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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Sprache: Englisch
The Breakthrough Therapy for Overcoming Anxiety, Stress, and Trauma
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is now recognized as one of the most effective treatment modalities for trauma, PTSD, anxiety, depression, addiction, and beyond. EMDR For Dummies is a user-friendly guide for patients who need an introduction to what this type of therapy can do for them—hint: it can help a lot. You’ll learn about the symptoms that EMDR can treat, and you’ll have a chance to assess yourself to determine whether it might be a good fit for you. Explore the different types of EMDR interventions, what to expect during and after treatment, and the phases of therapy. Most of all, find out why everyone’s talking about EMDR.
- Learn what EMDR is, why it’s effective, and what issues it can treat
- Gain a step-by-step understanding of the process and types of EMDR therapy
- Move your personal healing journey forward by overcoming past negative experiences
- Work through the most difficult challenges that patients and clinicians face during EMDR therapy
This easy-to-follow Dummies guide is a great resource for patients and loved ones looking for information on EMDR, as well as mental and behavioral health professionals seeking a guide to using EMDR.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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EMDR For Dummies®
To view this book's Cheat Sheet, simply go to www.dummies.com and search for “EMDR For Dummies Cheat Sheet” in the Search box.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Foolish Assumptions
About This Book
Icons Used in This Book
Beyond the Book
Where to Go from Here
Part 1: Getting Started with EMDR
Chapter 1: Trauma Is Real and EMDR Can Help
Trauma Is Everywhere
How EMDR Can Be an Option for Treating Trauma
Working with a Skilled EMDR Practitioner
Chapter 2: Getting to Know Your Brain on Trauma
Why Do I Do That?
How to Get Your Brain Working in Harmony
Chapter 3: Understanding EMDR
Your Natural Healing Process
Breaking Free from Triggers
The Three-Pronged Approach: Working with the Past, Present, and Future
Chapter 4: The Dos and Don’ts of EMDR
Recognizing Your Limits
Knowing Your Goals and Expectations
Embracing Your EMDR Experience
Keeping an Open Mind
Chapter 5: Your History in a Nutshell
Identifying Where You’ve Been
Finding the Good in Your Story
Your Future Goals
Understanding Your Patterns
Chapter 6: Getting to Know Bilateral Stimulation
Discovering Why Bilateral Stimulation Matters
Experiencing Different Types of Bilateral Stimulation
How You Will Use Bilateral Stimulation
Part 2: Utilizing EMDR Basic Preparation Skills
Chapter 7: Building a Sense of Calm
Creating Your Calm, Peaceful Place
Applying Your Calm, Peaceful Place
Addressing Barriers to Feeling Calm
Working through Intrusive Thoughts
Chapter 8: Creating Ways to Contain Your Emotions
Identifying Your Container
Using Your Container
Feeling “Stuck” When Using Your Container
Discovering Other Uses for Your Container
Chapter 9: Finding Your Internal Supports
Introducing Your Restoration Team
Creating Your Restoration Team
Working with Difficulties with the Exercise
Part 3: The Clinician’s Guide to Desensitizing and Reprocessing
Chapter 10: Identifying the Focus of an EMDR Session
Working through the EMDR Assessment Phase
Identifying the Target and Its “Worst Part”
Finding the Meaning You Assign to Your Experiences
Noticing How Your Targeted Issue Affects You
Wrapping Up Your EMDR Assessment
Chapter 11: Where the Magic Happens: Embracing Discovery and Change
Understanding Free Association
Moving through Difficult Moments
Knowing Your Mile Markers of Progress
Installing New, Positive Associations
Closing Your Session
Chapter 12: Getting Past Blocks and Setbacks
Identifying Your Stuck Points
Identifying Your Wounded Parts
Using Interweaves
Chapter 13: Working with Incomplete Processing
When You Don’t Get All the Way Through
Resuming Your EMDR after an Incomplete Session
Chapter 14: Using Restricted Processing for Acute Stress
Responding to Immediate Triggers
Setting Up Your Modified Session
Carrying Out the Restricted Process
Part 4: Addressing Trauma Fragmentation and Working with Your Inner Parts
Chapter 15: Understanding Fragmentation within Trauma
Noticing the Effects of Fragmentation
Recognizing the Many Aspects of the Self
Chapter 16: Befriending Your Inner Parts
Embracing All of Yourself
Exploring Your Positive Parts of Self
Creating Your Own Place of Acceptance
Recognizing Your Own Hero’s Journey
Targeting Your Challenging Parts
Chapter 17: Working with Childlike Parts
Reparenting Your Inner Child
Updating the Younger You
Chapter 18: Softening the Inner Protectors
Dealing with Reactivity: Is This Really You?
