EMDR Therapy in Orange County, CA

You CAN get past your past

What is EMDR Therapy?

EMDR Therapy stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy and is a proven and effective therapy for trauma. EMDR can help alleviate symptoms such as negative self-beliefs, sleep issues, anxiety, depression and flashbacks to name a few. EMDR first involves creating resources (coping skills) that can help you feel confident in exploring and processing those difficult memories from the past.

EMDR then helps to access your big, beautiful brain and all its healing capacities. With EMDR the idea is that past painful memories become ongoingly distressing because of how it was stored in the brain. Essentially with EMDR we are wanting to reactivate those distressing experiences and “reprocess” them. Reprocessing incorporates “Bilateral Stimulation” which is a technique that activates the left and right hemisphere of your brain, which helps your brain to understand what happened more adaptively.

According to EMDR, someone can experience persistent negative self-statements, avoid reminders of the trauma, or have intrusive memories of the event because the experience was stored in the brain before it was properly processed.

It’s not your fault that your brain ended up storing that experience in such an unhelpful way. Together, we can make sense of the past so that you can have a clear idea of how to step into your desired future.

With EMDR the goal is to no longer feel distressed when recalling those painful memories as well as to no longer have any negative beliefs about yourself, others or the world in relation to those painful memories. Another goal of EMDR is building internal resources to strengthen your own capacity to deal with life when it becomes challenging.

Essentially, the goal here is to feel that you CAN do hard things.

Types of trauma I have treated with EMDR:

• Pervasive, childhood trauma (i.e. chronic invalidation, emotional neglect, sexual abuse, verbal abuse and physical abuse)

• Sexual assault in adulthood and childhood

• Military trauma

• Car accidents

• Trauma/Pain related to break ups

• Cancer

The process…

When we begin EMDR, we often start with identifying what currently triggers your symptoms. For example, you may be afraid when driving and those triggers might include: getting on the freeway, someone tailgating me, and stop-and-go traffic. Then we would look at what are the previous memories that are associated with the current trigger. For example, a person might identify a car accident that occurred on the freeway, a time in which they were a kid and someone rear-ended them when they were a passenger, etc. This is essentially created a roadmap so we can know what memories are contributing to upsetting symptoms and behaviors today.

Next, we focus on strengthening your capacity to manage distressing moments by developing and enhancing resources (aka coping skills). You may already have a number of coping skills that are effectively helpful. For others, we may spend more time developing these skill sets. Sometimes the processing of the trauma can happen in-between the appointments in the form of dreams or memories re-surfacing and so it is important that we collectively feel that you have a toolbox of resources to support you in-between appointments.

Then, when we collaboratively feel you are ready and prepared to proceed with the trauma work, we start going into those old memories and reprocessing them using Bilateral Stimulation. We would work on one memory at a time until we reprocess it to completion and then move on to another past memory. Once we reprocess all the past memories to completion, we then move onto processing current triggers and then eventually future triggers so we can prepare and process for potential upcoming things that could trigger a reoccurrence of symptoms and behaviors.