EMDR Therapy Overview

hey everybody my name is Dr Scott jamui I&#39;m the director and founder of the Phoenix Center for experiential trauma therapy in Media Pennsylvania and I&#39;m a certified EMDR consultant in this video I want to talk to you about EMDR which is eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy uh in this video I&#39;m going to provide a a brief overview of what EMDR is and how it works and what you could expect if you&#39;re going to participate in EMDR or if you&#39;re a professional I&#39;ll talk a little bit about what you could expect if you were to refer someone to EMDR and who might be the best fit for [Music] EMDR so EMDR is one of the gold standard treatments for trauma and PTSD post-traumatic stress disorder it was created a couple decades ago by Francine Shapiro and it was uh really evolved from an accidental realization Francine was walking through the park and uh remembering some difficult experiences that she had had and she noticed her eyes spontaneously moved back and forth while she was remembering and walking and she paused and as a psychologist she got curious and thought huh that was strange and she tried to Think Through what was what had just happened and and realized that she was remembering a disturbing memory and then she recalled that memory and noticed that it seemed to be slightly less disturbing than it was a couple minutes ago and so she experimented with forcefully moving her eyes back and forth while she remembered this memory and noticed again that it if the sense ize the memory further and she ended up taking this realization and creating it into a structured therapy called EMDR therapy uh EMDR is highly researched at this point and the research all demonstrates that it&#39;s effective and that it works especially for PTSD and disturbing memories um it&#39;s one of the top tier recommended therapies for trauma it also is effective for a variety of different issues but it&#39;s primarily used for trauma and PTSD so honestly I think EMDR is a really bad name and maybe we could have uh developed a better name for it uh eye movement desensitization and reprocessing uh basically the the gist of it is the way that it works or the way we believe it works because we don&#39;t actually know for sure we do know that it does work but the neuroscience technology hasn&#39;t evolved to the point where we can know exactly why and how it works but we know it does um part of the theory is that the back and forth eye movements that we employ in EMDR help to activate the brain&#39;s natural memory processing mechanisms the same ones that are active during rapid eye movement sleep or REM sleep which is really normal and natural deep sleep phase that we get into uh usually this happens every night I believe once or twice sometimes three times uh during our sleep cycle and if you watch somebody while they&#39;re sleeping and they&#39;re in this deep uh state of sleep you&#39;ll notice that although their eyes are closed their eyes are actually moving back and forth rapidly this is the phase of sleep when we dream and what we believe is going on internally is that the brain is processing memory and processing experiences of the day consolidating short-term memory into long-term memory and storing that memory in a way that is workable in case we need to access that memory in the future so we believe with back and forth eye movements that we use in EMDR that we can tap into the brain&#39;s innate capacity to process memory and that what happens with traumatic memory is that they overwhelm the brain and the nervous system&#39;s ability to to make sense of it and to process all the sensory and emotional and visual information connected to the memory and so the traumatic memory gets stored in a way that&#39;s abnormal that it&#39;s not fully processed or Consolidated and that anytime there&#39;s a present day reminder or stimulus or trigger that relates or Associates to that unprocessed traumatic memory that it activates it in the here and now in the form of flashbacks or perhaps in nightmares while we&#39;re sleeping or disturbing images or Sensations in our body or other emotions or negative beliefs about oursel so uh we believe that EMDR is helping the brain to process memories in short chunks that aren&#39;t going to overwhelm the brain&#39;s ability to press process in EMDR we instead of asking the client to remember the entire memory at once we take it in short short periods maybe 10 to 30 seconds a minute or two at most where we would ask a client to focus on one aspect of the memory and just notice which what they experience it&#39;s a pretty organic process that involves lots of free association uh usually we&#39;ll start with the most disturbing part of the memory and we&#39;ll ask a client to focus on that disturbing part and just notice what they experience there&#39;s really no rights or wrongs in EMDR it&#39;s really just about letting your brain free associate to where it needs to go to connect to the Adaptive information that&#39;s already existing within yourself and within your brain and to allow your your your brain to do the work to heal itself and to reprocess this memory and so we do that just in short and simple chunks rather than trying to redo reprocess remember the entire memory all at once which is likely to overwhelm us again so it happens in short tolerable amounts and we believe that this allows us to desensitize oursel to that memory well giving the brain the chance to reprocess it a little bit at a time and consolidate that memory into long-term memory now while EMDR originally began by using eye movements and many EMDR therapists do use eye movements and many people actually believe that the eye movements are most effective and I&#39;m told there is some research to uh prove that we&#39;ve also found that other forms of bilateral stimulation back and forth stimulation bilateral also can be effective in MDR as an alternative to eye movements so for example uh bilateral sound where there&#39;s sound playing in one side of the ear to the other side or