Getting to Know Your Protectors
Chapter 19: Discovering Your Authentic Self
Rediscovering Your Lost Self
Becoming Self-Led
Part 5: Targeting Specific Individual Struggles
Chapter 20: Using Affect Tolerance to Manage Physical Symptoms of Distress
Understanding Your Body’s Reaction to Triggers
Using Distancing to Safely Feel
Decreasing Triggers in Your Body
Chapter 21: Addictive and Compulsive Disorders
Looking at Your Addictive and Compulsive Tendencies
Anchoring Yourself Back to Reality
Cultivating a Healthy, Sober You
Chapter 22: Sleep Disturbances and Nightmares
Discovering How Trauma Affects Your Sleep
Managing Sleep Disturbances
Part 6: The Part of Tens
Chapter 23: Ten Cool Things You Can Do with EMDR
Getting Your Brain Regions in Sync
Containing and Changing Your Feeling State
Creating Meaning in Your Life
Accessing Your Subconscious
Moving through Setbacks
Addressing Acute or Recent Traumas and Stressors
Targeting Pain and Physical Issues
Treating Addiction
Improving Sleep and De-Stressing
Working with Grief, Eating Disorders, and More
Chapter 24: Ten Myths about Trauma
Myth: Only Life-Threatening or Horrific Events Can Be Traumatic
Myth: If It Was Really That Bad, You Wouldn’t Talk About It
Myth: You Should Remember Everything
Myth: People with Trauma Become Mentally Ill
Myth: Trauma Has to Happen to You Directly
Myth: Trauma Impacts Only Weak People
Myth: Trauma Impacts Only Your Brain
Myth: People Exposed to the Same Type of Trauma Will Experience It the Same
Myth: You Can Have Trauma Only if You Remember the Actual Event
Myth: You Should Be Able to Move On from Trauma Quickly
Index
About the Author
Advertisement Page
Connect with Dummies
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 2
TABLE 2-1 Normal versus Traumatic Memories
List of Illustrations
Chapter 6
FIGURE 6-1: Regions of the brain.
FIGURE 6-2: Click the Start BLS Session button to get started.
FIGURE 6-3: Set the dot movement speed to make it comfortable but challenging.
FIGURE 6-4: The Auditory tab offers many sound options for bilateral stimulatio...
Chapter 20
FIGURE 20-1: The stress response.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Begin Reading
Index
About the Author
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EMDR For Dummies®
Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com
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Introduction
Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (what a mouthful!) is more commonly known as EMDR. It’s a treatment modality that was specifically designed to target and help heal trauma, but it can alleviate many other mental health concerns as well, and even assist with managing stress, chronic pain, and other challenges.
EMDR uses bilateral stimulation, which alternately stimulates the left and right sides of your brain using your own eye movements, or through sound or touch. In case this technique sounds odd or even “woo-woo,” bilateral stimulation mimics something your brain does every time you sleep deeply. It engages your brain in the same type of processing that occurs naturally, during the REM sleep cycle, and since its beginnings in the late 1980s, EMDR’s use and therapeutic value throughout the world has been demonstrated by extensive research.
Trauma can and very often does disrupt the brain’s natural and essential processing, locking some aspects of you into “survival mode” and unhelpful coping strategies. In EMDR For Dummies, you discover how these ways of coping, originally meant to protect you, can keep you “stuck,” even after you’ve tried seemingly everything to move beyond your pain or unwanted behaviors.
The purpose of EMDR is to get your brain back on track and functioning more adaptively, helping it to access and reprocess negative memories and beliefs, unlocking the key to change and healing. But EMDR is not just about dealing with effects from the past. EMDR For Dummies reveals how EMDR work can also empower you to redefine and meet present and future challenges as well. I strongly encourage you to use this book in conjunction with your own clinical treatment with a highly trained EMDR practitioner.
Foolish Assumptions
Dear reader, I am so glad that you are here and wanting to learn more about yourself and the treatment modality of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. In writing this book, I’ve made a few assumptions about you, the reader. I know you’re not a dummy; you’re reading this book because you want answers and a better, easier understanding of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. You probably already have some basic knowledge of mental health, trauma, and therapy. You may even already be an EMDR practitioner and have picked up this book as a tool to use with clients. Whatever your reason for reading this book, I want you to know that it will provide you with a clear, easy-to-read and easy-to-learn approach to this unique therapy modality!
For anyone considering undergoing EMDR, I want to stress the importance of not using this book alone. I strongly recommend using it in conjunction with your own psychotherapy with a trained EMDR practitioner. I hope that you will use this book as a guide for understanding ways to help you navigate and heal from traumatic or stressful events in your life. Finally, keep in mind that this is not a one-size-fits-all approach. This modality may resonate with you, or it may not; whatever the case, just know that you deserve options and can choose what works best for you. I commend you for your efforts in healing and taking back your life!
About This Book
As with all For Dummies guides, you don’t have to read this book from start to finish but can skip around as you like, according to what interests you. For an understanding of the basis of EMDR and what reprocessing looks like, see Part 1. Part 2 assists you with establishing resourcing exercises to draw on throughout your EMDR journey and even outside your EMDR sessions, which can be used independently by you. Part 3 is for taking a close-up look at working with the wounds of trauma, as well as the growth and healing from it, and this part may be of particular interest to you if you’re considering becoming an EMDR practitioner or have certain specific issues to address. Part 4, the Part of Tens, zooms in on ten ways EMDR is beneficial and dispels ten of the myths surrounding trauma.
In addition to all the regular text and step-by-step exercises in this book, you’ll also see the following:
Sidebars:
These are shaded boxes of text that give you some additional insight into a topic mentioned in the main text.
