Eye Movement Desensitising and Reprocessing (EMDR)
EMDR is a unique and powerful psychotherapy that reprocesses negative and traumatic memories, helping reduce their emotional charge. It can help you overcome anxiety, panic attacks and negative beliefs in yourself, which makes space for positive change and a calmer mindset.
What to expect?
EMDR therapy usually consists of several phases
1. History and Treatment Planning
In this initial phase, your therapist will discuss your personal history, current symptoms, and treatment goals. Together, you’ll identify specific memories or experiences to focus on during therapy.
2. Preparation
Your therapist will explain the EMDR process, set expectations, and teach you techniques to manage any emotional discomfort that may arise during sessions. This helps ensure you feel safe and supported throughout the therapy.
3. Assessment
You’ll identify a specific memory to target, along with the negative beliefs and emotions associated with it. The therapist will also establish baseline measures of distress and the validity of positive beliefs.
4. Desensitisation
You’ll identify a specific memory to target, along with the negative beliefs and emotions associated with it. The therapist will also establish baseline measures of distress and the validity of positive beliefs.
5. Installation
In this phase, the therapist helps strengthen a positive belief that you want to associate with the targeted memory, reinforcing adaptive thinking patterns.
6. Body Scan
You’ll mentally scan your body for any residual tension or discomfort related to the memory. If any is found, the therapist will guide you through processing it to achieve a state of physical and emotional calm.
7. Closure
Each session concludes with techniques to help you return to a state of equilibrium, ensuring you feel grounded and safe, regardless of whether the memory was fully processed.
8. Revaluation
At the beginning of subsequent sessions, the therapist will assess the effectiveness of previous work, checking if the memory still causes distress and if the positive beliefs remain strong. This guides the direction of future sessions.
What can EMDR help with?
Frequently Asked Questions
EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing. It is a therapy used to help people recover from distressing events and the problems they have caused, like flashbacks, upsetting thoughts or images, depression or anxiety.
EMDR is recognised by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and the World Health Organisation (WHO), which also recognises it as an effective treatment for children.
When a person is involved in a traumatic event, they may feel overwhelmed and their brain may be unable to fully process what is going on. The memory of the event seems to become “stuck” so that it remains very intense and vivid. The person can re-experience what they saw, heard and smelt and the full force of the distress they felt whenever the memory comes to mind.
EMDR aims to help the brain “unstick” and reprocess the memory properly so that it is no longer so intense. It also helps to desensitise the person to the emotional impact of the memory, so that they can think about the event without experiencing such strong feelings.
It does this by asking the person to recall the traumatic event while they also move their eyes from side-to-side, hear a sound in each ear alternately, or feel a tap on each hand alternately. These side-to-side sensations seem to effectively stimulate the “stuck” processing system in the brain so that it can reprocess the information more like an ordinary memory, reducing its intensity.
The effect may be similar to what occurs naturally during REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, when your eyes move rapidly from side to side as the brain processes the events of the day. Some research suggests that EMDR is effective because concentrating on another task whilst processing a distressing memory gives the brain more work to do*. When the brain is not giving its full attention to processing the memory, it starts to become less vivid. This allows the person to distance themselves from it and begin to remember the event in a more helpful and manageable way.
EMDR is a complex therapeutic process that should always be delivered by properly trained therapists.
* e.g. Gunter & Bodner, 2008
When a person’s mental health problems have their roots in a distressing life event, EMDR can be very effective very quickly. Studies have shown that EMDR can significantly decrease PTSD symptoms in just two or three sessions, and that the effect is long lasting (e.g. Ironson, Freund, Strauss, & Williams, 2002 ; Scheck, Schaeffer, & Gillette, 1998) . People who have experienced several traumatic events, neglect or poor treatment as children usually need more sessions than this.
See the research section of the EMDR association’s website to read more about the scientific evidence for EMDR therapy.
EMDR is best known for its effectiveness in treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is widely used by the NHS, charitable organisations and private sector, and the Ministry of Defence use EMDR to help service personnel with PTSD.
EMDR can also be used to help treat a variety of mental health problems like depression or anxiety, especially where a difficult life event has been involved. EMDR can be useful for people who have witnessed or experienced an event like a car accident, a violent crime, sexual or emotional abuse, bullying, a social humiliation or the sudden loss of a loved one, and are struggling to recover.
EMDR is suitable for adults, young people and children, however at present Inner Calm Collective only offers treatment to adults.
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