EMDR Therapy

I love working with EMDR for several reasons:

  • It’s fast - generally faster than other therapies I was trained in - at dealing with many issues. (I should add that it’s not magic - sometimes people get pretty excited about ‘fast’!)

  • It can get to the ‘hard to reach’ places that sometimes other therapies can’t.

  • We don’t necessarily need to know the reason for the issue to work on it: we identify the feelings - emotional and in your body - and work from there.

  • You don’t have to describe the trauma or experience in depth for us to work on it. I will need to sketch out a ‘map’ of your life to help you navigate, but I don’t need a blow-by-blow account.

  • Done ethically by a trained therapist, it is unlikely to re-traumatise you.

  • My clients often report feeling lighter, freer, experiencing an absence of something - an unhelpful reaction, pain, certain thoughts - after doing EMDR.

** EMDR = Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing

Why EMDR?

I trained in EMDR therapy after my experiences at the Priory, Woking. There were times when the types of therapy I had trained in didn’t seem to be able to quite get to the nub of the issue. Clients would have great awareness of the origin of their feelings, of what they needed to do, but they would still experience strong reactions to certain triggers. In some cases, this could be a fear - for example, a fear of death, travelling in a car, or dogs - or it could be a reaction to an argument with their partner. Whatever the issue, when there is a very strong emotional and body response to certain situations, that is a sign that it is a good candidate for EMDR.

How does EMDR work?

EMDR mimics the natural processing that happens during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. It works by focusing on the connection between distressing thoughts, emotions, and body sensations, while using rapid side-to-side eye movements (or taps, or buzzers) to help your brain reprocess traumatic material.

Once reprocessed, you can think about difficult experiences without experiencing overwhelming physical or emotional reactions, and related situations are no longer triggering. EMDR helps you respond to what is happening now, rather than reacting unconsciously from a place of old, unprocessed pain.

Is EMDR right for me?

It may be that you come to me certain of wanting to do EMDR, or that we figure that out as our work progresses. How long EMDR takes depends on the issue we are working on: for an isolated incident, it can be a few sessions; for more complex childhood experiences, it can be longer. If you have a fixed amount of sessions in mind, let me know and we can explore some realistic goals for your sessions.