improving your overall sense of self-worth.
Benefits of EMDR Include:
>>Immediate relief of emotional distress
>>Helps reduce anxiety and phobias
>>Increases self-worth and self-confidence
>>Decreases symptoms of depression
>>Decreases symptoms of PTSD
>>Heals the brain
>>Accelerates processing of trauma
>>Improves overall mood
>>Improves relationship with others / abandonment issues
** Since many children and some adults are unable to verbalize traumatic experiences for various reasons, EMDR can often provide the breakthrough that more traditional therapies cannot.