bilateral tactile stimulation such as back and forth tapping that this can also be helpful as an alternative to the eye movements um there&#39;s a therapy device called a therapper which has two it&#39;s an in instrument connected by wires that the therapist can control the intensity and the speed and the pacing and the client holds on to two modules that simply vibrate back and forth providing bilateral tactile stimulation now the theory about how this is helpful whether it&#39;s eye movements or audio sounds or bilateral stimulation uh tactile stimulation is that it provides a sense of dual awareness while we&#39;re remembering a traumatic memory we&#39;re also aware of the Here and Now That We&#39;re remembering a memory and our eyes are open and we&#39;re following our therapist&#39;s finger back and forth so we&#39;re we&#39;re aware of the memory and the trauma but at the same time we&#39;re aware that we&#39;re in the room with our therapists in a safe place or or maybe we have our eyes closed and we&#39;re holding on to the therapy Tapper and we&#39;re remembering an aspect of the memory but every time that Tapper buzzes it reminds us and it reminds our nervous system that we&#39;re not in that trauma right now that we&#39;re actually in the therapist&#39;s office and we&#39;re in a safe place and this really helps desensitize the nervous system when we&#39;re remembering a traumatic memory it&#39;s activating our nervous system you know we&#39;re experiencing stress and cortisol and adrenaline perhaps and other feelings and we might be on edge or alert our nervous system is feeling that that trauma all over again and then the therapy Tapper buzzes and it disrupts that and it reminds us oh yeah we&#39;re actually in the therapy office and it&#39;s safe here and then we go back to thinking about the memory and then the other side buzzes and it reminds us oh yeah we&#39;re in the therapy office we&#39;re safe and this disruption of of the traumatic response to the traumatic memory replacing it with a calming soothing reminder or stimulus effectively helps to desensitize the intensity of the stress attached to the the trauma so another reason why we believe this works is dual awareness and the way that it orients our nervous system to the hearing now uh in EMDR we We Believe that traumatic memories get fragmented and because they don&#39;t get fully processed and stored in the way that a normal memory would be that a traumatic memory exists in a fragmented state within our brain with our mind uh within our memory networks and that because it was too overwhelming for the brain and the nervous system and the mind the psyche to process it it exists in a way that&#39;s disconnected from other memories and disconnected from other information in the brain EMDR is really a affirming and humanistic Theory and approach in that we believe that the client has everything within them that they need to heal and that it&#39;s just disconnected in the brain from the traumatic memory and that in EMDR the free association uh within the process helps us connect the traumatic memory and the content attached to that memory to all the other good and adaptive information within the client&#39;s brain and in doing so we&#39;re promoting integration and promoting healing and helping that uh helping to reprocess that memory often times this is similar to changing how we perceive or remember the trauma especially for childhood trauma uh many times when we experience childhood trauma we&#39;ll remember it from the point of view of ourselves as a child and it&#39;s pretty common that through the EMDR process a client will then tell will tell me at the end that now they&#39;re seeing it Through The Eyes of themselves as an adult and that the the process of re of addressing memory with EMDR in short small pieces through free association bilateral stimulation has effectively connected that once isolated and fragmented traumatic memory with all this other good and adaptive information within the client&#39;s brain and mind as an adult now so this is what we call the Adaptive information processing theory in EMDR now EMDR is a process it&#39;s not something that we just jump into in our first session we really need to do the the foundational work to prepare for EMDR so uh we begin EMDR therapy in the same way we begin any other kind of therapy process we start by building a therapeutic relationship with the client and connecting uh with with some safety assessing where the client is at what&#39;s going on for them where to the presenting issues and making sure that EMDR is the right Fit U EMDR is a powerful therapy and if it&#39;s not used properly it can cause harm so we want to make sure that the client that&#39;s in front of us is a good candidate for EMDR and that they&#39;re stable and resourced enough and have social support in their life so that when we activate the traumatic memories we&#39;re not going to ret traumatize them or cause more harm so this is uh one of the most important aspects of preparing for EMDR and it&#39;s often something that I find is overlooked so uh if you&#39;re a therapist watching this it&#39;s really important that you make sure your client is appropriate and a good candidate for EMR and if you&#39;re a client watching this it would be important that you uh take your time and let the therapist guide you in this and make sure that uh you have some social support in your life and some coping coping skills that you can use on your own in case difficult emotions come up for you throughout the emgr process now in EMDR preparation phases we like to begin by doing what we call EMDR resourcing this is where we start by connecting with positive memories and pleasant memories uh to help the client self-regulate when they&#39;re feeling uncomfortable or feeling anxious or having difficulty sleeping or or other uh difficult emotions uh what this looks like is we might ask a client to identify a safe place that they can imagine spending time in or uh a memory where their body was in a calm state where they were at ease and felt