Web addresses:
In the print book, web addresses may break across two lines. If you’re reading this book in print and want to visit one of these web pages, simply key in the web address exactly as it appears in the text, with no spaces, as though the line break doesn’t exist. If you’re reading this as an e-book, just click the web address to go directly to the web page. A web link in the e-book looks like this:
www.dummies.com
.
Icons Used in This Book
I’ve used little pictures, or icons, in the margins when I want to call your attention to some point in particular, as follows:
This icon means you may find the text next to it of extra interest, or it mentions an additional idea worth trying.
Always read this information. This icon indicates that it’s of vital importance to you.
I use this icon to reinforce particular takeaways or information that I want you to be sure to note and keep in mind.
Beyond the Book
In addition to the material in the print or e-book you’re reading now, this product comes with some access-anywhere goodies on the web. Check out the free Cheat Sheet for internal resourcing exercises that you can practice, with or without bilateral stimulation, for reducing stress and anxiety and helping you to be more present. To get this Cheat Sheet, simply go to www.dummies.com and search for “EMDR For Dummies Cheat Sheet” in the Search box.
Where to Go from Here
If you’re totally new to EMDR, I recommend that you start with Chapter 1, and keep going through Part 1 if you want to get a thorough sense of EMDR’s purpose and methods. Move around from there as your curiosity or needs take you. If you’re considering embarking on EMDR work, see the end of Chapter 1 for recommendations on finding a skilled EMDR practitioner, which is a necessary step. EMDR processing is recommended to be done only with a trained EMDR practitioner.
Part 1
Getting Started with EMDR
IN THIS PART …
Find out what trauma is and how EMDR can help.
Get to know your brain and how it responds to stress and trauma.
Discover how EMDR works.
Explore the dos and don’ts of EMDR and other important considerations.
Find out how to identify your patterns of behaviors and your strengths, and discover how your past has influenced you both positively and negatively.
Get introduced to bilateral stimulation and why it is an important part of EMDR.
Chapter 1
Trauma Is Real and EMDR Can Help
IN THIS CHAPTER
Recognizing trauma
Introducing EMDR
Taking at look at how EMDR can help you
Trauma has become one of the many mental health catch phrases of the century. It is mentioned and talked about everywhere you look. Heightened awareness of this condition is a positive development, but it can also lead to confusion and misconceptions. What, actually, is trauma? And how do you know whether the term trauma applies to your own experience? It is rare in today’s world for anyone to be able to evade experiencing some type of trauma within their lifetime. Whether you are trying to explore your own trauma or identify whether it’s genuinely an aspect of your own experience, you can benefit from knowing how to handle traumatic or even merely stressful events in your life. Knowledge about EMDR treatment can help you find answers you’re seeking.
Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR, is a treatment modality that is specifically designed to target and help heal trauma, but it can alleviate many other mental health concerns as well.
This chapter introduces you to how this book explores the term trauma and the different ways that trauma can show up in your life. The chapter also provides an overview of the implications of EMDR and how you can use it to reduce the impact of stressors and trauma on your well-being.
Trauma Is Everywhere
It seems as though trauma is inescapable today. If you take a look around, remnants of trauma seem to be everywhere. People see trauma through many different lenses and explain it in many different ways, however, and this multifaceted view of trauma can make understanding it on a deeper, more individual level challenging. It can be hard to determine whether trauma is something that has impacted you. Keep reading to explore what trauma really is.
Recognizing trauma in your life
When big, tragic examples of trauma are all around you in the media and in life, you might shy away from identifying your own experiences as traumatic. It’s easy to compare your experience to those types of events and downplay the impact of your own life events.
Maybe you have associated trauma only with major negative life experiences, such as abuse or acts of violence, or believed it to be specific to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, trauma arises from many more conditions than just horrific, catastrophic events. Trauma can be an accumulation of different experiences that compound. Following are some attributes of trauma you may not be aware of:
Trauma can be big or small.
Trauma impacts everyone differently.
Trauma is more than a disorder.
Trauma is not just about the event you experience but also all the ways in which your body and mind are impacted.
Trauma doesn't always have a beginning, middle, or an end.
Trauma doesn't have to be a huge, catastrophic event; it can be a series of small injuries.
Gabor Maté, a well-known expert in the field of trauma, describes trauma in his book The Myth of Normal (2022) as being an automatic response and reaction to adverse experiences in life. He goes on to explain that trauma isn’t just what happens to you, but also what happens inside you. Although this is just one way to think of trauma, it calls attention to the fact that trauma is more than just something we experience, but is something that also impacts how we feel and function internally. So as you are considering whether you have endured trauma, keep in mind that it is about the impact it has on you, both psychologically and physically.
Following is a helpful definition to consider when you are exploring trauma in your life:
Trauma is anything that negatively impacts yourself, others, or the world around you.
Think about this a little more deeply. Trauma can be anything that negatively impacts your view of yourself and your trust in yourself. Trauma also involves the loss of trust in others, and the perception of the world around you as threatening and dangerous. For now, just begin to consider some of the ways you feel negatively toward yourself, others, and the world around you. What do you find? Are these issues in your life that you would like to resolve or whose impact you’d like to reduce? If so, you are in the right place!
