EMDR

EMDR Helps to Resolve Traumatic Memories

• Traumatic and painful memories can cause stress and tension when they are not properly processed. Sights, smells and sounds that remind you of the traumatic or painful memories may occur, triggering your stress and traumatic responses.

• EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Theory is a treatment modality that helps you to reprocess these memories help you heal.

• EMDR is one of the most widely used approaches to help people overcome and heal from deeply troubling problems such as anxiety, depression and other symptoms of trauma.

• Many therapists at Champaign Counseling who are trained in trauma therapy are also trained in EMDR.

What is EMDR?

During EMDR the client is guided to deliberately bring into conscious awareness the sensory memory, thoughts, and the accompanying emotions and bodily sensations associated with that memory. Clients need to be open to experience the emotions and body sensations that accompany the recall of a distressing memory and associated thoughts. 

Then by following the moving fingers of the therapist, (or other dual attention stimulation) this stimulates a distinctive and naturally occurring pattern of electrical activity in the brain, which causes the stored trauma memory to quickly change. The exact mechanisms in the brain which cause the memory to change have not yet been discovered, but the regions of the brain involved with sensory storage, emotional activation and reasoning all become more active, with changed patterns of nerve cell firing. 

The client does not try to change any aspect of the memory, and is asked to just notice the experience, to observe their memory, emotions, bodily sensations and thoughts. At the end of each set of eye movements the client is then asked to report their present experience. It may be that the sensory memory becomes less detailed or less vivid, and clients often report that the memory has become quite distant. Commonly the emotional or bodily sensations reduce in intensity quite quickly.