EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitisation Reprocessing. It is a psychotherapy treatment that has been extensively researched and proven effective to help millions of people of all ages recover from both PTSD and C-PTSD and the problems they cause, like flashbacks, upsetting thoughts or images, hypervigilance and other symptoms.

EMDR uses eye movements and sometimes audio tones, or even small hand-held buzzers to repeatedly stimulate the left and ride sides (hemispheres) of your brain to properly process traumatic intense and debilitating memories into simply memories.

The goal of EMDR is to allow the person to achieve a complete state of emotional and mental health – they should be able to recall or discuss the event without having a response that results in a debilitating reaction. ‘Through EMDR, individuals safely reprocess traumatic information until it is no longer psychologically disruptive to their lives. Over time, exposure to traumatic memories will no longer induce negative feelings and distressing symptoms.’

Many studies have documented the effectiveness of EMDR therapy for traumas such as rape and sexual abuse, combat trauma, childhood trauma and neglect, life-threatening accidents, and the resulting PTSD and C-PTSD symptoms. Find out more about the effectiveness of EMDR here. 

One of the things many people really like about EMDR is that you don’t need to talk about your trauma.  People undergoing treatment are asked initially to only think about their traumatic experiences during a session – there’s no requirement to discuss them.  Given the reluctance and fear of many trauma survivors to talk about the details of their experience, this can be a hugely important benefit of EMDR over other treatment options. Find out more about what happens in an EMDR therapy session here. 

It’s useful to understand how trauma affects your brain, to then be able to understand how EMDR can be so effective in treating PTSD and C-PTSD. ‘When a person is involved in a traumatic event, they may feel overwhelmed and their brain may be unable to fully process what is going on. The memory of the event seems to become “stuck” so that it remains very intense and vivid. The person can re-experience what they saw, heard and smelt and the full force of the distress they felt whenever the memory comes to mind.

EMDR aims to help the brain “unstick” and reprocess the memory properly so that it is no longer so intense. It also helps to desensitise the person to the emotional impact of the memory, so that they can think about the event without experiencing such strong feelings.

It does this by asking the person to recall the traumatic event while they also move their eyes from side-to-side, hear a sound in each ear alternately, or feel a tap on each hand alternately. These side-to-side sensations seem to effectively stimulate the “stuck” processing system in the brain so that it can reprocess the information more like an ordinary memory, reducing its intensity. The effect may be similar to what occurs naturally during REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, when your eyes move rapidly from side to side as the brain processes the events of the day.’

Due to the biological mechanisms involved in Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, internal associations arise and the client begins to process the memory and disturbing feelings. In successful EMDR therapy, the meaning of painful events is transformed on an emotional level.  For instance, an assault victim shifts from feeling horror and self-blame to holding the firm belief that, “I survived it and I am strong.”  Unlike talk therapy, the insights clients gain in EMDR therapy result not so much from clinician interpretation, but from the client’s own accelerated intellectual and emotional processes.  The net effect is that clients conclude EMDR therapy feeling empowered by the very experiences that once debased them.  Their wounds have not just closed, they have transformed. As a natural outcome of the EMDR therapeutic process, the clients’ thoughts, feelings and behaviour are all robust indicators of emotional health and resolution—all without speaking in detail or doing homework used in other therapies.’ Find out more about how EMDR works, and the science behind it here.

Your history and specific problem will influence the number of sessions of EMDR that you’d need, but ‘repeated controlled studies have shown that a single trauma can be processed within 3 sessions in 80-90% of the participants’. In another study, ‘80% of multiple trauma victims no longer had PTSD after approximately 6 hours of treatment’. Another study, looking specifically at combat veterans, ‘reported that after 12 sessions 77% no longer had post-traumatic stress disorder’. Find out more about how many sessions you might need here and for information about EMDR for C-PTSD, read this page. 

EMDR weakens the effect of negative emotions and the ‘charge’ behind emotions when recalling the event. Before and after each EMDR treatment, your therapist will ask you to rate your level of distress. The hope is that your disturbing memories will become less disabling.

Please remember, these are not medical recommendations. Be sure to work with a professional to find the best methods for you. EMDR should always be delivered by properly trained therapists.