EMDR is a type of therapy used to treat trauma.

As a first step the therapist takes a client’s history and collaboratively the client and therapist choose traumatic memories to work on during therapy.

Secondly, clients are taught grounding and coping skills to ensure they are not overwhelmed by negative emotions and flashbacks while working through their trauma.

Step three involves beginning to process the traumatic memories. The client is asked to think of and focus on an image related to the traumatic event, a negative belief associated with the event, and corresponding feelings and physical sensations. While they are focusing on these things they are engaged in some type of bilateral stimulation such as moving their eyes from side to side as instructed by the therapist or tapping their right and left hands on their right and left legs in an alternating fashion. At this point clients are asked to justice notice what is happening for them. Upon conclusion of this the client is asked to let their mind go blank and then share whatever feeling, image, sensation, or memory comes to mind, this helps the therapist choose the next target for reprocessing and the procedure is repeated. When the client is no longer experiencing negative emotions related to the chosen memory they are asked to focus on a positive belief that was preselected.

The change mechanisms of EMDR are not completely understood however it is theorized that when people experience a trauma that memory can get stuck and as a result is not processed the way our brain usually processes memories. EMDR allows clients to access and process traumatic memories properly by helping those negative memories form association with other positive memories. The results of EMDR are that memories no longer trigger negative emotions, negative beliefs are changed, and negative physical reactions are reduced.