EMDR, Trauma, and a Chuckle?
Introduction to EMDR and Trauma
Hey there, my name is Matt Taylor, and I am a Licensed Mental Health Counselor in the state of Florida. If you have been anywhere near the field of mental health, or watched any videos on mental health, you have likely heard EMDR mentioned at least once. Yes, it is E M D R, and not EDMR (this has nothing to do with electronic dance music), and this is a therapeutic approach targeted specifically in regard to trauma. If you are new to this, you may be too shy to ask the question, so I’ll just go ahead and explain it. EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.
How Does EMDR Work?
How we explain this has a lot to do with the brain, what happens during REM sleep, and how your eyes are connected to memory. If I were to ask you to remember what you had for breakfast this morning, did your eyes move at all when thinking about it? Did your eyes move around as you were searching for the image? Now if you focus specifically on the image of your breakfast (or whenever you ate last), do your eyes move and lock upward while you are holding the image in your brain? Our eyes will move to specific locations when we search, create, or remember images in our mind. These images may also have a specific emotional connotation tied to it. Traumatic level events will essentially freeze a certain image in our mind and attach specific emotional content, which will then trigger our body to react in order to survive.
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The Brain’s Protective Response
Imagine you are a cave person and you had to fight off a saber-toothed tiger close to its lair. You know that the tiger is gone, but you still can’t bring yourself to explore this new cave. Your brain associated it with danger and now expects danger to happen again, so much so that you tense up, your heart races, and you get ready to run or fight because you are CERTAIN you are going to meet another saber-toothed tiger there.
Stay with me here, because we are not all that evolved from cavemen, and our brain-body connection is there to keep us alive from these very creatures that are now extinct. This path in our brain exists to help us survive, but it can also be over-used to the point that our brain won’t let us move on from expecting this giant cat to try to eat us every day. It will also utilize this same path for other times we have been in danger and our brain tells us to remember this so that we can stay safe, and it’s inconveniently really difficult to reason with that old part of our brain, so it’s just going to win in a fight between emotion and reason.
The Purpose of EMDR Therapy
EMDR essentially disrupts this path so that we can unlearn this lesson and stop expecting danger in these specific scenarios when we don’t need to expect the danger anymore. It’s important to remember this because not every one of these “lessons” is bad for us, but some stick with us for so long and the wound cuts so deep that we expect bad things to happen everywhere, all the time, and with everyone.
How Does EMDR Desensitize Trauma?
EMDR (“eye movement...”) employs any of several different methods which are meant to disrupt what your brain will often do in the process of remembering a traumatic event. The standard method would be waving a hand in front of your eyes to help guide that movement to mimic the dream state. At this point, two things begin to happen. The first is that the focus on this memory is challenged while remembering it (called “dual attention stimulus”). When you have a guide helping you through this, what happens is you talk about the event, rather than fully remembering and reliving the event. This is the step of Desensitization.
The other thing that happens is the amount of openness and creativity that occurs in the dream state, where your mind is now open to looking at things, even scary things, in new ways. Remember the caveman and the saber-toothed tiger? After EMDR, that is no longer an expected event, but rather an event that happened at one time, relegated to the past, rather than an event recurring, re-lived, and expected to return.
A Story of Transformation
I had a client who happened to be my first client when I started my work in private practice. We worked for a long time on family trauma as well as medical trauma related to her childhood onset Type I Diabetes. The events that she endured as a child affected her to the point of influencing negative beliefs about herself, others, and the world (“core beliefs”). These same issues kept coming up in our sessions, where she believed herself to be a burden to others, that others were unsafe or unreliable, and the world was generally disappointing.
We began processing the event, which is something that often scares people because it involves looking directly at these unpleasant events. After a few attempts of utilizing the dual attention stimulus, we were able to start the process of bilateral stimulation (having both sides of the brain talking to itself), and she began to look at this same crucial event in a new way.
Unexpected Laughter: A Sign of Healing
The next thing, I didn’t expect, was that she began to smile and even chuckle! Here we were, talking about a time where the inner child in her was forgotten, and she was actually laughing? I know it sounds crazy, but this is just a glimpse of what can happen when you open yourself up to help. It was as if she uncoupled a line of cars from a freight train and suddenly looked (and reportedly felt) lighter. She said that she was able to actually see herself, not from within the eyes of that child, but really see that child with nostalgia and fondness.
A New Sense of Empowerment
This led to her realization of empowerment and hope, that she is now able to take care of herself, treat herself responsibly, and not have to wait on anyone else’s approval to have a happy life. What I can say is that this was definitively the beginning of the end of our time together as she progressed exponentially further until her point of discharge. These deep-seated issues became lighter. Her hope became brighter.
Finding Support through EMDR
This is what we as therapists, and all of us at HopeNation wish for you. If you are tired of struggling, know that you will have support, direction, and answers. EMDR can be a vehicle for immense change and emotional freedom. Let us help you get there.
✓ Medically Reviewed By Casey Merrill LPC-MHSP
