Who Can Benefit From EMDR Therapy?
While Francine Shapiro initially developed EMDR Therapy, or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, in the late 1980s to treat trauma, specifically post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), it has since been proven beneficial in treating a wide variety of mental health issues.
Many individuals interested in EMDR Therapy in Olds, Alberta often ask the same question: who can benefit from EMDR therapy? So, let's look at who can benefit from EMDR Therapy and how this treatment can help you heal and grow.
How does EMDR work?
EMDR Therapy focuses on reprocessing upsetting memories, feelings, and experiences. It uses bilateral stimulation like eye movements, rhythmic tapping, or tones in both ears to help change how your brain stores traumatic memories.
Bilateral stimulation can help:
reduce the emotional and physical symptoms tied to trauma
help you deal with traumatic memories in a more adaptive way
improve your overall well-being.
Who can Benefit from EMDR?
Life is an unpredictable journey, and we all experience pain at some point. These painful experiences can sometimes leave scars on our hearts and minds, preventing us from having a fulfilling life.
It doesn't have to be like this, however. EMDR Therapy can provide relief. After completing your EMDR treatment, you will still remember the painful event. But it will not have power over you anymore. You'll feel empowered to break free from your traumatic past. You'll be able to manage and reduce your symptoms and reclaim your life.
EMDR in Trauma Healing
It is natural to experience a rollercoaster of emotions if you have been through a very upsetting or stressful event. However, if you struggle to deal with troubling emotions and memories, go about your daily life, and keep up relationships, you might benefit from therapy.
EMDR Therapy may be critical to your emotional healing if you struggle with intrusive, upsetting thoughts and memories of a traumatic event, re-experience the trauma in flashbacks, or have sleep problems or nightmares. It can also help you cope with intense emotions such as guilt, shame, bereavement, anxiety, and avoidance behaviours. EMDR Therapy can help you if you have complex trauma, PTSD, childhood trauma, workplace trauma such as first responders or veterans, combat or war experiences, sexual assault or near-death experiences.
During the EMDR therapeutic process, your therapist will guide you through bilateral stimulation, which is believed to help the brain reprocess traumatic memories. This reprocessing decreases the emotional intensity connected to traumatic or distressing memories.
However, instead of focusing on the traumatic event itself, EMDR Therapy helps you work through the disturbing thoughts and feelings that come up after trauma until they don't cause you negative thoughts, painful feelings, or physical discomfort. However, EMDR Therapy goes beyond healing trauma and PTSD.
EMDR Therapy Potential Beyond Trauma Resolution: Who Else Can Benefit?
Whatever you are trying to navigate through, you don't have to do it alone. EMDR Therapy in-office or online can help release the grip of emotional distress that prevents you from enjoying your life and having fulfilling relationships.
EMDR Therapy for Grief and Loss
We understand how difficult it may be to enjoy your life and relationships when emotional pain weighs you down. Maybe you've lost a loved one and feel lost and unable to move forward. Losing a loved one is one of life's most painful experiences, and it is okay to feel overwhelmed or unable to feel hopeful about the future. But if these feelings last for too long or hinder your ability to go about your everyday life, work, socialize, or even get up from bed, EMDR Therapy might help, providing a safe environment to process your loss or the eventual traumatic aspects of it and reduce the intensity of painful emotions. You will eventually be able to find a new sense of hope and meaning in life.
EMDR Therapy for Birth Trauma
EMDR Therapy can also help people navigate through the aftermath of birth trauma. Bringing a new life into the world can sometimes be a traumatic rather than joyful experience due to complications, medical interventions, or even the loss of a child. If this resonates with you, grief, guilt, and shame might be following you around. You may have moments or days of intense guilt, regret, sadness, despair, and anger, or feel as if you've somehow regressed in grieving. It can be hard to get out of bed in the morning, even months after the loss. You may fear that you will forget your baby. You might be avoiding social events, dreading everyday activities, and feeling emotionally worn out.
EMDR Therapy can help you explore possible triggers for sadness and grief (like clothes and other baby items, photos from the period of the pregnancy, specific places, etc.). Together with your therapist, you will explore the importance of setting boundaries with others or situations that may cause emotional pain, focus on your own needs, and discuss ways of dealing with stressors and overcoming triggers. You will feel empowered to start new family traditions, plan for the future, or do things to honour the memory of your child. This should enable you to recall the memory of birth trauma without feeling distraught.
