About EMDR
Trauma can occur from violence, sexual abuse, natural disasters, accidents, or other sudden, unexpected, extreme events. The brain stores trauma memories differently than everyday factual memories. They are tightly bound with negative emotional response. When something reminds the survivor of the memory, it triggers the intense, involuntary emotional response. That shuts down more advanced parts of the brain that a person can normally engage to control words and behavior. That leaves only the four instincts of fear to drive behavior: flight, fight, freeze, and fawn. Flight means to run away, escape. Fight means anger, aggression, attacking others or self. Freeze means mental and physical paralysis. Fawn means to appease, placate, and please, even if it hurts one's self. All these behaviors hurt the survivor. They increates risk of greater harm and re-traumatization. This is why people who are victims of crime are more likely to be a victim again than other people who have not experienced trauma, despite all attempts to defend and protect against attack. When higher brain function is blocked by fear instinct, the brain chooses the risk from the fear instinct over the known harm in memory, which it suddenly experiences again as if it were happening right now. This involuntary, instinctual reaction drives relationship trouble, economic instability, drug and alcohol use, eating disorders, self-harm, and even suicide.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. Alternating stimulation of each half of the brain loosens trauma memory so the emotional response can be separated. Then the brain can correctly re-process the events as factual memories. While focusing on the memory, the treatment switches attention between left and right. This increases communication of the left and right parts of the brain. Imprisoned emotions connect again with logic and words. Movement of sensory attention overloads working memory, which is how the brain holds a thought in present mind. This allows new nerve pathways to form around the traumatic memory. The eye movement is like natural rapid eye movements during sleep, when the brain sorts through the day's events and creates stories so you can remember what was important. This helps your brain reprocess the memory without the intense emotions.
The first step of EMDR is to create a feeling of safety and security. (Free-EMDR.com protects your safety by keeping all information on your computer. It transmits no personal information to our servers, so you do not need to worry about trusting a stranger.) After raising the traumatic memory to awareness, visualization exercises create a feeling of safety in which the memories can be processed. The treatment concludes with a "body scan" meditation to return the survivor to awareness of the present moment. Positive belief reinforcement, meditation, and evaluation at the end of the the treatment help to wrap the bad feelings with new words, clear understanding, and a path to good feelings. Gradually, the brain can reprocess the event into normal factual memory. Then, when something reminds the survivor of the memory, it is no longer neurologically bound to the intense, involuntary emotional response that shuts down higher brain function. The survivor can remain a whole person in their mind and act appropriately in the present moment, even when reminded of the traumatic memory and emotions that were once tightly linked to it.
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