When I started my career, I worked in Acute and Community Mental Health settings such as inpatient hospitalization, sub-acute residential, and outpatient programs. Many of the clients I initially worked with had gone through some incredibly challenging and traumatic life events. As an empathetic and caring person, I could see how tough it was for my clients to talk about the various events they had gone through and understandably so.
Memory Storage...Error...Error: How trauma memories are stored
In fact, in recent decades there's emerging research that demonstrates why it's so hard to talk about trauma and through this research there are newer ways of conceptualizing how to treat trauma symptoms and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). There was a study done by Yale University in 2023 that took brain scans of individuals having sad, regular, and traumatic memories read back to them. The images showed that traumatic memories are activating parts of the brain that are experiencing present time. This means that people are experiencing the events as if they are happening today and not something that happened in the past.
Robin Shapiro, the founder of Eye Movement and Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy, put forward a theory on understanding how traumatic memories are likely stored in the brain, which is called Accelerated Information Processing (AIP) model. The AIP Model postulates that distressful memories are likely stored in error in the motor cortex of the brain. This makes sense actually. When we are in a traumatic event, our fight / flight / freeze responses are turned up all the way. Blood flow goes away from the conscious, decision-making centers of the brain and towards our automatic drive centers that gear the body up for sudden movement. We don't have time to think, we only have time to act. This is an adaptive response to predator, prey dynamics from our evolutionary history.
However, this means that these memories don't get processed through the regular memory centers, which helps to give that memory a sense of time (such as occurring in the past), a narrative chronology of events (difficulty recalling when it happened exactly), an adaptive perspective (e.g. it wasn't my fault), imagery (forgetting or blacking out certain parts), and fuzziness (the emotional and imagery memory isn't as vivid). Distressful memories are likely stored in their whole form with the full affect, emotion, negative thoughts about the self, associations, etc. that were experienced at the time of the event. The motor cortex also literally doesn't connect to the regular memory processing centers, except for working memory. That's likely why it can be so hard for people to shift the negative belief they still have about themselves today based on that past event.
How I got into EMDR Therapy
Again, as a therapist and a human being, I have a ton of respect and compassion for those who are embarking on the path of treating traumatic events and seeking therapy. I sought to learn therapy modalities that could better support people with reducing the distress from trauma and gain relief from challenging symptoms.
When I learned about EMDR from my clinician friends, I heard it was this emerging, fast, and amazing modality for treating traumatic memories. Within a single session, an event that haunted someone could go from a high level of distress to extremely little or no distress at the end. I thought, what...nah, that's too good to be true. That's crazy, right? But then I read the research. It's an evidence-based modality, which means it's statistically significant for reducing trauma symptoms. Again, I thought, if that's true, sign me up! I don't want my clients to be in any more pain than they already have been in. They deserve to have that trauma be in the past and more access to joy in the present.
How EMDR works
Now to give away the secret sauce recipe. EMDR is as close to a magic bullet for therapy as I have ever come across. It's still NOT a magic bullet just to clarify. It requires active effort and participation on the client's behalf to do this work and it takes time to do.
The first thing I like to explain to clients is that EMDR is not a 'talk therapy'. It's a structured 8 staged process that involves specific activities. The main activity is that it utilizes bilateral stimulation (BLS) to help the brain reprocess traumatic memories through the regular memory centers and connect to adult adaptive perspectives.
Let's break that down a little. Bilateral stimulation (BLS) is stimulating both lobes of the brain in a rhythmic pattern such as moving your eyes back and forth, tapping your shoulders or legs back and forth, or they even have hand buzzers these days that achieve the same effect. We do this because it's a naturally calming sensation to the body. Think about the early hypnotists that waved a watch in front of a person to get them to feel sleepy. Same thing, but used for a different purpose.
BLS helps the brain to feel calm when it's anticipating that it should be afraid such as when recalling a traumatic memory. This creates an 'error', which allows this memory to come back into working memory and get reprocessed through other centers of the brain. The individual who trained me in EMDR used the analogy of unlocking a locked computer file so that you can update and resave it. BLS creates an error for the brain that allows the locked computer file to get unlocked.
We then bring in 'adult adaptive perspectives' that support this memory to be reprocessed and updated. The negative belief that a person had about themselves today based on that memory is replaced by a positive belief they would prefer to believe in just one session. An example would be, "It's not safe to relax," to, "It's safe and ok to relax." The distress regarding this memory lowers significantly and most of the time people feel extremely little to no distress regarding the memory after an EMDR session.
What EMDR Treats
Since incorporating EMDR and the Flash Technique (a complimentary technique for very distressing memories) into my practice, I've really gotten to understand how it works and what it's effective for, as well as how it's challenging to treat some forms of trauma alone.
EMDR was initially made to treat single, incident events. That means focusing on reprocessing one event or memory at a time. It's very effective for certain types of traumatic or distressful memories where there is a single incident that happened such as a car accident, assault, or robbery.
For complex trauma, it gets trickier to treat with EMDR alone. Complex trauma often involves relational dynamics in which there are a lot of messages, events, dynamics that reinforce shame, guilt, neglect, threat, abuse, rejection, etc. For some with family and attachment trauma, this happens from the get-go in life and prior to conscious memory formation. EMDR can still be used for treating specific events the client recalls, but I draw on other therapies such as Family Dynamics, parts-work and Gestalt, Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy, attachment work, CBT, and others to support with healing.
Are you interested in EMDR therapy?
If you're interested in EMDR and a new, potential client, you can reach out to me for an initial 15-minute, no fee consultation to see how EMDR therapy may be a support for you. You can contact me here to setup a consultation.
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