Mental Health

EMDR

What you should know and consider before you try it

EMDR, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, “is a psychotherapy developed by Francine Shapiro starting in 1988 in which the person being treated is asked to recall distressing images; the therapist then directs the patient in one type of bilateral stimulation, such as side-to-side eye movements or hand tapping.”

According to the 2013 World Health Organization practice guideline: “This therapy is based on the idea that negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors result from unprocessed memories. The treatment involves standardized procedures that include focusing simultaneously on (a) spontaneous associations of traumatic images, thoughts, emotions and bodily sensations and (b) bilateral stimulation that is most commonly in the form of repeated eye movements.

EMDR is included in several evidence-based guidelines for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) — with varying levels of recommendation and evidence (very low-to-moderate per WHO stress guidelines). As of 2020, the American Psychological Association lists EMDR as an evidence-based treatment for PTSD but stresses that “the available evidence can be interpreted in several ways” and notes there is debate about the precise mechanism by which EMDR appears to relieve PTSD symptoms with some evidence EMDR may simply be a variety of exposure therapy.”

I can tell you from personal experience that for me, EMDR most definitely worked. I was first exposed to EMDR while receiving intensive trauma therapy in Florida. I saw the same therapist every Tuesday at 11am for a year and a half. I got “worse” before I got better.

By worse I mean — night terrors. I would wake up in the middle of the night almost every night and sometimes more than once a night. It was exhausting, to say the least. I would wake up because my face was wet. I had been crying in my sleep. I had no recollection of dreaming. Just crying. I would bolt upright in bed, sucking in air as if from a nightmare. I would wake up because I was ‘ninja fighting’ in my sleep as I called it then. Then there were the times I’d simply wake up screaming.

I would never really know why or what was happening to cause me to go through so much anguish in my sleep. But my therapist explained it to me.

Even if our brains don’t remember what has happened to us, our bodies do all the way down to a cellular level.

So it was not imperative for me to recall and relive every single trauma I had endured. Just so long as my body recalled and processed it once and for all. It’s been a few years since then. I will embark on the EMDR journey again come February. It isn’t always easy to find someone who has been trained and is qualified to perform EMDR. I have a sidearm of sorts this time around. I brought it back into my arsenal as a ‘just in case’ and that’s Trazadone. Created to help smokers stop smoking, they found it to help those who suffer from night terrors. I’ve already talked to my doctor and have a bottle sitting here patiently waiting.

Wish me luck on what will hopefully be me finally detoxing my soul once and for all.