Is EMDR Effective for Treating Things Other Than PTSD?
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy has been around since the 80s. When people think of EMDR, they usually think of it as a treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which is accurate. EMDR is well researched and highly effective for helping people heal and recover from PTSD.
I have had the fortune of utilizing EMDR as a form of treatment for my clients for the past several years. In my experience, EMDR is effective with a wider range of issues than strictly PTSD. EMDR has demonstrated effectiveness in healing from negative experiences as well as enhancing the positive traits and experiences to improve how you feel and act in your life.
As a form of healing, EMDR can address negative symptoms associated with:
Grief
Depression
Anxiety
Phobias
Panic Attacks
Addictions
Breakups or divorces
Recent traumas/smaller traumatic events
As a form of enhancing your positive well-being, EMDR can heighten:
Core strengths enhancements - building on the positive traits you already possess
Self-esteem
Healthy habits
Positive beliefs
One of my favorite things about EMDR is its versatility - clinicians can be creative and integrate it with other types of therapy.
EMDR for PTSD
Not all trauma that occurs becomes PTSD. When something traumatic happens, we all experience a normal stress reaction. In many cases, our brain processes that experience and we return to baseline engagement with the world after a few months. When our brain has difficulty doing so, trauma becomes part of our long-term memory. Then, PTSD symptoms result. It takes about 2-3 months before a traumatic experience becomes part of long-term memory. In these cases, early intervention with EMDR could prevent one from developing PTSD. This type of EMDR involves giving a narrative of the event and processing the worst part of the memory. Then, processing the whole event as if one is watching a video. Usually, processing a recent event can be done in 3 sessions.
In a similar way, EMDR can be used to help people process natural disasters or exposure to the aftermath of a war. Further, EMDR can help people process seemingly smaller traumas like being humiliated in the 1st grade by a teacher and now struggling to speak in public. I’ve also seen EMDR help kids and young adults recover from being bullied.
Effectiveness of EMDR
You might be asking yourself, why does EMDR address all these different types of things? Is that really possible? Understanding the EMDR treatment protocol and process helps make sense of this apparent incongruity. EMDR is a fully integrative therapy. This means it addresses your emotions, thoughts, and physical responses to triggers. Being able to focus on these three prongs of response applies to everything that happens in our lives.
Part of the EMDR process is using your mind to internalize positive resources you can lean on in times of stress in the future. With this process, you develop coping skills. Some of these skills are creating a safe place, imagining supportive people, and other imagery that creates a state of empowerment and positive feelings.
When you use EMDR to process trauma, you tap into the images, emotions, and negative beliefs about yourself and their expression in your body. Furthermore, the bilateral stimulation process allows your brain to heal itself through fully processing the trauma response.
EMDR Treats Many Issues
This protocol can be adapted to many presenting problems other than PTSD. Often, people do not realize it, but depression, anxiety, phobias, or addictions are often tied to trauma. So, they can be treated with EMDR therapy.
EMDR for Depression
Sometimes, depression comes from PTSD, ongoing trauma, vague feelings of a lack of safety, or not getting what you needed emotionally from a parent. Likewise, depression can spur from ongoing shame or growing up with a depressed parent. Other times, depression comes from a difficult situation in which there is little control. On the other hand, depression can also be simply biological. Whatever the cause, depression often involves an ongoing feedback loop with negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to avoid feeling depressed.
Dr. Elisha Goldstein posits that depression is a trauma. Depression affects the same areas of the brain. So, there are fears about getting depressed again. And, depression often negatively affects how people see themselves and the world. Depression is our brain and body’s way of shutting down and hunkering down in a situation that doesn’t feel safe. Moreover, it is a different coping mechanism than the classic fight or flight.
