EMDR

When you experience a traumatic event you may find that you have difficulty getting over it. You may have nightmares and anxiety attacks. A lot of things may cause you to remember it, and some of the time it may feel like the crisis is happening all over again. Your life may appear very normal and possibly no one knows that you are experiencing these problems.

You may be suffering from Post Traumatic Stress. This condition can arise from any stressful, upsetting or frightening incident, such as a break-in; a car accident; a death; being a victim of crime; sudden marital upheaval; or job loss. The event can have occurred recently or years ago. Many adults still suffer the repercussions of childhood incidents such as abuse and hospitalizations.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is one therapeutic technique that is used to address these traumas. To be effective and safe requires extensive specialized training.

With an experienced and qualified therapist this technique is easy to perform and very simple from the client’s point of view. It makes use of Rapid Eye Movement or REM, which occurs during sleep to process and store the day’s events into long-term memory. Events that are too stressful are not processed properly and are therefore stored in a way that keeps them feeling new and just as upsetting as when they first occurred. If you can imagine the upsetting situation as being frozen in your mind like a photograph that never changes, EMDR helps your brain to turn it into a movie that moves on so that you can get past the upset. Many people find that only 1 to 3 sessions can make a remarkable difference in how they feel, even though some of them have been carrying the memories for years. This method, especially when used together with talk therapy, provides a way to help people with traumatic memories.