Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) in Center City, Philadelphia, PA
& Online across PA & NJ
Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is a therapeutic treatment for trauma and anxiety. This technique can help you process upsetting memories, thoughts, and feelings related to the trauma. By processing these experiences, you can work through the trauma and get relief from distressing symptoms.
How EMDR Works
During EMDR, you will focus on a back-and-forth motion (moving your eyes side to side), sound (noise moving between your ears), or tactile sensation (tapping or buzzing on opposite sides of your body).
While this is happening, you focus on a traumatic memory until shifts occur in the way you experience and react to that memory. By recalling traumatic events while devoting attention to the task at hand, you can experience the memory with less intensity (since you are doing two things at once).
Preparing for EMDR
EMDR practitioners take an eight-phase approach to planning and enacting EMDR with their clients.
Client history and treatment planning: In the first phase, you and your therapist will talk about the trauma you want to process and your therapist will determine the first target memory to process
Preparation: During this phase, you and your therapist establish a relationship. You will go over regulation techniques for the ends of sessions and talk about how to care for your emotions between sessions
Assessment: You and your therapist will work together to identify the memory you want to work on “reprocessing” through therapy. This might be a memory that leads to strong feelings of distress when thinking about or being reminded of it. You will be asked to recognize the most intense or important image associated with this memory.
Desensitization: Your therapist will ask you to focus on the memory and the “bilateral stimulation” (this can be tapping on alternate sides of your body yourself or with the use of buzzers that vibrate, through following the therapists fingers or a light bar, or through listening to sounds that alternate back and forth between each ear.
Installation: Your therapist will help you replace the unprocessed traumatic memories with more adaptive, helpful thoughts about yourself, other people, and the world.
Body scan: Your therapist will help you recognize and release any remaining tension in your body.
Closure: Regulation/calming techniques are used to bring you back to a state of equilibrium, and your therapist explains what to expect between sessions.
Reevaluation: You and your therapist review the treatment’s effects and consider additional memories that you may want to process.
Benefits of EMDR
EMDR is an evidence-based, effective treatment for trauma that can result in long-lasting positive effects without making symptoms worse during treatment. Many patients appreciate that it doesn’t require discussion of traumatic experiences and that it works more quickly than techniques such as prolonged exposure therapy. It isn’t uncommon to see meaningful results in just two or three sessions. All in all, EMDR is a safe, constructive way for you and your therapist to work together to heal your trauma.