EMDR therapy can help by bringing the body from that shutdown state to a more activated, engaged state. Since depression can have different origins, an EMDR therapist will explore many areas in the intake to assess your depression. They will also assess if EMDR is an appropriate treatment for you. EMDR is an integrative therapy. So, your therapist will also encourage things to improve depression, like getting sunlight, eating nutritious foods, getting good sleep, movement, and social engagement. Doing some resource development with EMDR can go a long way toward helping a person with depression. It will help you feel more motivated, empowered, and able to make changes. Some things you might process in EMDR therapy are negative beliefs about yourself, losses that have occurred due to depression, fears about the depression, or the negative feelings that come along with depression.
EMDR for Grief
Like depression, EMDR can help with complicated grief. EMDR does not help people forget about things, people, or grief, but it does help people get unstuck from grief. Grief is a normal and healthy process. Some grief is complicated, traumatic, or creates a lot of guilt. For example, I have used EMDR with clients to overcome the traumatic grief after losing someone to suicide. These clients had negative feelings about themselves, images that were stuck in their heads, and difficulty moving on years after the event. During EMDR therapy, you might process traumatic events associated with the grief, guilt, or images, thoughts, and feelings that feel stuck.
A local comedian, Adam Cayton-Holland, wrote a book, Tragedy and Time. In this book, he describes his experience of the EMDR process his therapist used to help him heal from his sister’s suicide. As illustrated in his book, EMDR connects the mind, the heart, and the body. Even though one might rationally know they can move on or let go of the guilt, thinking that alone isn’t enough to move on. EMDR helps people remember their loved ones and continue to participate in life.
EMDR for Healing from Relationships
Grief and loss can be related to various things, including breakups and divorce. Relationships often bring up our biggest insecurities and negative core beliefs. I have found success using EMDR with people that are having trouble moving past divorce or breakup. Further, I have used EMDR to help those trying to have healthier relationships in general.
We never know where EMDR will take us, but often the things that bother us in relationships go back to childhood. Sometimes there are deep-seated core beliefs under the relationship problems. These may be feeling undeserving of love, not good enough, or unsafe. One person I worked with was able to connect her codependency problems back to feeling unsafe as a child. And, she was able to do so in a much quicker way than she was able to do with talk therapy. That is powerful stuff! And it resulted in an actual change in how she approached dating.
EMDR for Phobias
We never know where EMDR will go, and sometimes we don’t know how we developed our fears, phobias, and anxieties. CBT and exposure therapy are helpful for phobias like fear of flying, spiders, or public speaking. However, we can’t always mimic getting on a flight or a public speaking situation. Using EMDR for phobias is an effective way to “expose” oneself to thoughts, feelings, and body sensations associated with your phobia when you are unable to engage in direct exposure. And, when phobias stem from a trauma like a dental phobia because you had a bad experience, EMDR directly addresses the phobia. In addition, it will address the lingering trauma responses in your brain from the initial traumatic experience.
EMDR for Panic Attacks and Anxiety
Panic attacks can be processed in a similar way. People who suffer from panic attacks can become paralyzed by fear of a panic attack itself or its seeming life-threatening nature. EMDR can help reduce these fears. Furthermore, general anxiety is often associated with trauma. Much like depression, developing some resources alone can help one emotionally regulate anxiety. For example, with social anxiety, imagining handling a future situation in a positive way could be very empowering.
EMDR for General Issues
On occasion, clients coming into therapy don’t clearly know what is wrong, they just know they are not doing well. EMDR is a good option for addressing these types of issues. With EMDR, the narrative or memories of your life are not required for healing. Instead, the focus is on how your mind, heart, and body are reacting right now. For example, maybe your coworker really bothers you more than they should, and you just don’t understand why. It could be that the coworker is similar to someone hurtful from your past. With EMDR, you don’t need to actually remember the past person to process and overcome your feelings with the current coworker. Another example is a queer-identified person feeling like they do not quite belong anywhere. It is a common experience of LGBTQ folks to fear being rejected. This could stem from feeling different as a child. Maybe, something specific happened to enhance this fear. However, it’s often a series of messages and observations, both intentional and unintentional, that create this anxiety.