Taking back your life
After you identify and begin to learn more about the trauma in your life, finding hope is crucial. You need to know, right now, that you can take back your life and create the life that you want. Having the life you want is possible. Healing is available for you, even if you have never known a healthy, fulfilled life. Despite what traumatic or stressful things you have faced, it is never too late for you. It will take some work, as many good outcomes do. The work is messy, imperfect, and raw, but if you can embrace this aspect of your healing journey, you can take back your life.
Negative life experiences do not need to predetermine the rest of your life. You have already suffered enough. EMDR work isn’t about reliving the difficult experiences you have endured, or merely acquiring some coping skills. It is about doing real, hard, vulnerable work. And if you choose to do so, you will rid yourself of the negative influences that these experiences have created and truly step into the life that you want. Keep in mind that if you have a tendency to avoid this vulnerable work, that, too, can be a trauma response.
How EMDR Can Be an Option for Treating Trauma
If you have struggled to find things that work for you along your road to healing, EMDR may be a solution for you. Not only is it known for its rapid effects, it is also one of the most researched and evidence-based treatment modalities that exists worldwide for treating trauma and other mental health issues, as indicated by the originator of EMDR, Francine Shapiro, in a recent edition of her book Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (2019).
If you feel as though you run into the same issues over and over in your life, or can’t seem to get past certain problematic beliefs and behaviors, you are not alone. These kinds of blocks are common for people who have experienced trauma, and traditional forms of talk therapy can’t always do the trick of getting you back to living life the way you want. EMDR is different from traditional talk therapy.
So, what is EMDR?
Although the spelled-out version of EMDR — eye movement desensitization and reprocessing — is a mouthful and sounds like a long-winded, science-y term, EMDR is actually quite simple in its approach for you as the client.
Typically, the reference to eye movements throws people because it can make this modality sound weird, woo-woo, or hokey. But fear not: EMDR is based on neurobiology, with extensive research backing its therapeutic value. (You can find out more about the basis for EMDR in Chapter 6.) The purpose of EMDR is to get your brain functioning more adaptively, helping it to process and access memories and beliefs that are related to your past negative experiences and increase your ability to use more helpful, adaptive information within your brain.
Sometimes the effects of our traumatic experiences get stuck in a loop because the brain doesn’t know what to do with them, which leads to negative beliefs about ourselves, heightened emotional and body responses, intrusive thoughts and memories, and other symptoms. These loops become our automatic responses when we’re triggered, and we can get stuck in them (cue the panic attacks and nightmares!). Our brains and bodies think they need to be in this loop to keep us safe.
EMDR helps to break up this loop by disengaging the trauma-response associations your brain and body have made, increasing access to more adaptive thoughts, emotions, and self-beliefs. This process can result in finding resolution for your traumatic experiences. EMDR helps your nervous system to truly feel and believe that you are safe in the present and no longer in that traumatic experience.
The eye movement aspect refers to the use of bilateral stimulation, a nonintrusive, gentle approach that typically can involve sound or touch as well, to engage your brain in the same type of processing that it performs during your Rapid Eye Movement (REM) cycle of sleep. (I explain bilateral stimulation in detail in Chapter 6 and demonstrate its use throughout the subsequent chapters.)
REM sleep is the time when your brain does a lot of its processing, or making sense of information from what it has experienced throughout the day. EMDR helps your brain to engage in this same process but in a conscious manner so that you can work through problematic, “stuck” beliefs and emotional patterns that your brain may not get to fully finish processing during REM sleep. You can find out more about REM sleep in Chapter 6.
EMDR and mental health
The mental health landscape continues to change and evolve, and knowing what therapeutic approach will be the most helpful to clients can be tricky. EMDR is known for its effectiveness in treating not only PTSD and trauma but also a variety of other mental health disorders. Research has demonstrated EMDR’s efficacy for a myriad of problems, including depression, anxiety, substance use, impulse-control disorders, and more.
How EMDR can help you
If you are desperate for answers and yearning for help and true, lasting healing, EMDR is where you should start. When bad things have happened in your life, their impact can disrupt the proper functioning of your brain, leaving you in a highly stressed and fearful state. You can become “stuck” in these experiences and their details, and unable to move past them. EMDR can help you move these negative memories, thoughts, and feelings from the forefront of your mind to a different part of your brain so that you can get back to living the life you want!
How EMDR differs from talk therapy
In contrast to many traditional forms of talk therapy, EMDR puts you in the driver’s seat of your treatment and helps you connect with your experience. You will experience what EMDR practitioners call a free association process, which is similar to some hypnosis theory. However, hypnosis involves going into a trance-like state but EMDR does not. You’re fully aware of what is taking place in EMDR.
EMDR helps you to make sense of thoughts and memories that were once confusing or negative and replace them with positive, more meaningful insights. The best part? You cannot do EMDR “wrong,” meaning that your skilled EMDR practitioner will guide you through your experiences in a way that works best and is individual to you, rather than making you follow a rigid, one-size-fits-all approach.
