What is EMDR Therapy?

Do you feel trapped by your thoughts and emotions? Are you hoping to find the source of your pain? EMDR therapy could be the answer you’ve been searching for.

You feel as though you’ve been trapped in the same moments for weeks or even months. You experience the same thoughts or images repeatedly, like they’re in charge of your mind. You want to progress, but it’s like your past experiences are holding you back.

You’ve been struggling for a while. Too long. But you can’t quite identify why nothing is working. You feel stuck.

You’ve tried talk therapy, exercise, meditation, and healthy eating. But inside you are in pain. You’re near a breaking point, or maybe it’s the fury, dejection or nervousness that keeps revealing itself. It affects your relationships, work and you just want to feel like you, or a better version of you. Perhaps you’ve checked with your medical provider to discuss your physical symptoms, but everything is physically fine.

No matter how hard you try, it’s not enough. It feels as though you’re confined to the past, but you just can’t get out. It is painful, it’s nerve inducing, and it takes you away from the life you want to live.

Consider how improved your life could be if you had room in your mind to follow your passion, be in the moment, and relax?

Woman looking at beach from above, showing how EMDR can relieve trauma and help people feel more grounded.

The good news is that EMDR could help you!

Most people try EMDR therapy after finding that talk therapy does not fully help in changing their mindset. EMDR is different than other types of traditional therapy that focus on shifting how your thoughts and emotions respond to the past. Instead, EMDR aims to change the way memory is stored in the brain. It varies how painful memories are stowed, offering its users relief from the intensity of symptoms.

You may have heard of EMDR before, but wonder if it’s the right path for you. You may have wanted to try it, but still have queries and worries stopping you. Below are some frequently asked questions regarding EMDR therapy.

What is EMDR therapy?

Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is a recognized, evidence-based treatment used to securely release trauma from the mind and body. When a traumatic event occurs in our life, our brain may get overwhelmed in the moment and as a result it’s not able to store the memory in the correct part of our brain. Because of this, we may continue to relive the memories regularly.

This may sound very technical, so we like to use the following way of explaining how this all works: As a child, it’s likely that at least once you tripped and fell while you were walking, or maybe you lost control of the bike you were riding and fell to the ground. Imagine if you had a video of this happening to you as a child and you watched the video right now – it’s highly unlikely this would cause you to have nightmares of walking or falling off your bike. You probably wouldn’t be triggered when thinking about walking today. But why not - when that happened to you as a child it was pretty scary? The answer is that our brain is designed to know how to deal with upsetting memories by putting them away into the long term memory area of our brain after the incident is over. When a memory is in the long term memory area of our brain, we remember what happened but it doesn’t disturb us – it’s just a memory with little emotional impact on us.

When trauma happens to us, our brain is supposed to process the memory and put it away in the long term memory area of our brain but for a bunch of reasons - including the fact that in the moment of trauma our brain may get overwhelmed and freeze from the shock of the trauma – this doesn’t always happen. When this doesn’t happen the memories are in the forefront of our mind and get triggered easily by any reminder. Our mind is then clouded with memories and thoughts that we relive over and over.

EMDR helps our brain get another chance at putting this memory into the long term memory area of our brain so that we don’t have to live with the emotional impacts of that memory.

A bridge across woods. EMDR therapy can help people recover from the effects of PTSD, leading to a happier and healthier life.

How does EMDR Therapy work?

EMDR is different because, as opposed to normal talk therapy, it does not need you to discuss your trauma in depth. You can share as much or as little as you want. EMDR uses a method called bilateral stimulation to aid the brain re-process disturbing accounts. This allows you to remember traumatic memories without feeling re-traumatized, and to create different habits of thinking about yourself and the traumatic event.

What is bilateral stimulation? This is when we make rapid, back-and-forth eye movements or alternating left-right tapping of our hands and feet. These eye patterns copy the portion of sleep called rapid eye movement (REM), and REM sleep is when the mind processes events from the past.

In short, EMDR helps the brain reprocess trapped memories so that you can live your life without memories from the past popping up and affecting how you feel. As a result, it can help you enhance your self-awareness, improve your self-esteem, and reduce your emotional distress.

Does EMDR work?

EMDR is evidence-based, and recognized for its efficiency. Often, EMDR therapy can achieve in just a few months what traditional talk-therapy may take years to do. In many studies, about 90% of participants with PTSD symptoms described no more symptoms after completing EMDR therapy. Other studies have reliably proven that EMDR treatment is more effective for managing trauma than Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

How does it feel to do EMDR? It’s hard to describe and you need to experience it for yourself to know what it will do for you, but many clients have defined their experience as if they had 1000 pounds of agony, and EMDR helped them to drop about 800 to 900 pounds of that discomfort, and unlocked a whole new world. While every client is different and has their own unique healing experience, in all our years of doing EMDR therapy almost every client of ours who has done EMDR has experienced at least some improvement, with many reporting that the traumatic memory no longer emotionally affects them.

Woman looking at cliff and mountains, showing how EMDR can help people heal from trauma.

How we can help

We are a small Cincinnati based group of therapists that are highly trained in and specialize in using EMDR. We have several therapists on our staff that are trained in EMDR, and we collaborate together to make sure we are using the latest techniques and trainings. We have been fortunate to help hundreds of our clients get past their trauma to where they aren’t emotionally affected anymore by what they have experienced, and you deserve to be able to feel this way as well.

While there are other therapists who are trained in EMDR, one of the things that makes us different from other therapists is that we do not simply rely on our initial EMDR training but rather are constantly learning and growing in our ways to use EMDR effectively. This is important, since EMDR is not just a simple type of therapy that we know all about – instead it is a relatively new therapy and researchers have been discovering different ways of using EMDR that are more effective than what we knew several years ago. This extra knowledge and training becomes even more crucial when dealing with what we call Complex Trauma, or trauma that is complicated and has many layers to it. Having this extra training can be the difference between EMDR therapy being successful or not.

The bottom line is that when you chose to work with us you are working with highly trained professionals who have helped hundreds of people before you, and who will give you the most cutting edge EMDR treatment possible. This greatly increases the chances that you will reach your goals in therapy.

Taking the next step

The most important thing to remember it’s possible to recover from trauma. You can live a life where you’re not affected by what you experienced, even if it’s hard to picture what that would be like. You deserve an opportunity to move beyond your trauma, and EMDR therapy can help you achieve peace of mind and help you get rid you of the painful, emotional triggers.

If you want to put pain behind you and regain your control and security, we would be privileged to help you. You can contact us today for a free phone consultation to see if EMDR therapy is the right approach for you. We hope to hear from you!

Sheldon Reisman is an EMDRIA certified EMDR therapist, and Kelsey Harlow and Hannah Armbruster are trained EMDR therapists.