calm and peacefulness and tranquility and we would facilitate the client using eye movements or bilateral stimulation to really connect and deepen their connection to this memory or this positive resource other resources that we typically use would be a container this would be an imaginary or physical container that we could facilitate the client in putting difficult memories or emotions into in order to contain things uh we might use a protective figure or a nurturing figure or some sort of spiritual figure or wisdom figure for example um I have a client or two that uses characters from movies in their EMDR resources uh they might choose uh Dumbledore from Harry Potter as a protective and wise figure a figure that they feel connected to that could help them navigate the aftermath of their trauma and I would facilitate a process of them imagining connecting with Dumbledore and asking Dumbledore for support uh about how to navigate their trauma or the aftermath of it and they would imagine receiving guidance or advice from Dumbledore what do you imagine Dumbledore would say to you recommend to you suggest to you and H this is usually not a prescripted process it&#39;s it&#39;s a spontaneous creative and imaginary process and I&#39;m constantly surprised at the type of adaptive information and new insights that come just from inviting clients to connect with positive resources like this many times the emgr resourcing process by itself can be incredibly healing and corrective and help to reduce PTSD symptoms without even getting into processing and desensitizing traumatic memories but it&#39;s important that we start with this resourcing process so that if we do get into some trouble or we do start to feel overwhelmed while reprocessing the traumatic memories later that we have some positive memories and some coping skills we can come back to uh and that we can use in between sessions when we&#39;re not in the therapy office we can imagine spending time in that safe place or connecting with Dumbledore or with um another positive memory that will effectively reduce our anxiety and stress levels just like when we remember something painful or difficult it changes how we&#39;re feeling here and now when we remember something positive or Pleasant or nurturing or validating it also changes how we feel here and now so it&#39;s important that we use this to our advantage rather than letting past painful memories control how we feel constantly so the EMDR process involves identifying these positive resources then we move into identifying Target memories traumatic memories and different traumatic memory networks memories that are tied together based on shared negative beliefs emotions experiences and physical Sensations in an actual EMDR processing session we would identify specific memory where going to work with and we would uh set up the session by using an EMDR worksheet which asks questions like what&#39;s the most disturbing image when you think of this memory what&#39;s the negative belief that goes with this this image when you think of this negative belief and this negative image on a scale of 0 to 10 how disturbing is this zero being I can think of this right now and it doesn&#39;t feel disturbing at all 10 being it&#39;s the worst disturbance that I can imagine when I think of it right now we ask other questions about emotions that come up for you right now when you think of this and when you think of this what do you feel in your body so it&#39;s really a holistic process looking at thoughts and beliefs images and memories feelings and Sensations and then we&#39;ll also have a process of identifying a new positive belief belie about oursel that we would like to replace the negative belief with so EMDR is a pretty structured process then we&#39;ll simply ask a client to focus on the worst part of that memory let your mind go and just notice what you experience and follow my fingers or hold on to the thot tappers and notice the bilateral stimulation the client will do that for a couple sentences or set number of eye movements usually it lasts only about 30 seconds or so and then I&#39;ll ask the client to take a breath come on back to the room with me and just tell me what they noticed and there&#39;s no rights or wrongs after 30 seconds of focusing on the the worst part of the trauma the client might say something like um what I noticed is that um I feel really angry about what happened and I&#39;ll say okay now I want you to focus on that anger and just notice what you experience follow my fingers going go for another 30 seconds or so I&#39;ll tell the client to take a deep breath and just let me know what they experienced that time and they might say I notice that I feel anger in my stomach and then I&#39;ll say all right great you&#39;re doing great now I want you to focus on that feeling in your stomach follow my fingers and just notice what you experienc let&#39;s go with that and so there&#39;s just a series of short associations that we use again there&#39;s no right or wrong in this to help the client process aspects attached to the traumatic memory in short tolerable amounts if it feels like we&#39;re getting too off track then I&#39;ll ask the client to come back to where we started hey when we think of that disturbing image we started with the worst part of that memory when you think of that right now now on a scale of 0 to 10 how disturbing does it feel now and usually uh to my surprise and the client&#39;s surprise it&#39;ll drop from like an 8 out of 10 when we started to a five out of 10 after just 10 or 15 minutes of the MDR and then we continue all right what&#39;s the most disturbing part of the memory now well now the most disturbing part is the fact that uh my parent didn&#39;t protect me from that happening say okay now I want you to focus on that part follow my fingers notice what you experience and we go through another series of associations and so every so often we&#39;ll Circle back to the memory when do you think of that now how disturbing does it feel ideally by the end we get to a zero and