EMDR therapy is a psychotherapy method that helps individuals make sense of traumatic experiences and free themselves from their emotional impact. This therapeutic approach argues that the source of individuals’ psychological distress is the traumatic events and memories stored in the mind. Within the scope of EMDR therapy, these negative events and memories are reprocessed and transformed according to the adaptive information processing model.
Traumatic experiences and memories from the past may lead to psychological difficulties during adulthood. With EMDR therapy, these distressing memories are accessed and reprocessed.
What Is EMDR?
What is the EMDR Technique? It is a psychotherapy method called “Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.” The EMDR therapist asks the client to move their eyes left and right (typically by following the therapist’s finger), which gently stimulates both hemispheres of the brain. This allows the client to focus on the disturbing memories, emotions, and sensations.
It is believed that focusing on these rapid eye movements or bilateral stimuli helps accelerate the healing process.
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What Is EMDR?
What is the EMDR Technique? It means “Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.” The EMDR therapist guides the client’s eye movements from side to side, gently stimulating both hemispheres of the brain and helping the client focus on their disturbing memories, emotions, and sensations.
Focusing on these rapid eye movements or bilateral stimuli is believed to facilitate and speed up the healing process.
Who Is EMDR Therapy For?
EMDR therapy is used for emotional difficulties arising from traumatic life experiences such as post-traumatic stress disorder, abuse, natural disasters, or distressing childhood events. It is also applied in the treatment of phobias, performance anxiety, panic disorder, body image issues, childhood trauma symptoms, grief, chronic pain, and more. EMDR therapy is particularly known for its success in treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and many studies have been conducted on this topic and others.
Is EMDR Therapy Effective?
The brain’s ability to naturally process traumatic events over time proves that a healthy internal healing mechanism exists. With EMDR therapy, even if individuals remember the traumatic event, they may feel very little or no emotional distress. In some cases, this natural information-processing system becomes blocked, leaving the images, thoughts, and feelings associated with the traumatic event unprocessed.
This blockage creates a sense of being unable to escape the past and repeatedly reliving the traumatic event. Even if logically the person knows the event is over, they cannot free themselves from its emotional impact. This interruption prevents the traumatic memory from being processed and stored adaptively like other memories.
EMDR therapy allows the individual to quickly process information related to a past traumatic experience. In many psychological difficulties, the issue is not the event itself but the brain’s inability to process the negative emotions associated with it.
During bilateral stimulation in EMDR therapy, the client is asked to focus on the distressing scene, thought, emotion, and bodily sensation. As a result of EMDR therapy, the adaptive information-processing system—which had been blocked due to earlier mentioned reasons—becomes activated, and the emotional distress caused by the traumatic event is processed. The goal is not only to reduce distress but also to replace the negative belief linked to the traumatic memory with a positive belief, enabling greater functional improvement.
How Many Sessions Does EMDR Therapy Take?
Above all, a healthy therapeutic relationship between the client and the therapist is essential. The number of EMDR sessions varies depending on the client's psychological condition and its severity. Specifying an exact number of sessions would be inaccurate, as psychological difficulties differ from person to person. The duration of EMDR therapy is determined by the specialist based on the course of treatment.