Not only does EMDR help you work through mental challenges and reduce the impact that trauma has on your emotions and thought processes, it also tends to improve your physical symptoms. People often report that they feel healthier, stronger, and more energized after using EMDR as a treatment method. Besides helping your overall health improve, EMDR can reduce recurring cycles of thoughts and behaviors, and eliminate the need to talk through the intense, disturbing details of your life events. You may find a freedom that is unmatched by other forms of therapy you may have tried.
Lasting changes you can see
One of the most remarkable aspects of EMDR is its lasting effects for people who have used it in their healing. EMDR has been shown to improve a client’s overall well-being in as little as a few sessions, with results lasting for months and sometimes years after treatment. Keep in mind that EMDR is not a quick-fix solution; it requires your commitment and full engagement to be successful. But if you fully invest in your treatment and work with a skilled EMDR practitioner, you stand a very good chance of finding satisfying results.
Many people report that they notice a reduction in triggers (triggers are explained in Chapter 3), more control over their thoughts, a better ability to manage and handle their emotions, and so many more improvements. As you begin your own EMDR journey, I challenge you to begin noticing the changes and improvements that you find in your day-to-day life. You may be truly amazed by the healing power of EMDR.
Working with a Skilled EMDR Practitioner
Finding the right practitioner along your healing journey is essential. You need a compassionate, highly trained EMDR companion who can walk with you throughout your process of healing. Keep in mind that the layperson and some variety of professionals in this field may not have specific training related to trauma or EMDR.
When wanting to use EMDR in your own therapeutic work, it is imperative that you consider the following:
Training:
Find out what the professional’s experience and education are as related to trauma and, most important, their training related to EMDR. To be fully trained and able to utilize EMDR, practitioners must receive approximately five full days of training, including practice opportunities, ongoing consultation, and continued consultation to qualify for certification in EMDR.
Experience:
Find out what the professional’s experience in using EMDR is and whether they use resourcing skills (you can literally ask this). If they do not know what resourcing skills are, you should look for another professional to work with because these are among the most important aspects of EMDR that lead to greater success within treatment.
If the practitioner you are looking to work with does not meet both of these requirements, you are better served to look elsewhere. EMDR is an advanced clinical skill that takes a lot of practice and ongoing education; it is not something that can simply be learned by reading a book or just watching videos, and it should never be done independently without the expertise of a trained professional.
Chapter 2
Getting to Know Your Brain on Trauma
IN THIS CHAPTER
Taking a look at a few brain basics
Understanding why you react and respond the way you do
Regaining harmony in your brain and life
Your brain is a complicated, intricate part of you. Your brain is the hard drive for your entire operating system and manages everything from your thoughts and feelings to breathing, movement, temperature, and all the other processes in your mind and body.
Understanding how your brain is impacted when trauma occurs helps you see why it has been difficult for you to move past certain events and issues in your life. Learning about a few brain basics will make EMDR easier to comprehend and make your experience go much smoother. It also helps you understand your reactions to stressors and why EMDR can help you regain balance and harmony in your life, as this chapter explains.
Why Do I Do That?
Trying to figure out why you feel or act the way you do can generate a lot of misunderstanding and mistaken assumptions. Maybe you have believed that some of your thoughts and behaviors will never change because they are hardwired parts of you.
When you experience trauma, your brain has a chemical response and reaction. In an effort to keep you safe, your brain begins to adapt to what you have been through. Suddenly the way in which you see and function in the world is different, and you begin to notice that you view the world through a much different lens than you had previously. You may find yourself questioning the degree of safety all around you, or spotting threats and danger everywhere.
You may have never considered how some of your responses to people or events relate to your experiences of trauma, especially if you have endured painful, chaotic, or stressful circumstances for most of your life. When you have never had the opportunity to feel emotionally or physically safe, you can’t know what it’s like to act or respond in a different manner.
Whatever your background is, the stress response is a natural part of your brain’s protective system. The following section takes a deeper dive into your stress response.
Understanding your stress response
Your brain and body have deeply encoded responses to highly stressful events or experiences. Your brain secretes chemicals that give you a surge of energy to help you prepare to protect yourself from threats. Two of the main chemicals are adrenaline and cortisol, which increase your blood sugar, suppress your digestive system, increase your heart rate and blood pressure, and make it hard for insulin to work properly. Normally your system re-regulates and balances itself after the stress passes. However, sometimes your system remains under stress and continues to secrete these chemicals, disrupting the way your body functions and keeping you under stress.
Although the initial response to stress or a threat is designed to aid you in times of trouble, unresolved trauma can disrupt this natural process of protection, leaving you overreactive or more sensitive to particular stressors.
You can think of your stress response in basic terms as your fight/flight/freeze response.
Ongoing stress can also lead to additional chemical changes in mood and negative thoughts. As a result, you may find yourself with common reactions such as
Mood swings
Isolating or avoidance
Dissociating or becoming easily overwhelmed
Being easily startled or jumpy
Heightened irritability or anger
Anxiety or depression
Turning more frequently to high-risk or numbing-out behaviors (alcohol, drugs, sex, shopping, food, spending, video games, and others)
Having difficulty focusing
Identifying some of these stress responses can make you feel crazy or out of control. Remember, these are just normal symptoms that have been caused by abnormal circumstances in your life. Recognizing the impact of these chemical changes can help you to better understand the internal systemic changes that occur in your brain and body and hopefully help you to feel less out of whack.
