Budget EMDR: The Perks of Going on a Walk
I’m halfway through a preliminary training on Eye-Movement and Desensitization Reprocessing, shorthand for EMDR. It is fascinating how integrated and connected our body, mind, and heart all are.
Trauma work, as EMDR and all evidence-based practices contend, is all about finding and safely activating those “stuck” places for them to be safely reprocessed and thereby resolved. And it isn’t just traumas like a natural disaster, a car accident, or veterans returning from a war.
Little “t” traumas, those which are like a paper cut which never stops cutting for years and eventual decades, are more often than not the work that brings people to do trauma work, even though most believe their work to be primarily around anxiety and depression. In fact, usually anxiety and depression serve as helpful messengers around needing a deeper form of relief beyond less anxiousness and less “down” feelings.
EMDR serves as a way to access which previously was inaccessible. Like a flashback scene in tv show or film giving the audience character perspective, EMDR enables “multiple” takes, at multiple angles, and with multiple emphases, all for someone to more accurately interpret what happened to them, how it often wasn’t their fault, and that even if it was, they likely did the best they could.
How does this have to do with going on a walk? Let me show you.
The primary functional thing done in EMDR is biltateral stimulus. Said in non nerdy therapy speaking, this means simply having one’s attention divided between something in the present and something in the past. For example, while describing that memory of the teacher who shamed you in front of your peers, your clinician will have your eyes follow their fingers from side to side, mirroring the sensation occurring while someone is in REM sleep. Essentially, while we do not know scientifically why this is the secret sauce for healthily activating stuck traumatic material, this does, in fact, enable us to go to places we wouldn’t be able to go to.
Enter walking, the budgetary (key word) form of EMDR therapy.
When walking, we are putting one foot out in front of the other. Left foot, right foot. Left foot, right foot. Over and over and over.
When doing this, we can activate a part of our minds that even the greatest therapist sitting across from you can’t quite get to in even the best forms of talk therapy.
Simply put, going for a walk, taking a light jog, riding your bike, etc. most forms of exercise involve some level of bilateral stimulus. It’s not just therapists trying to get themselves off the hook by asking every week “did you exercise?” The evidence is clear; activating our bodies in a rigorous manner, especially when it requires your vision, arms, and legs to pan from side to side has enormous health benefits. They don’t outright cure anxiety and depression but boy are they a good head start.
All this being said and as the title suggests, this is a “cheap” and “value menu” form of self EMDR therapy and does not compare to actual EMDR treatment.
But there’s a reason it’s accepted that our physical bodies store trauma; it’s not a broken brain you’ve inherited or a warped capacity to become dysregulated at the drop of a hat. Our minds worked as they ought to be, bypassing the gross implications of what you experienced. Our hearts lead the “dysregulation charge” in order to warn us of incoming danger.
And our bodies are the key to activating what we can’t get to via a thought experiment or a coping strategy to contain intense feelings.
Walking and other movements, particularly bolstered by EMDR or other trauma-informed therapeutic practices, work in tandem providing us the ability to reprocess and therefore reinterpret what we were unable to before.
Our bodies are meant to heal. That’s why they are the first place we should seek to restore and replenish.