Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing

EMDR is a therapy aimed at helping people in recovering from a traumatic event. After any traumatic event the images, thoughts and emotions can remain. These can create ‘overwhelm’, of being back in that moment where you may feel “frozen in time.”

EMDR Therapy helps you process these memories with billateral stimulation and therefore allows normal healing to occur. It effectively helps your brain to join the dots of a neural network so that it recognises an event is in the past rather than still occuring in the present.

A 2012 study of 22 people* found that EMDR therapy helped 77 percent of the individuals with psychotic disorder and PTSD. It found that their hallucinations, delusions, anxiety, and depression symptoms were significantly improved after treatment. The study also found that symptoms were not exacerbated during treatment.

Building a good therapeutic relationship between clients and therapist is important for trauma healing. It can be used for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Our therapists use a collaborative approach to help you decide on what traumas you might like to work on in a history-taking phase of EMDR. After an assessment of each trauma, processing takes place with bilateral stimulation in the form of auditory beeps, eye movements, tactile buzzers, tapping, or a combination of the above.

An intake is necessary to determine eligibility for EMDR. After that, a two-hour session works best but it can also be broken down into one-hour sessions. While all clients are not the same, usually 4 - 6 hours total enables great healing to occur.