What in the Heck is EMDR: A Brief Summary

EMDR (eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing) is a directive and action-oriented method of working with trauma. When I say “action-oriented,” I mean that EMDR is not “talk oriented.” Said another way, EMDR is much more about a therapist leading you through your own work rather than working together.

The process includes eight distinct phases that for the sake of simplicity I’ll boil down to three: the set-up, the work, and the maintaining of progress.

For set-up, EMDR is similar in most aspects to other therapies. Who are you, what are you wanting help with, the normal thing one comes to therapy for. However, differently than other forms of therapy, there is no homework required. While many forms of homework in other forms of therapy are very valuable, insightful, and effective at producing results, EMDR requires none; all of the work done in sessions is often enough to produce the desired result for the week.

The “set-up” phase then is about aiming our work toward an objective. The objective most useful for EMDR work is trauma, particularly of the past. Trauma can mean single event contexts, like surviving a natural disaster or escaping a car accident. It can also mean ongoing contexts, such as abuse, neglect, and other forms of trauma that might seem to be “little” but add up to equal a lot. Simply put., EMDR enables somebody to reprocess what you weren’t able to healthily process DURING the trauma.

The “work” is about the reprocessing and the famous “tapping,” following a clinician’s fingers, or other stimulation called bilateral stimulation or BLS. Simply put, this enables one to activate a state in your mind normally blocked due to trauma and life circumstances. In action, this means reestablishing yourself in the car “as it crashes” or in the room where abuse happened YET enables you to reprocess it healthily through positive cognitions, such as “I am in control” or “I am important.” Through the stimulation, regulation skills, positive cognitions, and a healthy partnership with your therapist, a client is able to “unstick” previously “stuck” trauma, thereby finding relief steadily over time in the present.

The “maintaining the work” phase is about now extending the skills, reprocessing, and bilateral stimulation toward future or “potential” triggers. These could be imagining the highway where the wreck happened, noticing a person who looks similar to your abuser, and so on. The same steps apply; being led through BLS, your therapist inquiring what you notice as your do the work of BLS, and installing positive cognitions that serve as a counter weight to fears, anxieties, and struggles that normally apply when a trigger appears.

Overall, EMDR works to help you to help yourself in an active way. While the supportive relationship with a therapist is hugely valuable, EMDR equips you to tackle difficult things and is backed by research to assist people in overcoming trauma, both single incidents and ongoing past trauma.