EMDR Therapy for Medical Trauma
Maybe you've been through a traumatic medical procedure, hospitalization, or a physical injury, such as a vehicle accident. Even though your physical scars have healed, emotional wounds can still have a grip on you. You may experience emotional or somatic flashbacks, reliving the same feelings and bodily sensations you felt during the incident. Although you know you are not in danger, you can do nothing to calm down.
With the help of EMDR Therapy, you will reprocess the distressing memories and develop tools and strategies to manage stress so you can go to a hospital or get behind the wheel without debilitating fear. Your sleep quality may improve, and you may no longer experience nightmares about the event.
EMDR Therapy for Natural Disasters
Sometimes, things beyond our control happen and mess with our emotional well-being. Suppose you have been through a tornado, wildfire, earthquake, hurricane, or flood. In that case, this experience can profoundly affect how you feel, think, and behave.
For example, the tension you experience after surviving a tornado may lead you to fear the slightest storm. The sounds, sights, movements, physical sensations, and feelings during a tornado may linger in your mind for a long time, causing anxiety and distress. You may be preoccupied with the possibility of losing loved ones, your home, and your belongings. These negative thoughts can make you feel super stressed and worried all the time.
EMDR Therapy can help you regain a sense of safety, help you challenge negative thoughts linked to a traumatic experience, and equip you with coping strategies such as mindfulness or deep breathing to help you manage intrusive thoughts and anxiety.
EMDR Therapy for Anxiety
Is your inner voice full of criticism and negative remarks about yourself? Do you nitpick at everything you do, thinking, "I'm a failure" or "I'm to blame"? These thoughts that won't go away can mess with your emotions and drain your energy.
You might want to explore EMDR Therapy benefits if you suffer from social anxiety, panic disorder, or generalized anxiety disorder. Anxiety often stems from our inaccurate, negative beliefs and self-perceptions. EMDR Therapy can help you manage your anxiety by helping you challenge negative thinking patterns and develop more positive self-concepts.
EMDR treatment for anxiety can also equip you with coping techniques like body scan, mindfulness, and deep breathing to deal with emotional pain and respond more effectively to triggers. The purpose of coping strategies is to increase resilience and reduce anxiety symptoms.
EMDR Therapy for Depression
It is not unusual to struggle with depression if you have a history of trauma. EMDR Therapy may help you cope with low mood and feelings of hopelessness by addressing the underlying roots of your depression.
What do clients say about EMDR Therapy?
EMDR Therapy has been proven to help with all sorts of issues, like PTSD and chronic pain. People who have undergone the treatment say that EMDR Therapy helped them integrate upsetting memories into their life experiences, allowing them they can recall them without experiencing emotional pain. To back up these claims, studies have shown that more than 90% of single-trauma survivors had no PTSD symptoms after just three EMDR sessions.
In Conclusion
EMDR Therapy is a structured and evidence-based approach that can effectively treat a wide range of conditions, from PTSD to depression, anxiety, medical trauma, birth trauma, fetal trauma, grief, physical injuries, accidents, motor vehicle accidents, natural disasters, medical procedures, dental procedures, surgery, hospitalization and low self-esteem. EMDR Therapy can help you integrate upsetting memories into your life experience so you can recall them without experiencing emotional pain.
Even if you don't struggle with trauma, PTSD, anxiety, or depression, EMDR Therapy can help you address unresolved issues from your past that continue to impact your everyday life and well-being and provide relief.
Schedule your free 15-minute consultation with our trauma therapists today by clicking here. During the call, you will discover how having a place to heal with a guide can take you from the hurt to a healthier life and relationships.
How Williamson & Associates Counselling in Alberta and Trauma Therapy in Alberta Can Improve Your Life!
As counsellors, trauma therapists, child therapists, psychologist, family therapists and couples counsellors in Olds Alberta, we work with individuals, couples and families to help them feel more connected, secure, and loved.
EMDR therapy in Olds, Alberta can help you get to a place in your life where you feel peace, ease, freedom and lighter again.
See other posts about EMDR Therapy:
What Is Trauma? Trauma Therapy