it&#39;s actually quite common that we do get to a zero that after 30 minutes or an hour of EMR processing the client can remember the worst part of the memory and right now when they remember it they don&#39;t feel any disturbance now EMDR is not going to make you forget about the the memory it&#39;s just going to change your relationship to the memory it&#39;s going to take away the edge and the disturbance from it when we get to a zero then we return to that positive belief about ourself that we wanted to replace the negative belief with and we&#39;ll uh integrate that positive belief in and then there&#39;s a process of connecting with our body doing a short body scan and then we&#39;ll end the EMDR processing session that&#39;s what you could expect in an EMDR processing session if the memory does not get to a zero then we might return to one of the positive resources we started with and help the client regulate and ground and contain the session so that we can end and then next week we would revisit it in a future session so in EMDR although there&#39;s always exceptions to this ideally we would start with the Touchstone memories in the memory Network the original and first uh traumas related to the presenting issue we would work our way forward chronologically reprocessing other traumatic memories related to that one at a time then we would move to the present day triggers and we would identify present day experiences where that past trauma was triggered we would use a very similar process of eye movements and bilateral stimulation to desensitize this present day triggers and that would often take a a series of sessions as well and then we would create future templates so next time you encounter a situation that in the past would trigger you related to this trauma ideally how would you like to respond to it how do you want to act what do you want to say what do you want to do um let&#39;s create an image and a vision of responding to a future trigger in an ideal way and let&#39;s uh let&#39;s connect with that and integrate that and there&#39;s a a similar protocol using IM movements to connect with that future template so we do the past then the present and then the future this is um emdr&#39;s three pronged approach now uh EMDR works amazingly well for single incident traumas when there&#39;s a one-time traumatic experience in just a a handful of vmdr sessions many people with a single incident trauma will experience a complete uh reduction in PTSD symptoms and they&#39;ll be able to go on with their normal life without ongoing negative ative impacts from that trauma at least internal negative impacts so EMDR is amazingly effective for someone that&#39;s experienced onetime trauma or experience one type of trauma one time so if that&#39;s you or that&#39;s someone you love or a client that you&#39;re working with I highly recommend that you refer them to EMDR uh EMDR will work in just a handful of sessions as long as that person is stable enough to participate in EMD R and able to tolerate the difficult emotions that come with remembering the memory EMDR is also effective for complex trauma in larger memory networks or reoccurring trauma it just takes a bit longer and we might have to Target more memories because there&#39;s been more experiences of trauma in that memory Network EMDR is also effective for other things like anxiety depression traumatic loss grief panic attacks and many people are finding EMDR effective for chronic pain and even for performance related issues I&#39;ve had clients who struggle with anxiety or or freeze in their jobs or public speaking or driving or getting on an airplane or uh in sports even and EMDR can be really effective at working through some of those blocks um if you&#39;re interested in learning more about EMDR I encourage you to check out emdria.org which is the International Association of EMDR where there&#39;s more resources Avail available I also have other videos on EMDR on this channel that might interest you really want to urge you not to try to do EMDR on yourself I&#39;ve had so many clients that have tried EMDR on themselves and hurt themselves uh really professional um and uh there&#39;s another video I created about that if you&#39;re in the Philadelphia area or in Delaware or New Jersey or Pennsylvania and are interested in working with us with EMDR I encourage you to reach out to us um our email is support Phenix trumac center.com or our intake number is 48444 9416 we&#39;re located in Media Pennsylvania we have over two dozen different EMDR therapists on our team uh and we can we can help you work through whatever it is that you&#39;re going through related to trauma we also have uh about 10 different graduate students that we support to get training at EMDR and they can offer lowcost EMDR which is almost impossible to find otherwise um we find it to be uh really important that therapy is accessible for everybody and so so um we&#39;ve created this lowcost trauma therapy program through our internship program and we can work with clients on a sliding scale rate so I encourage you to reach out to us for more information let us know how we can be helpful and check out EMDR therapists in your local area the website that I mentioned earlier emdria.org has a search engine where you can put in your insurance and your zip code and other details and it&#39;ll give you a list of EMDR therapist local to you so I hope you found this video useful if you did I encourage you to give us a thumbs up a like button subscribe to the channel and put in the comments here what you found helpful those actions will help make this video more uh visible for other people let me know if there&#39;s other topics you&#39;d like to see in future videos thank [Music] you

