Breaking Down the Benefits of EMDR Therapy
EMDR is a relatively new method of psychotherapy compared to Freud or Jung, and yet one of the most effective ones, especially for mental health conditions related to trauma, fears, anxieties, and depression.
But why is EMDR therapy successful? What exactly are the benefits of EMDR? How are they achieved?
Let’s explore EMDR therapy and the most considerable benefits that clients report.
What is EMDR therapy?
EMDR therapy, officially named Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy, is a type of mental health therapy method. It was initially used to treat PTSD, but today is used for a plethora of mental health conditions. Here at EMDR Therapy Nashville it’s something we’ve seen help numerous clients.
EMDR is based on the Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model, created by the same psychologist who came up with EMDR as a technique. This model proposes that our memories are stored differently when they are traumatic since parts of the brain freeze under the impression of strong emotions. This makes the traumatic memories “stuck” somewhere between long-term and short-term memory, staying unprocessed and partially active. This is why people who have PTSD experience vivid flashbacks and why people who have suffered some sort of trauma tend to react explosively to triggers. The memory is not completely processed, and to the brain, at times, it seems like it's still going on.
Based on this theory, EMDR includes sensory stimulation (eye movement, sounds, or taps) to stimulate and engage the brain while recalling traumatic experiences. Shapiro, the model's creator, noticed that negative emotions lowered when she recalled them and moved her eyes from side to side. She explored this phenomenon, eventually developing the EMDR protocol.
EMDR aims to help patients heal from trauma or other adverse life experiences by changing the emotions, thoughts, and behaviors that stem from those negative experiences. In its essence, EMDR changes the brain's structure and its neuron pathways, allowing the brain to recall the experience without the emotional charge that comes with it.
What can EMDR therapy help with?
As I previously mentioned, EMDR was initially found to be highly successful in treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. As time passed and more studies were conducted, EMDR is today widely used for all kinds of difficulties and trauma-related mental health problems.
The most frequent mental health disorders that EMDR helps with are:
Anxiety and anxiety disorders like panic disorder, phobias, or social anxiety
Depression and depressive disorders
Dissociative identity disorders, amnesia, or depersonalization/derealization
Eating disorders
Obsessive-compulsive disorders like OCD or hoarding
Personality disorders like borderline, avoidant, or antisocial
Trauma disorders like Acute stress disorders or PTSD
Aside from mental health disorders, EMDR can also help with other difficulties and traumatic experiences like:
Physical, emotional or sexual abuse
Childhood neglect
Suffering a life-altering accident
Being a victim of a violent crime
Witnessing a violent crime
Sleeping difficulties
Is EMDR therapy effective?
Yes, EMDR therapy is one of the most effective therapies that help with trauma. Relying its core on other psychotherapeutic approaches like psychoanalysis, somatic therapy, and cognitive-behavioral therapy, EMDR draws its success from well-established theories and methods.
EMDR is effective since it explores the client's past, present, and future, helping them realize where their difficulties stem from, how they want to move forward, and acknowledging what they need to do to achieve that. Furthermore, with the help of its desensitization and reprocessing method, clients can explore and process their traumatic experiences in the safety of a clinical office and with the support and guidance of an experienced, educated expert.
As the American Counselling Association underlines, EMDR is effective because it makes “trait changes” rather than “state changes.” While state changes help you move from one emotional state to another, trait changes help your brain and nervous system create new pathways, change personality traits that stem from trauma, and find new coping strategies that are effective for the particular client and their background.
5 Benefits of EMDR Therapy
EMDR provides the client with trait changes that bring numerous, long-lasting benefits and help clients make substantial changes in their life experiences and satisfaction.
Here are some of the most essential benefits of EMDR therapy:
Helps you Resolve Trauma
Trauma can have a long-lasting impact on the mental health of the sufferer. As a coping mechanism for trauma, people develop all kinds of adaptive behaviors that might have been constructive in times of trauma but now only interfere with their mental health and prevent them from growing and improving. Furthermore, the trauma and the emotions from the experience might be stored somewhere in the body and result in somatic difficulties like headaches or muscle stiffness.
With EMDR, clients can reprocess their traumatic experiences and finally release the emotional energy stored in them.
For example, let’s say that a person is mugged on the street and now experiences traumatic distress. When the event happened, their whole system concentrated on surviving, so they couldn’t process the event normally. Instead, it is a chunk not correctly stored in their memory. So, they now feel entirely unsafe, triggered by every person on the street that might look suspicious. This, in turn, makes the person withdrawn and even hesitant to leave their home at all.
EMDR therapy can help them go over the traumatic experience in a controlled process and a secure place, with guidance and the help of an expert.
