EMDR- What makes it different?

I think we’ve all been there before, or at least heard it said- “therapy doesn’t really do anything” or “how can talking about your problems actually fix them?” or (my personal favorite) “I’m just an anxious person, all I can do is learn to live with it”.

I used to think the same things, and to some extent there can be truth to it. Therapy isn’t a time machine that can undo things we wish we’d never gone through. However, it can help your brain realize that it’s not there anymore. It’s not still in that moment where your body is flushed with adrenaline and you can’t see anything but red.

But again, how can therapy really do that? Because we’ve all told ourselves over and over until we’re blue in the face “just don’t worry about it, it’ll be fine”. And guess what? You’re still worried. Your body still feels worried, and you just can’t talk yourself out of it.

That’s where EMDR is different.

EMDR talks to different areas of the brain than traditional talk therapy does. When you feel anxious about something that you “know” is going to be fine, or you’re depressed during the best day in the sun; it’s not something that you can talk yourself out of, or convince yourself not to feel. It’s in your body, and so we have to talk to the area of the brain that talks to your body.

How EMDR does that is through bilateral stimulation, which is essentially any sort of stimulation that’s right side then left side, right side then left side. This can be through eye movements (which is how it was originally founded, hence the name Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), auditory stimulation through headphones, or tappers that vibrate back and forth in your hands. This back and forth motion is what talks to that area of the brain that houses all the emotion through your body.

How does this actually help though?

Good question. I like to picture it like your brain is a wall of filing cabinets, and each file is memory that’s full of emotions, thoughts, core beliefs, and information about the world. When a file is properly processed, our brain can put it in the right filing cabinet, in the right drawer, in the right order. However, when something deeply emotional, traumatic, or just plain sad happens our brains don’t always know what to do with that file, so it just gets stacked in a big pile in the command center of your brain.

So EMDR comes in like a helper to start looking through the pile of unprocessed memories and sorting them into the correct filing cabinet. Why this works is because our brains are already created to process this way.

Think of REM (dreaming) sleep. It’s called REM for Rapid Eye Movement meaning that while we’re asleep and dreaming of sheep jumping over the moon, our eyes are using bilateral stimulation to move back and forth. That way our brain processes information from the day or weeks before in our dreams is the same way EMDR helps to process “stuck” memories or core beliefs, just inside the therapy office.

Enough with the science, how does this actually help me?

Another good question! When files or memories are unprocessed, then our brain does’t know what to do with that information. It can’t learn from, use, or properly internalize the information like it can if it’s properly processed. So what tends to happen is feelings, thoughts, and beliefs just get recycled over and over without truly dealing with it. This is why you go back to that same relationship that you know isn’t working, or why you may hear the reassurance that you need but it doesn’t actually make you feel any better. It just means your brain needs a little help processing the hard stuff.

EMDR helps you get to the root cause of your anxiety. What event or string of events led to your brain needing to prepare for every potential outcome in order to feel safe? What messages have you heard for so long that have led to a core belief that you can’t handle it? There’s some emotion that your brain is still chewing on that’s feeding a need to feel safe and calm that’s not been met yet. And that’s where EMDR comes in.

It’s not that you’re not trying hard enough, you just need to try something different.

Let’s try EMDR.