Can EMDR Help Me With My Anxiety?
Anxiety is normal in small doses. Everyone gets stressed now and again. But if your anxiety has specific triggers, or if it prevents you from doing daily tasks or activities you once loved, you might need to look at the cause. There are several therapeutic techniques that address anxiety, but EMDR targets the root of your trauma and retrains your brain to associate positive emotions with negative memories.
What is EMDR?
Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is a therapeutic technique that uses bilateral stimulation as you talk about a traumatic event to reprogram the brain. While it sounds complicated, all this means is that a therapist will guide you through a disturbing memory or an experience while directing you to look left and right or tap your left and right hands. What this does is activate the brain’s adaptive information processing (AIP) while sifting through the memory. Essentially, when we experience trauma, our brains store the information improperly when there are negative emotions like fear, guilt, or humiliation accompanying it. By using bilateral stimulation, you’ll help your brain “re-store” the memory and associate positive emotions with it. Some studies show this bilateral stimulation functions much like rapid eye movement in sleep.
How does EMDR help anxiety?
Anxiety can sometimes be triggered by sensory inputs or experiences. For example, if you survived a car accident, you might feel distressed by the smell of gasoline and have been unable to fill up your car at the pump since. Because EMDR targets the event that started all your anxious behaviors and responses, you’ll eventually see positive images and emotions come up when revisiting your negative experience. Your triggers become disarmed.
What does an EMDR session look like?
EMDR sessions need quite a bit of prep work before diving into the traumatic memory. While the number of sessions varies case by case, EMDR has eight phases.
History and treatment plan You and your therapist will discuss your goals for these sessions and evaluate your past experiences with trauma and anxiety.
Preparation Your therapist will explain how EMDR works and give guidance on healthy coping mechanisms as well as how to approach the distressing emotions that might come up in your sessions.
Assessment You and your therapist will decide on the memory you want to explore with bilateral stimulation. You’ll talk about the emotions and bodily responses that this memory causes. You’ll also choose a positive replacement for the negative memory, which can be an image, thought, feeling, or another memory.
Desensitization To reduce your negative emotions associated with your target memory, your therapist will have you recall it while either directing your gaze from left to right or asking you to tap alternately on your left and right sides. You’ll repeat this until you no longer have any negative effects from this memory.
Installation Your therapist will guide you through replacing this memory with a positive one.
Body Scan You’ll do a mental scan of your body as you reimagine the negative images and memories to see how you respond physically.
Closure Your therapist will take you back to the coping strategies covered in phase two and help you engage with them while going over your target memory.
Re-evaluation You and your therapist will review how the phases went, whether the sessions were effective in reprocessing your memory, and how your anxiety has been affected.
Should you try EMDR?
If you have found yourself unable to do things you’d like to because of anxiety, getting at the root cause of your distress can help. You might not even be 100% positive about exactly what’s causing your anxiety, but maybe you suspect it has to do with past trauma. A therapist trained in EMDR can help.
To find out more about how EMDR Therapy can work to reduce your anxiety, please reach out to us.
