EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)
EMDR is a treatment methodology that enables people to heal from the symptoms and emotional distress that are the result of disturbing life experiences.
Unlike talk therapy, the insights clients gain in EMDR therapy result not so much from clinician interpretation, but from the client’s own accelerated intellectual and emotional processes. The net effect is that clients conclude EMDR therapy feeling empowered by the very experiences that once debased them. Their wounds have not just closed, they have transformed. As a natural outcome of the EMDR therapeutic process, the clients’ thoughts, feelings and behavior are all robust indicators of emotional health and resolution—all without speaking in detail or doing homework used in other therapies
What does it entail?
EMDR entails having the client focus on a specific event, problem, or issue and proceeding to methodically identify negative beliefs related to this event, problem, or issue as well as identifying emotions and physical sensations associated with the event, problem, or issue. After this has been sufficiently established and all neuro-networks surrounding this event, problem, or issue are lit up in the client, the clinician proceeds to wave fingers back and forth in front of the client, and the client visually “pushes” fingers back and forth with eyes. This is not hypnosis and the client is in full control at all times. What this does is invoke the brain processing that occurs during the REM cycle of sleep. The client is continually guided by the therapist through what could be called the free association of healing which can come in the form of images, thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Ultimately ending in less and less disturbance in emotions, beliefs, thoughts, and sensations that are associated with a specific event, problem, or issue that was presented. One is liberated from the past and able to live in the present with the ability to acknowledge the past, but not be ruled by it.