Reacting versus remembering
Besides the key chemical changes that your body experiences, high levels of stress also change the way in which you remember and form memories. When stress occurs, your body and brain become more concerned with surviving, which is exhibited in reacting. Reacting helps ensure survival, because if you are not quick to respond, greater threats may ensue. When you are in a balanced state, however, with no impending threats, your brain and body function more holistically and can take in information from all kinds of different sources, thus leading to the ability to form and store long-term memories.
In order for long-term memories to fully form and take hold, you need your brain working in synchronicity. In other words, you need all necessary areas of the brain working harmoniously together rather than opposing one another, which can happen with traumatic experiences.
Stress can enhance certain memories while inhibiting the formation of others. Stress also impacts the way these memories are stored and remembered. When traumatic and stressful events occur, the details can become stored in your senses.
People often mistakenly assume that you have to experience a similar situation to a past trauma to be triggered, or suffer an intense emotional reaction. Although this can be true at times, you can also be set off by sensory details associated with a difficult event. When you have this type of post-traumatic stress response, your body believes that it is experiencing a real threat, even if one isn’t actually occurring in that moment. This is why it can be common for those with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or trauma to sometimes have memory issues. Your brain is more focused on keeping you safe in the moment and recording those certain, very specific elements of your trauma with keen precision (such as the sound of a crash, the smell of the rubber tires, the look on someone’s face).
When you go through trauma and stress, you will be prone to react instead of remember, meaning that your body will be more concerned about protecting you.
Table 2-1 lists some important differences between normal memories and stress/trauma memories.
TABLE 2-1 Normal versus Traumatic Memories
Normal Memories
Stressful or Traumatic Memories
Adaptable and can change
Rigid and inflexible
Are typically stored in your long-term memory network, and feel more distant, like a photograph
Are typically stored in your senses and are more vividly experienced as if they are actually happening in the moment
Feel as if they happened in the past
Feel as if they are being re-experienced
Have a beginning, middle, and end and can be recalled as if telling a story
Tend to be more fragmented and disorganized
The differences between long-term memories and stressful or traumatic memories show you why you may have difficulty recalling certain memories, as well as why some memories stand out more than others.
Understanding the importance of your prefrontal cortex
The normal human brain functions harmoniously, meaning that both hemispheres of your brain communicate and work together. One of the most important parts of your brain is your prefrontal cortex, which is located behind your forehead and controls the following functions:
Helps you with decision making and planning
Enables concentration, logic, and focus
Aids in regulating your thoughts, behaviors, and emotions
Allows you to utilize intellect and emotion
You can see from this list why the prefrontal cortex is so important to you. This is the part of the brain from which you want to operate 90 percent of the time. When your brain operates this way, it is functioning in a holistic, whole-brain manner.
When trauma or stress occur, your prefrontal cortex is not as accessible to all incoming information as it is when you’re calm, and your brain becomes more focused on immediate responses to whatever the perceived or actual threat is that you are experiencing. This can result in an inability to access the essential functions of this region of your brain, leaving you to react in a more emotional, knee-jerk way. Your ability to make calm, rational decisions is impaired and you operate from a place of sheer survival and urgency.
In a feedback loop with the prefrontal cortext is the cerebellum (which is at the back of the brain and is involved with muscle memory and coordination of movement and balance). When our heightened trauma response is repeated, and especially when it is reinforced by our survival, this trauma response gets stored into that muscle memory area and becomes even more automatic, almost like going on autopilot. Think of how people say “it’s just like riding a bike.” This idea applies to trauma reactions, too; they eventually get stored in the brain, guided by the cerebellum, as useful and even rigid “rules” or as a “script” for how we will respond to future triggering events.
Survival came first
In the developing human being, the prefrontal cortex is the last part of the brain to fully mature. When you are born, it’s your survival reflexes, or your fight/flight/freeze responses, that are ever present and critical in ensuring your existence in the world.
And this makes sense, right? Human babies enter the world dependent on others for survival. Others have to meet their basic needs in order for them to thrive and survive. This region of the brain allows the baby to alert others of their needs through crying and other physiological responses.
Your left and right hemisphere and frontal lobe will continue to grow and function as they are engaged and used.
Your brain grows and develops the same way as muscles do in your body and takes anywhere from your mid- to late 20s to fully mature.
Staying stuck in fight/flight/freeze
The more you use and exercise your muscles, the more they grow and develop. For your muscles to reach their optimal development and to be strengthened, you have to utilize them. The brain works the same way.
So if you are born into a home with a lot of chaos and ongoing trauma, such as abuse, violence, neglect, and instability, your brain is stuck operating from your fight, flight, and freeze response. When this occurs, you do not have experiences that activate the left and right hemisphere or your frontal lobe, which is important for learning and adapting. As a result, your brain just learns to respond and stay in its automatic survival part because it does not perceive that you are safe, and perhaps you often weren’t.
