Sarah! What the heck is… EMDR?

Oct 16

Hello! Welcome to another psychoeducational post! This is my series on therapy jargon!

Most people who seek out therapy have no idea what all the acronyms are and there are A LOT of them!

This collection of blog posts talks about many of the acronyms you may come across while you go throughout your therapy journey.

Today we’re talking about, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, often referred to as EMDR.

EMDR is a well-researched and popular approach to addressing trauma in clients.

The idea behind EMDR is to mimic the rapid eye movement pattern that people experience in sleep, when the brain is processing and storing information.

When someone experiences a trauma, information processing is interrupted. The brain is overloaded because of the traumatic experience. The trauma is then left unprocessed and is lingering inside the emotional center of the brain, away from more executive functioning.

EMDR aims to use the whole brain to help a client process their traumatic experience, unlike standard talk therapist, which focus more on the executive functioning part of the brain.

So, what happens when someone does EMDR?

Most EMDR therapists will get to know their clients before jumping right into treatment and will follow proper EMDR protocol.

This includes getting a client’s history, preparing them for EMDR, assessing the particular traumatic event the client would like to work on, then actually doing EMDR, and checking in with how the client responded to treatment.

This is more involved but for the purpose of this blog post, this is just a general overview.

EMDR itself is comprised of bilateral stimulation, basically processing traumatic experiences through dual attention. Dual attention is an external action a client is doing, like following a clinician’s finger or moving light with their eyes, tapping their legs or shoulders, or listening to something.

The idea is to mimic memory integration that happens during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep.

EMDR can help people who are struggling with: