Hello and welcome to episode 50 of the emdrdoctor podcast. Today I am re recording one of the most popular episodes of the podcast, so we are going to explore that first question that people ask me - what actually is EMDR? I am recording it with video this time around so it will be available on Youtube so you can see me as well as hear me, if you feel like doing that.
The podcast is going really well, so thank you to all my listeners, this week we made it to the top 100 in Mental Health podcasts in Australia, which is a bit of an achievement, so a big thank you to everyone who has listened and given me a review or a rating, it really helps to get the podcast out to those who need this information.
So what is EMDR? eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing...
the official response is: EMDR is a powerful, evidence based, structured 8 phase therapy designed for PTSD. The reality is that it is a quirky blend of imagination, science, somatic work, CBT and ACT all rolled up in to this magic weird process that takes your horrific memories and makes them into just something bad that happened to you one time. It can also take your horrific imaginings of the future, from expectations of dread to expectations of excitement.
EMDR is a memory based therapy, not a diagnosis based therapy - so it works across all diagnoses, and goes to the cause of the distress, which is often an incident (or many incidents) which caused us to learn something about ourselves which in turn causes distress and incapacity.
So for example, if I was bullied at high school, it may have been a really distressing time, when I learned that I was useless and unworthy of having friends. In my adult life this may present as social anxiety, with feeling anxious and fearful of going to social occasions, or even agoraphobia with fear of leaving the house. It may present as depression, with feeling low and sad and hopeless, or it may present as OCD, with paying attention to all the details, to control my environment to help reduce those feelings of anxiety and hopelessness. Or it may present as an eating disorder, trying to soothe myself with food or be thin enough for people to like me. So we work on the distress associated with those memories to resolve the symptoms that present as the diagnosis. I will be talking a bit about diagnoses and the ability of EMDR to work across many different diagnoses in a future podcast. But for now, the point that I want to make is that EMDR is a memory based therapy, that works on the distressing memories, so that that distress doesn't have to turn up in our current situation and impeded our current life.
EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing. The Eye movement part is an important aspect of EMDR - often we use a pointer, or a light bar, for the client to follow with their eyes from left to right, left to right. we use some sort of bilateral stimulation to help the memory seperate from the emotion that is attached to the memory. When we talk about bilateral stimulation, we are referring to anything that takes the conscious attention from one side to the other, from left to right and back again. This is usually eye movements, but can be other physical movements like tapping left and right, or rocking, or even sounds through stereo headphones. The bilateral stimulation just needs to engage the brain in alternate left and right attention. The purpose of this left and right brain activity is to help release the memory and allow it to be reprogrammed in to a less distressing version.
When something bad happens to us, that is outside of our capacity to cope, our brain stores the memory in the limbic system, which is the emotional part of the brain. The memory is held often as a picture like a photo or polaroid, or video, so the visual aspect, associated with other senses - the smell, the sounds, the physical sensation, the emotion, and the thoughts that we were having about the situation and ourselves. When we are under stress, the hormones that our bodies make under stress, cause some disruption to the normal brain processes. So if you imagine being in a very stressful situation, the body creates cortisol and adrenaline and noradrenalin, all the fight or flight hormones, and all these hormones act, not only on the body to help us cope with the situation, by running or fighting or whatever we needed to do, but also on the brain, and one of the effects is to hold or freeze that memory or situation, in the short term, emotional part of the brain. That particular situation then doesn't get processed in to long term memory, it stays in short term memory, and is easily and readily activated as if we are reliving that event. So any small trigger, will cause us to reactivate that memory and relive it , as if it is happening right now. This is what happens with PTSD. Other unpleasant things, that aren't particularly traumatic, or are within our capacity to cope, will be allowed to be processed in to the long term memory part of the brain. Like if I was at the supermarket and someone runs in to my ankles with a trolley, which actually did happen to me the other day. It was unpleasant, I didn't like it, but it wasn't traumatic, so if I think about it next week, it will likely be just something that happened last thursday, or was it Friday, or it doesn't actually matter that much. It has been transferred to the long term part of my brain, and doesn't intrude on me unexpectedly. So with traumatic memories, that a\havent been processed properly, What EMDR does, is allow that memory to be reprogrammed and then stored in the long term, less emotional part of the brain, so it can become "Just something bad that happened to me that time" rather than a current crisis. and doesn't need to intrude upon us in our everyday life.
So we do work on memories one by one, but don't worry, if you have had the same thing happen to you a thousand times, we don't have to do an EMDR session for every single time. Memories are held in what we call memory networks, and if we work on one or two or several of those memories int he memory network, then the network becomes weaker and weaker, and eventually all the memories in that network all feel less emotional, less impactful, and they all lose their power.
So today we have covered a little bit about what EMDR does, the bilateral stimulation and how that allows our traumatic memories to become just a thing that happened that time, and a little bit about how memories are consolidated. I hope that's been helpful to you, I will be talking in more detail about some of these things in a future podcast.
I hope thats been helpful, until next time take care, Bye for now.