When you are in fight, flight, or freeze response, your brain is not operating holistically, and your prefrontal cortex is “offline.”
Getting your prefrontal cortex back online, or functioning in harmony and balance, will benefit you greatly, and believe it or not, getting back to that state is possible.
How to Get Your Brain Working in Harmony
To get your brain out of your stress response, you have to get your brain and body grounded and feeling safe. You can accomplish this through a variety of techniques: deep breathing, relaxation or meditation, physical activity, and positive social interactions. Getting your brain back online is imperative in order for you to heal and to fully work through some of the trauma that you have experienced.
Simple breathing exercises and relaxation techniques are a good starting point for moving out of your stress response. Keep in mind that even these simple exercises can feel challenging and difficult. Stick with it. Exercises like these won't take away your trauma but can help you manage your symptoms.
When you have experienced a great deal of trauma and have had limited experiences feeling safe in your body or surroundings, you may feel more emotional or activated when trying basic breathing and regulation techniques. If you have this experience, seek additional support from your therapist or EMDR practitioner.
Your brain has the amazing ability to create new neural pathways and be stimulated to use all its parts rather than quickly revert back to your stress response. You can start to heal and help your brain function holistically and to navigate these triggers more easily. EMDR is an approach that helps this healing. One of the essential features of EMDR is the bilateral stimulation that is involved in this therapy.
Bilateral stimulation and your brain
You can find out much more about how EMDR uses bilateral stimulation in Chapter 6; for now, I explain why bilateral stimulation is used in EMDR and how it helps your brain get regulated.
In healthy brains, both hemispheres of the brain work together in synchronicity. After trauma occurs, communication among different brain regions can become “stuck,” leaving you operating from survival responses, and not fully engaging all parts of your brain. Bilateral stimulation is a method that can help motivate your brain.
Bilateral means two-sided, and bilateral stimulation means to affect or stimulate both sides. In EMDR, the purpose of bilateral stimulation is to foster connection between both sides of your brain and stimulate the flow of communication between them.
How the breath can help you calm down
One of the easiest, most efficient ways to calm yourself when in a state of stress is through the practice of mindful breathwork. By changing the way that you breathe can stimulate your brain and body to calm down and relax. You will be using a lot of breathwork within EMDR. The breath will be used in all of the skills that you learn as well as when you begin your EMDR processing. Including the breath in your EMDR work will help you to become more mindful of your breath and how your body responds to the breath.
You can find out more about the brain and body connection in Chapter 20.
Having some basic breathing skills that can help you calm you down will be helpful at the beginning of your EMDR journey. Breathing exercises can be a useful skill to implement if you run into overwhelming emotions or high levels of distress within EMDR. Following are some basic breathwork exercises to try:
Nasal breathing:
Push down on your left nostril with one finger to close it, and then slowly inhale and exhale through your right nostril. Then reverse positions to inhale and exhale through your left nostril while keeping the right side closed. Do this back and forth for several rounds.
Diaphragmatic breathing:
Place your hands above your head and take a round of seven deep breaths, in through your nose and out through your mouth.
3-4-5 breathing:
Inhale for a count of 3 seconds, hold for 4 seconds, and exhale for 5 seconds.
To regain a sense of calm, you can use any of the preceding exercises or any other type of breathwork that you are comfortable with. I highly recommend that you use what feels right and helpful to you!
Creating meaning from your experiences
The brain, it is said, is a meaning-making machine; everyone seeks to find and create meaning in their life and the world around them. Meaning is the lens through which you see your world and experiences. Your brain is hard-wired to make sense of and process all your experiences, big and small alike, and the meaning you give to such experiences is influenced by how you come to understand circumstances and events in your life as well as how threatening an event or situation feels to you.
Trauma can change the meaning that you assign to your experiences. Within EMDR, you will be seeking to explore and ascertain new, positive meanings to give to your life experiences, both good and bad.
Considering your perceptions
As you come to find and make meaning in your life, you will find that your perceptions play a large role in this process. Your perception is influenced by your five senses and the mental impression you make of them. Your brain interprets your sensations and makes and assigns meaning accordingly.
When considering the perceptions that you have, it can be useful to consider the following:
What emotions may be influencing your perception?
For example, “I feel scared; therefore, I must not be safe.”
What biases or beliefs do you carry that influence your perception of things around you?
For example, “I can't trust [a certain gender] because they have hurt me in the past” or “I have to be of a certain weight to be accepted by others.”
What past experiences may be impacting how you perceive things in your life?
For example, “I was in a car accident, so driving will always be unsafe” or “I struggled to pass high school, so I must not be good at learning.”
As you begin to utilize EMDR, you will find yourself considering different perceptions and perspectives of situations from your life. In addition, you will also be looking at the perceptions that you carry about yourself.
Finding new meaning in your life
One of the most profound aspects of EMDR is the new meaning that it can enable you to begin to find and create about yourself and your life. Despite what you have believed about yourself or the negative associations you have made in your life, how you feel and what you believe about yourself can change and improve.
