EMDR THERAPY
Whether you’ve tried talk therapy before and didn’t find it very helpful, or you’re new to therapy and want to start with an approach that’s strongly evidence-based— you’re in the right place.
All of our therapists specialize in working with trauma, and while there are many effective ways of doing so, one of our favorites is EMDR therapy.
In addition to "big T” traumas (what we often think of as traumatic experiences), EMDR is effective with a variety of issues because it is a powerful way of “rewiring” the brain by identifying the root of your stuck points (i.e. a feeling of never being good enough) and helping you move through those roots more thoroughly than we can with traditional talk therapy alone.
WTF is EMDR?
The fields of psychology and psychotherapy sure do love their acronyms. In this case, EMDR stands for “Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing,” which was originally developed in the late 1980s by Francine Shapiro.
The eye movements can actually be any form of bilateral (side to side) stimulation (your therapist will help you identify which form is most effective for you), and the “desensitization and reprocessing” is basically bringing up a memory that is somehow connected to a symptom impacting you in the present, adding the BLS to access a deeper part of the brain than just the “thinking/talking” brain, and maintaining “dual attention” of both the memory and the present while we allow your brain the space the process the experince more thoroughly and effectively than it was able to at the original time.
What makes EMDR effective?
While reading about EMDR often leaves folks scratching their heads initially (let’s be honest, doesn’t it sound weird?)— since its original conception, extensive research has repreatedly found it to be an effective, evidence-based treatment for helping people recover from PTSD, distressing life experinces, anxiety, and more.
EMDR is based a theoretical approach that Shapiro called the Adaptive Information Processing model, which essentially means that the brain— like other parts of the body (think of your skin when you get a cut)— will naturally move toward healing, given the right conditions.
However, those “right conditions” often don’t just organically arise, and EMDR was discovered to be a highly effective process for facilitating those conditions. While questions remain regarding all the “mechanisms of action” within EMDR that make it so effective, what’s clear in the research and from thousands of client experiences in the past several decades, is that EMDR is a powerful approach for psychological healing. Especially for people who have found limited success with talk therapy, EMDR can provide a real possibility for a different outcome.
Why choose The Gaia Center for EMDR?
Our founder Valerie Martin used to to be very skeptical about EMDR… until she saw how effective it was for clients in the residential treatment center where she started her therapy career. After reading Bessel van der Kolk’s chapter on EMDR in The Body Keeps the Score, she decided to take the plunge and do EMDR training. That was in 2015, and now she is EMDR Certified and a Consultant in Training, providing consultation to newer EMDR clinicians.
Several other Gaia Center clinicians are also trained in EMDR, including Colleen Werner & Kaitlyn King.
We take an approach to EMDR that is strongly body-based and attachment-focused, which makes it a highly effective way to treat relational wounds, like healing from dysfunctional family systems or unhealthy relationships.
Interested in EMDR? Head to our contact form here or click the button below to get in touch.