If You Can’t Remember Trauma, Can EMDR Help?

Frustration. Anxiety. Emotionally numb.

You’ve tried to fight the feelings, but you can’t seem to shake them.

A trauma happened, you know that. You show a lot of the signs and symptoms of experiencing trauma.

In order to protect yourself, you’ve worked hard to bury the details deep inside of you. No matter how hard you try, you can’t seem to remember everything that happened.

You don’t exactly want to remember all of the details. You survived the trauma. It is part of your past and yet you still feel reactive and catch a familiar uneasy feeling. You don’t have all of the specific memories but in some ways something still feels off. The way our brain works when faced with an extreme threat, it makes sense that some (or most) of the details are blurry or non-existent.

Here’s how EMDR can help you shift from reactivity to stability and healing as you fill in the gaps if you can’t remember your trauma.

What is EMDR Therapy?

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It’s a technique that uses bilateral stimulation to reprocess negative experiences, situations, and events into more positive ones.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy doesn’t erase the memories or feelings that you associate with a certain event, but it can help you feel a little less stuck in the process.

It’s a process that focuses on all three areas of healing: thoughts, emotions, and what you feel in your body.

How Does EMDR Therapy Work?

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy helps to clear fragmented sensory components of memory that were not filed away properly in the face of a threat beyond an individual’s ability to cope in that moment. Similar to how our eyes move back and forth during REM sleep, researchers believe bilateral stimulation is a similar, in that we process events from short-term to long-term memory.

The eye movement is recreated during an EMDR therapy session by either watching a therapist’s finger move back and forth or by tactile bilateral stimulation using hand tappers. The movements help integrate left side and ride side brain components of the memory. This bilateral stimulation helps you reprocess and gives you the ability to move on with less nervous system reactivity around the memory.

During the session, a therapist will help guide the individual by focusing on negative memories and identifying their feelings, thoughts, and emotions tied to that specific memory. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing allows the person to reprocess that negative memory and ends by associating it to a positive belief instead.

EMDR allows individuals to safely process their trauma until its no longer disruptive to them. With time, reliving these memories will no longer bring on negative feelings or symptoms.

Why Does EMDR Therapy Work?

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy sessions have proven to be one of the most effective treatment options available for trauma. EMDR therapy has also been used to treat a variety of other disorders like anxiety, chronic pain, depression, phobias, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD.

EMDR often provides noticeable relief and results as our brain naturally works towards healing. This can be a huge breakthrough for someone with trauma, especially because after a trauma happens, the body can hold onto it.

In addition to the benefits the brain receives during a session, EMDR helps the nervous system deal with the trauma that’s stored in the body that’s preventing it from returning to its normal state.

Next Steps

Interested in learning more about EMDR therapy?

After an initial assessment, we’ll work with you to determine the best plan of action for your recovery.

We can discuss treatment options and determine if Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy is the best treatment plan for you and your healing.

EMDR can help you fill in those gaps from the past. We’ll help get you on your way to healing for a better future.

Reach out to us today to schedule a consultation to see if EMDR therapy is right for you.