hey everybody my name is Dr Scott jamui I&amp;#39;m the director and founder of the Phoenix Center for experiential trauma therapy in Media Pennsylvania and I&amp;#39;m a certified EMDR consultant in this video I want to talk to you about EMDR which is eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy uh in this video I&amp;#39;m going to provide a a brief overview of what EMDR is and how it works and what you could expect if you&amp;#39;re going to participate in EMDR or if you&amp;#39;re a professional I&amp;#39;ll talk a little bit about what you could expect if you were to refer someone to EMDR and who might be the best fit for [Music] EMDR so EMDR is one of the gold standard treatments for trauma and PTSD post-traumatic stress disorder it was created a couple decades ago by Francine Shapiro and it was uh really evolved from an accidental realization Francine was walking through the park and uh remembering some difficult experiences that she had had and she noticed her eyes spontaneously moved back and forth while she was remembering and walking and she paused and as a psychologist she got curious and thought huh that was strange and she tried to Think Through what was what had just happened and and realized that she was remembering a disturbing memory and then she recalled that memory and noticed that it seemed to be slightly less disturbing than it was a couple minutes ago and so she experimented with forcefully moving her eyes back and forth while she remembered this memory and noticed again that it if the sense ize the memory further and she ended up taking this realization and creating it into a structured therapy called EMDR therapy uh EMDR is highly researched at this point and the research all demonstrates that it&amp;#39;s effective and that it works especially for PTSD and disturbing memories um it&amp;#39;s one of the top tier recommended therapies for trauma it also is effective for a variety of different issues but it&amp;#39;s primarily used for trauma and PTSD so honestly I think EMDR is a really bad name and maybe we could have uh developed a better name for it uh eye movement desensitization and reprocessing uh basically the the gist of it is the way that it works or the way we believe it works because we don&amp;#39;t actually know for sure we do know that it does work but the neuroscience technology hasn&amp;#39;t evolved to the point where we can know exactly why and how it works but we know it does um part of the theory is that the back and forth eye movements that we employ in EMDR help to activate the brain&amp;#39;s natural memory processing mechanisms the same ones that are active during rapid eye movement sleep or REM sleep which is really normal and natural deep sleep phase that we get into uh usually this happens every night I believe once or twice sometimes three times uh during our sleep cycle and if you watch somebody while they&amp;#39;re sleeping and they&amp;#39;re in this deep uh state of sleep you&amp;#39;ll notice that although their eyes are closed their eyes are actually moving back and forth rapidly this is the phase of sleep when we dream and what we believe is going on internally is that the brain is processing memory and processing experiences of the day consolidating short-term memory into long-term memory and storing that memory in a way that is workable in case we need to access that memory in the future so we believe with back and forth eye movements that we use in EMDR that we can tap into the brain&amp;#39;s innate capacity to process memory and that what happens with traumatic memory is that they overwhelm the brain and the nervous system&amp;#39;s ability to to make sense of it and to process all the sensory and emotional and visual information connected to the memory and so the traumatic memory gets stored in a way that&amp;#39;s abnormal that it&amp;#39;s not fully processed or Consolidated and that anytime there&amp;#39;s a present day reminder or stimulus or trigger that relates or Associates to that unprocessed traumatic memory that it activates it in the here and now in the form of flashbacks or perhaps in nightmares while we&amp;#39;re sleeping or disturbing images or Sensations in our body or other emotions or negative beliefs about oursel so uh we believe that EMDR is helping the brain to process memories in short chunks that aren&amp;#39;t going to overwhelm the brain&amp;#39;s ability to press process in EMDR we instead of asking the client to remember the entire memory at once we take it in short short periods maybe 10 to 30 seconds a minute or two at most where we would ask a client to focus on one aspect of the memory and just notice which what they experience it&amp;#39;s a pretty organic process that involves lots of free association uh usually we&amp;#39;ll start with the most disturbing part of the memory and we&amp;#39;ll ask a client to focus on that disturbing part and just notice what they experience there&amp;#39;s really no rights or wrongs in EMDR it&amp;#39;s really just about letting your brain free associate to where it needs to go to connect to the Adaptive information that&amp;#39;s already existing within yourself and within your brain and to allow your your your brain to do the work to heal itself and to reprocess this memory and so we do that just in short and simple chunks rather than trying to redo reprocess remember the entire memory all at once which is likely to overwhelm us again so it happens in short tolerable amounts and we believe that this allows us to desensitize oursel to that memory well giving the brain the chance to reprocess it a little bit at a time and consolidate that memory into long-term memory now while EMDR originally began by using eye movements and many EMDR therapists do use eye movements and many people actually believe that the eye movements are most effective and I&amp;#39;m told there is some research to uh prove that we&amp;#39;ve also found that other forms of bilateral stimulation back and forth stimulation bilateral also can be effective in MDR as an alternative to eye movements so for example uh bilateral sound where there&amp;#39;s sound playing in one side of the ear to the other side or bilateral tactile stimulation such as back and forth tapping that this can also be helpful as an alternative to the eye movements um there&amp;#39;s a therapy device called a therapper which has two it&amp;#39;s an in