Break Through to the Next Level with EMDR
By Michael Westfall, LCSW
helping us push beyond the challenges to find ourselves in a fresher and more productive place.
to block our way or swipe at our feet to trip us up. Truth is, this baggage is the sum of our experiences. As we go through our lives we collect attitudes and beliefs about ourselves and the world. Some people are better at sort- ing out hot buttons and trigger points. Many manage very well going through the day with little interference from their baggage. Some- times we are confronted with something that just rubs us the wrong way. Those times may be easy to avoid or smile our way through, or they can be painful and leave us unable to handle the situation. Thankfully, we live most of our lives someplace in between these two extremes. We may turn to therapy when we don’t know what is pushing our hot buttons or don’t have the necessary skills to manage them being pushed. We may be wary of coun- seling because we fear it would reflect poorly to be soliciting input on our everyday chal- lenges. The very thought of finding a thera- pist can be intimidating, with the different approaches and credentials of the therapists. However, approaches that are geared toward short-term solutions can be very effective in
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motional baggage: we all carry it around with us. We think of it as our negative, neurotic thoughts that rear up and try
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Repro- cessing) is an exciting form of treatment being applied to an increasingly broad range of complaints. The name itself sounds complicated and perhaps a bit off-putting. But
in practice, EMDR is a direct, effective way to tap into the brain’s natural tendency for healing. Since its development in the early 1980s by Francine Shapiro, it has been stud- ied extensively. EMDR has proven effective for post-traumatic stress disorder, where it was originally employed, and is used to treat an ever-expanding list of challenges, nota- bly anxiety and depression. Initially, EMDR skeptics dismissed its techniques as little more than exposure to a person’s stressors. Some place it in the same category as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) with its emphasis on rationality and the aim to systematically change our thinking. EMDR does change our thinking but this misses the realm of cogni- tions that are preverbal, meaning the thoughts we have that exist from before we were able to give words to what was happening around us. EMDR’s effectiveness with these preverbal experiences makes it quite remarkable. Underpinning this approach is the belief that information has been dysfunction- ally stored in the brain and thus needs to be reprocessed so it can be integrated with the existing information. For example, one person might hold onto a heightened sense of responsibility for others’ wellbeing and not recognize that might be a result of his parents divorcing when he was only eight years old. Another might feel a nagging sense of uneasi- ness and be struggling with a disappointment from a month ago. Often, the difficulty experi- enced in the present is not summed up in a single incident but is a composite of many years of messages from others. These events, while not necessarily traumatic in the clinical sense, were experienced in the past, recent or distant, and continue to assert themselves in dysfunctional ways in the present. In this way, the person’s brain continues to experience the event on some level and is unable to resolve it. The dysfunctionally stored elements of the past can show up as bodily sensations or
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negative beliefs about the self. At times it may be difficult to put these feelings into words, hence the need to get the thoughts ‘unstuck.’ A skilled therapist facilitates the client’s ability to move towards the much-desired stability. A degree of controversy persists over how
it works. EMDR employs a technique called Bilateral Stimulation (BLS). In practice, this may look vaguely like hypnosis as the client watches the therapist’s hand move back and forth. It can also be done with alternately tap- ping on the client’s hands or knees or with au- dible sounds on either side of the head. Some claim that this movement back and forth generates a type of processing believed to occur in REM sleep (hence the early emphasis on Eye Movement in EMDR). Over time, there has been more focus on Dual Attention Stimu- lation (DAS). In essence, the client is paying attention to movements in the present with the therapist while also reprocessing the past. This is the mechanism believed to allow for the brain to integrate old experiences while adding new information, because it is forced to straddle between the past and the present. Working with a qualified therapist whom
you can place a degree of trust in can help to illuminate the places that cause us such dissatisfaction. A therapist, while needing to be competent and capable, helps the client to navigate the healing and push it along if the reprocessing should get ‘stuck.’ The refreshing aspect of EMDR is that the client is the one in the driver’s seat, which makes it appealing to people who may be wary of psychotherapy. Quite pointedly, your brain makes the con- nections to have a more fully formed image, rather than relying on the incomplete picture formed earlier.
One of the newer areas is in treating sports-related performance anxieties. Athletes strive to unlock all their potential to perform their best. A kernel of self-doubt can fester and block us from our goals. There may not be any major trauma, but just a lurking nega- tive belief about the self that is unrelated to the ability to excel and reach the goals set. Nevertheless, these beliefs can present them- selves in ways that undermine our best efforts to succeed in our sports endeavors. Perfor- mance can benefit from anxiety to spur us on to our greatest achievements, but if anxiety gets the better of us, we are left with our feel- ings of self-doubt. Sports psychologists offer many help- ful tools to overcome anxiety. Visualization
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