Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing

We process emotional material in a different part of the brain than we process intellectual material. When we have gone through a painful experience, we can know intellectually that we are okay, safe and taken care of but still feel anxious, scared, or overwhelmed.

In cases of trauma, we can have intrusive thoughts, nightmares and flashbacks and even feel that we are reliving the painful experience. EMDR appears to connect what we know to what we feel so that the brain is able to process past experiences and allow us to heal.

Trauma can consist of one isolated incident, but more often, it consists of a series of adverse experiences that are ingrained into schemas (the pattern in which we organize and interpret the world around us). Those invisible negative messages to ourselves can inform our behavior and influence what we get to experience. Simply said, these wounds can be buried deep inside our psyche and negatively impact our current life on emotional, behavioral and even somatic levels. The EMDR method can help to "clean out" these old emotional injuries so that we can live our lives more fully.

EMDR is used in individual sessions and can be done virtually from the comfort of your home. Usually, we would have an initial meeting and preparation session, an EMDR session, and at least one integrative session.