Imagine you were given the opportunity to time travel back to your younger self at the age you are now. Without changing your past, you had a chance to comfort your younger self through a traumatic event. How might things be different if you had the support you really needed at those distressing times in your life? You might be thinking that’s an impossible scenario, but what If I told you it’s not? 

EMDR therapy (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) was designed to go back into that part of our brain and resolve unprocessed traumatic memories. EMDR therapy can help you come face to face with your younger self and help those wounded parts of you finally be able to heal. 

In the beginning phases of psychotherapy, a well known neurologist, Sigmund Frued, discovered that the path to healing first begins with bringing your unconscious thoughts back to conscious awareness in order to process them. 

Generations later in 1989, Francine Shapiro, a California psychologist, was walking in a forest and noticed her anxiety started to calm down after scanning her surroundings. Adapting on Frued’s initial insight, Shapiro wondered if this eye scanning technique could be used to help individuals with traumatic memories bring them to consciousness  as well. 

This idea eventually led to Shapiro’s development of EMDR therapy, which uses repetitive movements such as following a finger or tapping side to side, to put us in a trance-like state that brings us to a new level of consciousness. 

Powerful experiences that cause trauma are stored in your brain’s long-term memory with a lot of emotions attached to them that you can’t seem to escape. When triggered, these memories can be just as distressing as the actual moment you experienced the traumatic event. 

The idea of EMDR is to access the part of your brain (long-term memory) that is holding onto this experience, and get it into the your “working memory” (short term memory) so your brain is finally able to process the experience and minimize the emotional impact it continues to have on you in your day to day life.

EMDR was originally developed for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and is widely considered one of the best treatments for PTSD and other Trauma-related disorders. Several therapists have extended the use of EMDR to assist with other conditions such as anxiety, depression, personality disorders, mood disorders, and panic disorders. 

If you have been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, suffer from frequent panic attacks, are always feeling on edge, or feeling “stuck” in an experience that continues to replay in your mind, EMDR therapy might help you unlock that part of your mind that needs healing. 

EMDR therapy can be used on it’s own or integrated into standard talk therapy. EMDR therapy typically lasts for 60-90 minutes and unlike many psychotherapy modalities, does not require an individual to talk in detail about the distressing issue. The therapist acts as a guide through this process and allows the individual time to process and self-soothe through the experience.

Rather than focusing on changing emotions, behaviors, beliefs, or thoughts related to the distressing issue, EMDR therapy allows your brain to do the work for you by reconstructing its ability to naturally heal itself.