What Is EDMR?
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, or EDMR, is a psychological therapy that helps you heal from past emotional distress caused by unsettling life experiences. For most people, resolving severe emotional pain takes an extended period of time and effort, perhaps years.bEMDR can help you move forward and regain a sense of hope, balance and wholeness in your life in a much quicker time frame.
With EMDR therapy, we heal your mind from disturbing emotional anguish similarly to how the body recovers from physical injury. When you’re suffering from a physical wound, having an obstruction slows or even prevents the healing process. When healing from psychological wounds, severe and disturbing past events act as the obstruction, slowing or preventing emotional remedy. So, we remove what’s holding up recovery.
According to the National Library of Medicine, over 29 separate studies prove that using EMDR can help sufferers speed up the psychotherapy process and see results much sooner than talk therapy alone. EDMR helps to rid your mind of troubling thoughts and experiences that hinder recovery from past traumatic incidents. This allows your brain to create a natural return to hopeful thinking. You’re likely to conclude EMDR feeling empowered by those experiences that once hurt or possibly debilitated you, having an overall positive transformative effect on your esteem.
When coping with life after severely disturbing events, a person may first want to avoid the thoughts that remind them of their pain. This leads to unhealthy mechanisms such as avoidance or disassociating from feelings. These behaviors might provide relief for a little while, but unfortunately, over time it becomes clear you’re still experiencing emotional anguish and you can get stuck in the cycle of revisiting the thoughts you’re trying to run from and get involved in other ways to cope, which may eventually lead to addictions and self-harm.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing works most effectively on someone severely distressed by past events or abuses that cause long-term mental trauma. EDMR takes the previously distressing thought and changes it into a benign memory, removing its power to create the pain it used to inflict. This ultimately means that you can begin to live with less fear and anxiety. In some cases, even physical pain lessens, since many depression and trauma sufferers also experience these symptoms as well. Studies show that more than 77% of EDMR patients enjoy faster and long-term relief from their worst symptoms than talk therapy. While it’s not likely that only one session of EDMR treatments will result in a complete and permanent change, substantial emotional transformations will be experienced quickly, if not immediately and can be maintained over your lifetime.
EDMR is a very effective and proven therapy for resolving issues and will reduce your healing time from PTSD, giving you relief from your pain and suffering. Our staff at The Guest House is specifically trained to work with clients who have difficult experiences to share and are here to help, build you up, and support you in returning to a life that brings you joy again. Let us help you conquer your trauma.
To learn more about the benefits of EDMR, visit our blog here.