instrument connected by wires that the therapist can control the intensity and the speed and the pacing and the client holds on to two modules that simply vibrate back and forth providing bilateral tactile stimulation now the theory about how this is helpful whether it&amp;#39;s eye movements or audio sounds or bilateral stimulation uh tactile stimulation is that it provides a sense of dual awareness while we&amp;#39;re remembering a traumatic memory we&amp;#39;re also aware of the Here and Now That We&amp;#39;re remembering a memory and our eyes are open and we&amp;#39;re following our therapist&amp;#39;s finger back and forth so we&amp;#39;re we&amp;#39;re aware of the memory and the trauma but at the same time we&amp;#39;re aware that we&amp;#39;re in the room with our therapists in a safe place or or maybe we have our eyes closed and we&amp;#39;re holding on to the therapy Tapper and we&amp;#39;re remembering an aspect of the memory but every time that Tapper buzzes it reminds us and it reminds our nervous system that we&amp;#39;re not in that trauma right now that we&amp;#39;re actually in the therapist&amp;#39;s office and we&amp;#39;re in a safe place and this really helps desensitize the nervous system when we&amp;#39;re remembering a traumatic memory it&amp;#39;s activating our nervous system you know we&amp;#39;re experiencing stress and cortisol and adrenaline perhaps and other feelings and we might be on edge or alert our nervous system is feeling that that trauma all over again and then the therapy Tapper buzzes and it disrupts that and it reminds us oh yeah we&amp;#39;re actually in the therapy office and it&amp;#39;s safe here and then we go back to thinking about the memory and then the other side buzzes and it reminds us oh yeah we&amp;#39;re in the therapy office we&amp;#39;re safe and this disruption of of the traumatic response to the traumatic memory replacing it with a calming soothing reminder or stimulus effectively helps to desensitize the intensity of the stress attached to the the trauma so another reason why we believe this works is dual awareness and the way that it orients our nervous system to the hearing now uh in EMDR we We Believe that traumatic memories get fragmented and because they don&amp;#39;t get fully processed and stored in the way that a normal memory would be that a traumatic memory exists in a fragmented state within our brain with our mind uh within our memory networks and that because it was too overwhelming for the brain and the nervous system and the mind the psyche to process it it exists in a way that&amp;#39;s disconnected from other memories and disconnected from other information in the brain EMDR is really a affirming and humanistic Theory and approach in that we believe that the client has everything within them that they need to heal and that it&amp;#39;s just disconnected in the brain from the traumatic memory and that in EMDR the free association uh within the process helps us connect the traumatic memory and the content attached to that memory to all the other good and adaptive information within the client&amp;#39;s brain and in doing so we&amp;#39;re promoting integration and promoting healing and helping that uh helping to reprocess that memory often times this is similar to changing how we perceive or remember the trauma especially for childhood trauma uh many times when we experience childhood trauma we&amp;#39;ll remember it from the point of view of ourselves as a child and it&amp;#39;s pretty common that through the EMDR process a client will then tell will tell me at the end that now they&amp;#39;re seeing it Through The Eyes of themselves as an adult and that the the process of re of addressing memory with EMDR in short small pieces through free association bilateral stimulation has effectively connected that once isolated and fragmented traumatic memory with all this other good and adaptive information within the client&amp;#39;s brain and mind as an adult now so this is what we call the Adaptive information processing theory in EMDR now EMDR is a process it&amp;#39;s not something that we just jump into in our first session we really need to do the the foundational work to prepare for EMDR so uh we begin EMDR therapy in the same way we begin any other kind of therapy process we start by building a therapeutic relationship with the client and connecting uh with with some safety assessing where the client is at what&amp;#39;s going on for them where to the presenting issues and making sure that EMDR is the right Fit U EMDR is a powerful therapy and if it&amp;#39;s not used properly it can cause harm so we want to make sure that the client that&amp;#39;s in front of us is a good candidate for EMDR and that they&amp;#39;re stable and resourced enough and have social support in their life so that when we activate the traumatic memories we&amp;#39;re not going to ret traumatize them or cause more harm so this is uh one of the most important aspects of preparing for EMDR and it&amp;#39;s often something that I find is overlooked so uh if you&amp;#39;re a therapist watching this it&amp;#39;s really important that you make sure your client is appropriate and a good candidate for EMR and if you&amp;#39;re a client watching this it would be important that you uh take your time and let the therapist guide you in this and make sure that uh you have some social support in your life and some coping coping skills that you can use on your own in case difficult emotions come up for you throughout the emgr process now in EMDR preparation phases we like to begin by doing what we call EMDR resourcing this is where we start by connecting with positive memories and pleasant memories uh to help the client self-regulate when they&amp;#39;re feeling uncomfortable or feeling anxious or having difficulty sleeping or or other uh difficult emotions uh what this looks like is we might ask a client to identify a safe place that they can imagine spending time in or uh a memory where their body was in a calm state where they were at ease and felt calm and peacefulness and tranquility