Therapy Information

Depression, fear, and anxiety are some of the most common and uncomfortable emotions that we can experience at some point in our lives. Through counseling and treatment, we can help you recover the motivation, perspective, and joy you once had.  

Licensed Counselor trained in EMDR

Many individuals can experience symptoms associated with painful and traumatic circumstances. Anxiety, fear, and hopelessness are a few emotions that can linger post traumatic events. Counseling can help you overcome these symptoms and guide you through grief and healing.  

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What is EMDR therapy?

Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is a mental health treatment technique. This method involves moving your eyes a specific way while you process traumatic memories. EMDR’s goal is to help you heal from trauma or other distressing life experiences. Compared to other therapy methods, EMDR is relatively new. The first clinical trial investigating EMDR was in 1989. Dozens of clinical trials since then show that this technique is effective and can help a person faster than many other methods.

Who needs to have EMDR therapy?

EMDR can help people with a wide range of mental health conditions. Adolescents, teenagers, and adults of all ages can benefit from this treatment. Some healthcare providers also specialize in EMDR for children.

Why is this treatment used?

EMDR therapy doesn’t require talking in detail about a distressing issue. EMDR instead focuses on changing the emotions, thoughts, or behaviors that result from a distressing experience (trauma). This allows your brain to resume a natural healing process. While many people use the words “mind” and “brain” when referring to the same thing, they’re actually different. Your brain is an organ of your body. Your mind is the collection of thoughts, memories, beliefs, and experiences that make you who you are.

The way your mind works relies on the structure of your brain. That structure involves networks of communicating brain cells across many different areas. That’s especially the case with sections that involve your memories and senses. That networking makes it faster and easier for those areas to work together. That’s why your senses — sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feels — can bring back strong memories.

Adaptive Information Processing

EMDR relies on the Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model, a theory about how your brain stores memories. This theory, developed by Francine Shapiro, PhD, who also developed EMDR, recognizes that your brain stores normal and traumatic memories differently.

During everyday events, your brain stores memories smoothly. It also networks them, so they connect to other things you remember. During disturbing or upsetting events, that networking doesn’t happen correctly. The brain can go “offline,” and there’s a disconnect between what you experience (feel, hear, see) and what your brain stores in memory through language.

Often, your brain stores trauma memories in a way that doesn’t allow for healthy healing. Trauma is like a wound that your brain hasn’t been allowed to heal. Because it didn’t have the chance to recover, your brain didn’t receive the message that the danger was over.

Newer experiences can link up to earlier trauma experiences and reinforce a negative experience over and over again. That disrupts the links between your senses and memories. It also acts as an injury to your mind. And just like your body is sensitive to pain from an injury, your mind has a higher sensitivity to things you saw, heard, smelled, or felt during a trauma-related event.

This happens not only with events you can remember but also with suppressed memories. Much like how you learn not to touch a hot stove because it burns your hand, your mind tries to suppress memories to avoid accessing them because they’re painful or upsetting. However, the suppression isn’t perfect, meaning the “injury” can still cause negative symptoms, emotions, and behaviors.

Triggers

Sights, sounds, and smells with a connection or similarity to a trauma event will “trigger” those improperly stored memories. Unlike other memories, these can cause overwhelming feelings of fear, anxiety, anger, or panic.

An example of this is post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, flashback, where improper storage and networking causes your mind to access those memories in a way that’s uncontrolled, distorted, and overpowering. That’s why people with a history of flashbacks describe feeling as if they were reliving a disturbing event. The past becomes the present.

Reprocessing and repair

When you undergo EMDR, you access memories of a traumatic event in very specific ways. Combined with eye movements and guided instructions, accessing those memories helps you reprocess what you remember from the adverse event.

That reprocessing helps “repair” the mental injury from that memory. Remembering what happened to you will no longer feel like reliving it, and the related feelings will be much more manageable.