EMDR THERAPY
What is EMDR Therapy?
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a one-on-one, interactive therapy designed to help you process and heal from stressful or traumatic experiences. It's a powerful tool that helps clear the emotional “stuckness” left behind by events that overwhelmed your nervous system—whether recently or long ago.
Trauma: small-t and Big-T
One helpful way to think about trauma is this: trauma is anything that happened to you that shouldn’t have—like bullying or abuse—or something important that should have happened but didn’t—like receiving safety, love, and support during childhood.
We often associate trauma with extreme events like assault or abuse, war, or even natural disasters—these are what we call “Big T” trauma. Still many of us carry around “small t” traumas every day: being teased, feeling left out, failing an exam, or growing up with emotionally unavailable parents.
When those “small t” experiences are brushed off as part of life, they leave lasting emotional effects that deserve attention and healing. Think of it like a sports injury: instead of ignoring it and toughing it out, there’s more benefit and healing with seeing a physiotherapist.
EMDR works the same way for emotional wounds and their scars, and can tackle the root causes so you can begin real healing.
Great video explaining EMDR Therapy in a few minutes
Application of EMDR Therapy
EMDR therapy is shown to be an effective treatment for people who experienced psychologically stressful events, people suffering from traumatic memories, or those with a formal PTSD diagnosis. Since experience of psychological stress or trauma manifests in different ways, EMDR therapy may benefit you if you experience any of the following symptoms:
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Constant stress
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Anxiety
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Depression
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Eating Disorders
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Panic Attacks
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Recent and Past Trauma (car accident, divorce)
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Trouble sleeping
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Phobias
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Low self-esteem
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Performance Anxiety
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Complicated grief
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Pain relief, phantom limb pain
Only an EMDR therapist can assess whether EMDR is a right solution to what you are experiencing.
How EMDR Therapy Works
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy consists of eight essential phases. It’s necessary to go through all the eight phases for the EMDR therapy to work successfully. EMDR should always be used within a comprehensive treatment plan and should never be attempted without proper education, training, preparation, and the opportunity for reevaluation. Normally EMDR appointments run 90 minutes. While it’s possible to do shorter appointments, since every session requires an opening and a closing (like bookends), the middle portion is considerably longer during a 90 minutes session. This allows you to progress faster and accomplish more in fewer sessions, costing you less in the end.
Below you’ll find a quick and easy to read explanation of the EMDR process. For a comprehensive explanation, please click here. Something to note: this is not always a linear process. We may move back and forth between phases.
Phase 1: History and Treatment Planning
You will start with an opportunity for you to share the reason which brings you to counselling and for your therapist to develop a plan on how to move forward together.
Phase 2: Preparation
Your therapist will teach you different techniques to help you deal with upsetting thoughts and feelings. They will also share more information about EMDR, such as the process, what to expect, how it works, and so on. This is the phase where you develop trust with your therapist.
Phase 3: Assessment
At this point we’ll select and target specific memories related to your reason for seeking counselling and all the underlying roots attached to it.
Phase 4 - 6: Desensitization, Installation, & Body Scan
This is where we work on the distressing memory targets set out in Phase 3. Your therapist will have you hold the negative thought, memory, or image in your mind while following their hand movement back and forth. Though it may sound strange, this process actually ‘digests’ the negative thought and so that it is no longer distressing for you.
Phase 7: Closure
When it’s time to wrap up our counselling session for the day (regardless of what phase you are in), your therapist will close the session in a way that feels nurturing for you. They may ask you to record your experience between sessions and try out the different techniques from Phase 2.
Phase 8: Reevaluation
In the final phase, the therapist checks in on what has changed between sessions. With this information, the therapist will make any necessary changes to the treatment plan.
For a more detailed description of the 8 phases of EMDR, you can read this.
Effectiveness of EMDR
EMDR therapy has helped over a million individuals over the years. The validity and effectiveness of EMDR therapy has been established as a result of through research in clinical settings. EMDR therapy is recognized and recommended as a treatment for PTSD/Traumatic Experiences by:
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Department of Defense (US)
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Department of Veterans Affairs (US)
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American Psychiatric Association
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International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies
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National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (UK)
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Departments of Health in Israel and Northern Ireland
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World Health Organization
Formal recommendations for clinical treatment of trauma are slow to evolve, but as more and more studies are done, more countries and organizations recognize and recommend EMDR therapy as treatment for trauma and PTSD. And as the body of supporting evidence grows, it's very challenging to dispute is the effectiveness of EMDR therapy as a treatment for traumatic memories and experiences.