and we would facilitate the client using eye movements or bilateral stimulation to really connect and deepen their connection to this memory or this positive resource other resources that we typically use would be a container this would be an imaginary or physical container that we could facilitate the client in putting difficult memories or emotions into in order to contain things uh we might use a protective figure or a nurturing figure or some sort of spiritual figure or wisdom figure for example um I have a client or two that uses characters from movies in their EMDR resources uh they might choose uh Dumbledore from Harry Potter as a protective and wise figure a figure that they feel connected to that could help them navigate the aftermath of their trauma and I would facilitate a process of them imagining connecting with Dumbledore and asking Dumbledore for support uh about how to navigate their trauma or the aftermath of it and they would imagine receiving guidance or advice from Dumbledore what do you imagine Dumbledore would say to you recommend to you suggest to you and H this is usually not a prescripted process it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s a spontaneous creative and imaginary process and I&amp;#39;m constantly surprised at the type of adaptive information and new insights that come just from inviting clients to connect with positive resources like this many times the emgr resourcing process by itself can be incredibly healing and corrective and help to reduce PTSD symptoms without even getting into processing and desensitizing traumatic memories but it&amp;#39;s important that we start with this resourcing process so that if we do get into some trouble or we do start to feel overwhelmed while reprocessing the traumatic memories later that we have some positive memories and some coping skills we can come back to uh and that we can use in between sessions when we&amp;#39;re not in the therapy office we can imagine spending time in that safe place or connecting with Dumbledore or with um another positive memory that will effectively reduce our anxiety and stress levels just like when we remember something painful or difficult it changes how we&amp;#39;re feeling here and now when we remember something positive or Pleasant or nurturing or validating it also changes how we feel here and now so it&amp;#39;s important that we use this to our advantage rather than letting past painful memories control how we feel constantly so the EMDR process involves identifying these positive resources then we move into identifying Target memories traumatic memories and different traumatic memory networks memories that are tied together based on shared negative beliefs emotions experiences and physical Sensations in an actual EMDR processing session we would identify specific memory where going to work with and we would uh set up the session by using an EMDR worksheet which asks questions like what&amp;#39;s the most disturbing image when you think of this memory what&amp;#39;s the negative belief that goes with this this image when you think of this negative belief and this negative image on a scale of 0 to 10 how disturbing is this zero being I can think of this right now and it doesn&amp;#39;t feel disturbing at all 10 being it&amp;#39;s the worst disturbance that I can imagine when I think of it right now we ask other questions about emotions that come up for you right now when you think of this and when you think of this what do you feel in your body so it&amp;#39;s really a holistic process looking at thoughts and beliefs images and memories feelings and Sensations and then we&amp;#39;ll also have a process of identifying a new positive belief belie about oursel that we would like to replace the negative belief with so EMDR is a pretty structured process then we&amp;#39;ll simply ask a client to focus on the worst part of that memory let your mind go and just notice what you experience and follow my fingers or hold on to the thot tappers and notice the bilateral stimulation the client will do that for a couple sentences or set number of eye movements usually it lasts only about 30 seconds or so and then I&amp;#39;ll ask the client to take a breath come on back to the room with me and just tell me what they noticed and there&amp;#39;s no rights or wrongs after 30 seconds of focusing on the the worst part of the trauma the client might say something like um what I noticed is that um I feel really angry about what happened and I&amp;#39;ll say okay now I want you to focus on that anger and just notice what you experience follow my fingers going go for another 30 seconds or so I&amp;#39;ll tell the client to take a deep breath and just let me know what they experienced that time and they might say I notice that I feel anger in my stomach and then I&amp;#39;ll say all right great you&amp;#39;re doing great now I want you to focus on that feeling in your stomach follow my fingers and just notice what you experienc let&amp;#39;s go with that and so there&amp;#39;s just a series of short associations that we use again there&amp;#39;s no right or wrong in this to help the client process aspects attached to the traumatic memory in short tolerable amounts if it feels like we&amp;#39;re getting too off track then I&amp;#39;ll ask the client to come back to where we started hey when we think of that disturbing image we started with the worst part of that memory when you think of that right now now on a scale of 0 to 10 how disturbing does it feel now and usually uh to my surprise and the client&amp;#39;s surprise it&amp;#39;ll drop from like an 8 out of 10 when we started to a five out of 10 after just 10 or 15 minutes of the MDR and then we continue all right what&amp;#39;s the most disturbing part of the memory now well now the most disturbing part is the fact that uh my parent didn&amp;#39;t protect me from that happening say okay now I want you to focus on that part follow my fingers notice what you experience and we go through another series of associations and so every so often we&amp;#39;ll Circle