Reshapes your Memories of Past Events
With trauma, it’s often and very likely that the person who experienced it made a mental narrative of what happened, and they stored it in their memory as such. Since the emotional charge of those experiences is hefty, the mind tends to avoid thinking about the trauma, and the experience involuntary comes back into their consciousness in the form of flashbacks and triggers.
With the help of an experienced EMDR therapist, the client can work through their traumatic experiences and the conclusions/beliefs they have drawn from them. With the help of EMDR therapy, the client can tackle those memories and bring them into consciousness in a controlled and guided way. They can break down the traumatic events and reevaluate them from different perspectives and angles, gaining new insights into the whole experience and reshaping their memories in the process.
Furthermore, during this stage, EMDR also tackles the person's beliefs about themselves and the experience. To further build on the example above, the mugged person may think that they are never safe and that they can be attacked at any moment. Furthermore, they might believe that they are weak since they can’t protect themselves or that they will be a potential victim once more if they have money.
EMDR therapy can help the client reevaluate their experience and the beliefs that they have deduced.
Lowers Challenging Emotions and Anxiety
Every traumatic experience contains strong challenging emotions. Since humans' natural tendency is to distance themselves from negative experiences and pain, these emotions are usually bottled up and stored somewhere in the body. At the same time, the person tends to avoid feeling them and thinking about those feelings. However, when an external trigger occurs, they come forth sometimes as strong as they initially were. The whole system can get into a fight-flight-freeze mode, and the person becomes less and less capable of acting or thinking rationally depending on the size of the trigger and trauma.
EMDR can help the client lower their emotions, anxiety, and distress by guiding them through the feelings and “draining them out,” reducing the strength of the triggers and improving the strength for emotional regulation.
One aspect of EMDR therapy is coming up with a support system, i.e., people, places, objects, activities, and personality traits that can help a person to improve their emotional state when they feel unpleasant emotions. Through relaxation practices and techniques like mindfulness, meditation, or deep breathing, the client can learn skills that help them better regulate their emotions. To start the process right away, here are a few exercises you can utilize to lower your negative feelings and anxiety.
Helps with Emotional Regulation
The more a person is in contact with their traumatic experiences and the lingering negative feelings, the more they can tolerate those feelings and lower their power.
EMDR, with the help of the desensitization process and the development of healthy coping skills, allows precisely that. Emotional regulation is the process of recognizing a particular emotion, living through it, feeling it completely, and then rationally and lovingly deciding on the action one should take to respect the message the emotion is trying to send.
In the example of the mugged person, they might feel fear and unsafety as a result of the robbery, and once they fully experience their fear, they might decide that they want to buy pepper spray or learn self-defense techniques to feel safer.
EMDR therapy helps clients learn healthy coping mechanisms and emotional regulation skills, allowing them to manage their emotions and behaviors better and regain more control over their lives.
Builds Emotional Resilience and Self-Esteem
When people work through their traumatic experiences, they release a lot of emotional charge from their bodies, thus giving space for new emotional states to come and go. By regulating emotions and rationally deciding on their actions, clients can improve their self-esteem and emotional resilience to adverse experiences.
For people who have suffered trauma, it’s normal to have distrust in oneself, the people around and the world. This, in turn, can lead to isolation, loneliness, or worthlessness.
EMDR therapy can help clients establish and fortify their identity, self-esteem, mindset, thought process, and internal monologs. This allows them to improve their life satisfaction by controlling their emotional responses and behaviors or reactions. Instead of feeling weak, victimized, or hurt, a person can take control over the experience and feel strong and in control, able to self-protect.
Conclusion
EMDR can have numerous benefits for people who are open to working on their trauma and overcoming their triggers, unhealthy coping mechanisms, and reactive behaviors. The big five benefits of EMDR therapy are resolving the trauma, reforming the beliefs and memories from the traumatic experiences, lowering the negative emotions, gaining more skills for emotional regulation, and improving overall resilience and self-esteem.
If you’re looking for a licensed and experienced EMDR therapist who can help you improve your overall life satisfaction, here at EMDR Therapy Nashville, we specialize in working with trauma and PTSD.
Your past experiences can hinder your growth until you decide to take a different direction. Our highly educated and trained collective can help you resolve past traumatic events and empower you to build a better future for yourself.
References
Phillips, L. (2021, September). Tapping into the benefits of EMDR. www.counseling.org. https://www.counseling.org/publications/counseling-today-magazine/article-archive/article/legacy/tapping-into-the-benefits-of-emdr#
Shapiro, F. (2017). Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy: Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures. The Guilford Press.