Your brain has the miraculous ability to change and adapt as it learns and takes in new information. Age doesn’t matter; even an old dog really can learn new tricks! EMDR is transformative in the way it supports your brain’s learning and stimulates and reorganizes existing neural networks. As you continue your journey forward and learn more about EMDR, consider what meaning you want to take on in your life and about yourself.
Chapter 3
Understanding EMDR
IN THIS CHAPTER
Understanding the basics of EMDR
Discovering how EMDR can identify and help reduce triggers
Recognizing the importance of targeting the past, present, and future in your healing work
The name Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (better known as EMDR) is a mouthful. Despite the scientific, jargony sound of its name, EMDR as a therapy is not as technical as the name implies. Don’t get me wrong: It can be intense and at times even feel overwhelming, but the nature of EMDR is to be healing.
EMDR was developed by Francine Shapiro in 1987. Since then, it has gained immense recognition and is, according to the EMDR International Association (EMDRIA), one of the most researched and evidence-based treatment modalities available for treating trauma and a variety of other mental health disorders.
EMDR is all about reconnecting you to the core of who you are, the good traits and characteristics of yourself that can sometimes be forgotten or hidden away in an effort to protect yourself from the pain you have experienced. EMDR helps to elicit your own natural healing process and uncover these hidden or hard-to-access parts of yourself. The idea of possessing inherent healing processes within yourself may sound too good to be true, but it really isn’t. Tapping into your own strengths, healing your brain and body, and rediscovering yourself truly is possible, and EMDR is one of the tools that can help make these outcomes a reality in your life.
If you have found yourself getting stuck in your healing work or running into continual roadblocks and setbacks that keep you feeling stuck in your life, EMDR may be for you. EMDR has a way of getting around some of these limitations to help move you forward. It can assist you in getting to the root of what is causing some of the difficulties in your life.
Your Natural Healing Process
A primary piece of the EMDR model is adaptative information processing, which is a theory of learning that people are born with a natural ability to heal — not just physically but psychologically as well. This ability is part of your own design for survival.
Your brain has its own adaptive, natural way to heal. Your brain and body are deeply connected and working together. Just as your body has its own natural healing process, your brain goes through its own natural healing process after mental or emotional injuries occur. And just as your body sometimes needs additional resources to help you recover fully from trauma, your brain can also require the same type of support. EMDR is one of those tools that can help you fully heal.
Looking at the eight phases of the EMDR protocol
The EMDR model and standard protocol involves the following eight phases, which you should work through in order and with a trained EMDR practitioner to resume your own natural healing process:
History Taking and Treatment Planning:
Essential for understanding your background and identifying the targets for EMDR therapy. In this phase, you are gathering information about significant events from your past and present.
Preparation:
This phase prepares you for EMDR, establishes rapport with your EMDR practitioner, and teaches self-soothing techniques. It also provides you with a basic understanding of trauma, your brain, and EMDR. During this phase, you learn about bilateral stimulation and other common resourcing and coping skills.
Assessment:
You choose, or target, events or issues that have disturbed or continue to disturb, along with the details of their current impact on you.
Desensitization:
Bilateral stimulation (explained in detail in
Chapter 6
and demonstrated throughout many subsequent chapters) is applied as you engage in a free-association process of the event you are targeting to reduce its intensity.
Installation:
You install a new positive belief about yourself that you want to associate with the event you have been processing.
Body scan:
You focus your awareness on your body to ensure that there is no residual stress that needs to be addressed.
Closure:
At the end of your EMDR session, you discuss what you have learned with your EMDR practitioner and find out what to expect after an EMDR session. You may also return to using some basic grounding or coping skills to help reduce any distress that you may still be experiencing, especially if you don’t get all the way through your EMDR session because of time constraints.
Reevaluation:
This final phase occurs at your next EMDR session, where you talk about any new insights, thoughts, or realizations that you have noticed, while also checking in with the original target from the previous session.
Phases 3–7 typically occur in one session, with a trained EMDR practitioner.
The eight phases of EMDR help you to resume the processing of difficult life experiences while also lessening the impact they continue to exert over you.
Recovering from emotional pain
Unresolved emotional and psychological pain can leave you dysregulated — meaning that you find it difficult to control or manage your feelings and emotions — and cause you to act in ways you don’t want to. This is because trauma can become stuck in your brain and body, almost as though the emotions, memories, or thoughts associated with the trauma are being played on repeat. Because of how your brain and body hold on to these stressful and painful experiences, recovering from them can be extremely difficult.
When unprocessed, or unresolved, traumatic material is in the brain, it is actually stored in an entirely separate network from other long-term memories. We refer to this material as being “maladaptively stored” because it is not helpful for you to carry distressing information in this way. Think of your brain’s memory networks as being like various filing cabinets that are neatly stored and filed away. With trauma memories, this file cabinet has papers falling out all over the place, leaving you feeling confusing and disturbed.
This disarray is not good for your filing system, just as it’s not good for your life to have trauma material stored in a place that’s not adaptive (helpful). As a result of this faulty storage, your brain’s ability to process and work through traumatic experiences can be impaired. Integration, or how experiences are stored in your brain, is an important part of how memories are formed and processed. The goal within EMDR is to help you finish processing and integrating these scattered or traumatic pieces that have become stuck.
