Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing: EMDR
Most of the time, your body routinely manages new information and experiences without you being aware of it. However, when something out of the ordinary occurs and you are traumatised by an overwhelming event or by being repeatedly subjected to distress, your natural coping mechanism can become overloaded. This overloading can result in disturbing experiences remaining frozen in your brain or being ‘unprocessed’. Such unprocessed memories and feelings are stored in a “raw” and emotional form rather than in a verbal ‘story’ mode. This system maintains traumatic memories in an isolated memory network that is associated with emotions and physical sensations, which are disconnected from the part of the brain where we use language to store memories.
These disturbing memories can be continually triggered when you experience events similar to the difficult experiences you have been through. Often, the memory itself is long forgotten, but the painful feelings such as anxiety, panic, anger or despair are continually triggered in the present.
Much of our natural coping mechanism occurs during sleep, particularly during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Using this natural mechanism, EMDR helps create the connections between your brain’s memory networks, enabling your brain to process the traumatic memory in a very natural way.
You can find out more about EMDR from the EMDR UK Association website.
