Melbourne trauma psychotherapy

Eye movement and de-sensitisation and reprocessing therapy (EMDR) is a type of psychological treatment that was originally developed to treat individuals who had experienced single-incident traumatic events (e.g. a car accident, a sexual assault experience, etc.). However, EMDR has developed over the last thirty years to treat a variety of psychological difficulties, including anxiety, depression, dissociation, phobias, OCD, and more complex forms of trauma, including extended experiences of childhood abuse and neglect.

The theory behind EMDR’s mechanism of change posits that mental health difficulties are memory-based. That is, if past difficult memories have not been properly processed or stored, they remain easily triggered in day-to-day functioning and can colour the perceptions and behaviours of individuals today. These memories might not be consciously remembered, but rather, unconsciously inform an individual’s sense of themselves (e.g. worthless), or sense of others (e.g. dangerous). Because these memories have not been properly processed or stored, they cannot be changed by other adaptive information that individuals have learned or experienced, and therefore remain active and continue to cause ongoing problems for individuals.

EMDR works by directly accessing the memory networks associated with these past difficult memories, and through the use of bi-lateral stimulation (that is, a stimulus that is presented to one side of the body, and then the other side of the body), is able to complete the processing and integration of these difficult memories such that individuals can now think and feel differently about the memory. This is because the memory has become integrated into the rest of the memory network, and thus the individual has been able to think about the experience using different and more adaptive knowledge.

The following short video describes the theory behind EMDR: