EMDR is a highly effective PTSD treatment for adverse life experiences.

Many people assume trauma and its lingering consequences only come from something overwhelming, like life-threatening circumstances or experiencing a terrible event. People minimize their own traumatic experiences because they aren't as bad as what other people have experienced. They deal with the effects of trauma for a lifetime and don't realize it. Mental health problems like anxiety, panic attacks, fear, and hopelessness are often rooted in past adverse experiences. When these things are trauma based, they are resistant to talk therapy. 

Capital T Trauma

"Capital T" traumas are significant events often threatening one's life, limbs, or safety.

Small T Trauma

"Small t" traumas are less threatening events. They can be one-time occurrences or repeated infractions. While smaller, they still have a powerful effect that can influence how we think and feel for decades.

Big and small traumas can have a significant, often lifelong, impact on people. It's not the size of the adverse event that lingers problematically but the message received through the trauma. These sorts of messages sound like, "I'm not safe," "I'm not lovable," and "people can't be trusted," to name a few. This message becomes a foundation of one's core beliefs and the filter to experience the world.

Through EMDR therapy, we help people process the remnants of these adverse experiences. This processing minimizes the disturbance they cause and the hold they have. EMDR therapy for trauma can resolve issues that cause traditional counseling to stall.

EMDR involves bilateral stimulation of the brain through guided eye movements that help the brain process, reframe, and put away distressing memories. 

Traumas of any size can leave unprocessed fragments of past adverse events in the limbic system, the part of the brain responsible for emotions and fight or flight. These fragments include the sights, sounds, body sensations, beliefs, and intense feelings experienced through the event. Whether it was ten years or ten days ago, the brain sees them as now because they weren’t put away in long-term memory.

Present-day stressors trigger these past fragments (sights, sounds, body sensations, beliefs, and feelings). We are unknowingly experiencing the residual adverse effects of the past in the present.

Healing trauma through EMDR involves accessing these stored fragments, processing them, and integrating the experience so that it no longer controls emotional and physical responses.

The conscious part of your brain attempts to keep trauma from surfacing, but that also keeps it stuck unprocessed. The guided eye movements occupy the conscious brain, letting the unconscious do what it has always wanted: heal the trauma.