back to the memory when do you think of that now how disturbing does it feel ideally by the end we get to a zero and it&amp;#39;s actually quite common that we do get to a zero that after 30 minutes or an hour of EMR processing the client can remember the worst part of the memory and right now when they remember it they don&amp;#39;t feel any disturbance now EMDR is not going to make you forget about the the memory it&amp;#39;s just going to change your relationship to the memory it&amp;#39;s going to take away the edge and the disturbance from it when we get to a zero then we return to that positive belief about ourself that we wanted to replace the negative belief with and we&amp;#39;ll uh integrate that positive belief in and then there&amp;#39;s a process of connecting with our body doing a short body scan and then we&amp;#39;ll end the EMDR processing session that&amp;#39;s what you could expect in an EMDR processing session if the memory does not get to a zero then we might return to one of the positive resources we started with and help the client regulate and ground and contain the session so that we can end and then next week we would revisit it in a future session so in EMDR although there&amp;#39;s always exceptions to this ideally we would start with the Touchstone memories in the memory Network the original and first uh traumas related to the presenting issue we would work our way forward chronologically reprocessing other traumatic memories related to that one at a time then we would move to the present day triggers and we would identify present day experiences where that past trauma was triggered we would use a very similar process of eye movements and bilateral stimulation to desensitize this present day triggers and that would often take a a series of sessions as well and then we would create future templates so next time you encounter a situation that in the past would trigger you related to this trauma ideally how would you like to respond to it how do you want to act what do you want to say what do you want to do um let&amp;#39;s create an image and a vision of responding to a future trigger in an ideal way and let&amp;#39;s uh let&amp;#39;s connect with that and integrate that and there&amp;#39;s a a similar protocol using IM movements to connect with that future template so we do the past then the present and then the future this is um emdr&amp;#39;s three pronged approach now uh EMDR works amazingly well for single incident traumas when there&amp;#39;s a one-time traumatic experience in just a a handful of vmdr sessions many people with a single incident trauma will experience a complete uh reduction in PTSD symptoms and they&amp;#39;ll be able to go on with their normal life without ongoing negative ative impacts from that trauma at least internal negative impacts so EMDR is amazingly effective for someone that&amp;#39;s experienced onetime trauma or experience one type of trauma one time so if that&amp;#39;s you or that&amp;#39;s someone you love or a client that you&amp;#39;re working with I highly recommend that you refer them to EMDR uh EMDR will work in just a handful of sessions as long as that person is stable enough to participate in EMD R and able to tolerate the difficult emotions that come with remembering the memory EMDR is also effective for complex trauma in larger memory networks or reoccurring trauma it just takes a bit longer and we might have to Target more memories because there&amp;#39;s been more experiences of trauma in that memory Network EMDR is also effective for other things like anxiety depression traumatic loss grief panic attacks and many people are finding EMDR effective for chronic pain and even for performance related issues I&amp;#39;ve had clients who struggle with anxiety or or freeze in their jobs or public speaking or driving or getting on an airplane or uh in sports even and EMDR can be really effective at working through some of those blocks um if you&amp;#39;re interested in learning more about EMDR I encourage you to check out emdria.org which is the International Association of EMDR where there&amp;#39;s more resources Avail available I also have other videos on EMDR on this channel that might interest you really want to urge you not to try to do EMDR on yourself I&amp;#39;ve had so many clients that have tried EMDR on themselves and hurt themselves uh really professional um and uh there&amp;#39;s another video I created about that if you&amp;#39;re in the Philadelphia area or in Delaware or New Jersey or Pennsylvania and are interested in working with us with EMDR I encourage you to reach out to us um our email is support Phenix trumac center.com or our intake number is 48444 9416 we&amp;#39;re located in Media Pennsylvania we have over two dozen different EMDR therapists on our team uh and we can we can help you work through whatever it is that you&amp;#39;re going through related to trauma we also have uh about 10 different graduate students that we support to get training at EMDR and they can offer lowcost EMDR which is almost impossible to find otherwise um we find it to be uh really important that therapy is accessible for everybody and so so um we&amp;#39;ve created this lowcost trauma therapy program through our internship program and we can work with clients on a sliding scale rate so I encourage you to reach out to us for more information let us know how we can be helpful and check out EMDR therapists in your local area the website that I mentioned earlier emdria.org has a search engine where you can put in your insurance and your zip code and other details and it&amp;#39;ll give you a list of EMDR therapist local to you so I hope you found this video useful if you did I encourage you to give us a thumbs up a like button subscribe to the channel and put in the comments here what you found helpful those actions will help make this video more uh visible for other people let me know if there&amp;#39;s other topics you&amp;#39;d like to see in future videos thank [Music] you

Transcript for:EMDR Therapy Overview

Transcript for:
EMDR Therapy Overview