Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)

EMDR is an eight phase model involving dual attention stimuli, such as eye-movements, tapping, or sounds, and is administered while a client focuses on the disturbing memories, anxiety, psychological and somatic symptoms. 

Often, when you experience a trauma or a difficult life event, your body can get overwhelmed and that experience can get stuck in the brain with the original picture, sounds, sensations, thoughts, and emotions. Since it’s stuck, it continues to be activated whenever a reminder comes up in our everyday life. These reminders can cause our body to get overwhelmed all over again and you most likely experience a great deal of  discomfort, distress, or negative emotions that you can’t seem to control. These are in fact the emotions and sensations connected with the original experience that are being activated.

The dual attention stimuli used in EMDR can utilize the system in your brain that allows the experience to get unstuck and stored in the brain in a more adaptive way (Shapiro, 2017), rather than experiencing the same high levels of distress or discomfort as the original moment.