Sometimes, people are unable to move forward with something important without feeling like something bad is going to happen. Others may struggle with chronic feelings of unworthiness or feel stuck repeatedly experiencing the same negative patterns without knowing how to stop the cycle. These people may not see a clear incident that feels like trauma, but something may have happened, and their brain is stuck on it. EMDR therapy doesn’t help people retrieve memories. And it's important to know that EMDR does not always work for all issues. But, with some of these vague presentations, EMDR can unlock something that talk therapy might not.
EMDR for Self Improvement
Most of what you’ve read so far is how EMDR can help people with problems like depression, anxiety, and trauma. You may not be aware of this, but EMDR can also be used to improve self-esteem, create a change in mindset, and enhance performance. I have worked with many people in therapy, particularly women, who struggle to feel confident taking risks, meeting new people, or thinking negatively about themselves. So many of us walk around with a tape in our heads repeating the negative messages we learned and integrated when we were young. These messages often become outsized negative beliefs we have about ourselves. Processing some of this and doing the resource development can help rewrite the tape. This leaves a person with more positive beliefs about themselves and increased confidence. Performance anxiety, feeling blocked before giving a speech or a sports game, or other such events could also have roots in negative beliefs about yourself or a smaller trauma that occurred. Most people struggle with public speaking. For some people, there might be a trauma causing that. For others, using EMDR to prepare for and visualize speaking successfully can be useful.
EMDR and Positive Psychology
Maybe you’re thriving already and just want to feel happier or have more success in life. EMDR can enhance wellbeing. Shortly after being trained in EMDR, I took a class on positive psychology and EMDR. This is an interesting intersection. Part of EMDR is developing positive and future-oriented coping skills. Positive psychology posits that not only do we need to think about mental illness, but mental wellness as well. For example, there is a survey called the VIA strengths, developed by Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology. This survey can help you identify strengths like creativity, knowledge, kindness, and many others. To further enhance these strengths, EMDR can help. Like I mentioned before, EMDR really connects the mind and the heart. So, it can help you go from rationally believing you have that strength to fully believing and embodying it.
EMDR can also be used to help let go of a negative habit and add a more positive habit. With some creativity, one could use the strengths identified and imagine a future in which they’ve added the habit, like exercising more. Not exercising isn’t necessarily something that stems from anxiety, depression, or trauma, but exercising greatly enhances a person’s life. EMDR could also be used to enhance and embody gratitude and mindfulness, which improves our wellbeing overall.
Although I have used EMDR to help clients with a variety of symptoms and disorders, I’ve also benefitted from using EMDR to enhance wellness. In the class I mentioned, I had the opportunity to work with other therapists who were coaches trained in positive psychology. One exercise we did was create a “commitment credo” combining our strengths, values, and desires for the future. We used EMDR to install these positive beliefs, work through fears and blocks, and embody what the future could be. It really changed my life and I’ve been fortunate enough to share that with clients I’ve worked with too. It is a bit off-script for EMDR and certainly not well-researched, but powerful.
EDMR Works
EMDR, proven to effectively treat PTSD, has also demonstrated effectiveness in a variety of other psychological issues. Part of the effectiveness of EMDR therapy has to do with the relationship between client and therapist. As with all therapy, rapport, trust, and safety with the therapist are critical to healing and change. As a therapist, EMDR is fun! It lends itself to creativity on the therapist’s part in thinking about how EMDR could help, what to target, and coming up with creative resources with the client.
EMDR is an integrative therapy, meaning it is integrated with other effective modalities like cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, and even positive psychology. Unlike talk therapy alone, it connects the brain to the body and the heart. Our emotions show up in our bodies. Although we can cognitively believe something, it sometimes doesn’t stick until we feel it in our hearts and minds. I’ve met many people trying to affirm they are good enough, saying the right words, doing the right things, but not believing it. Experience helps us believe these things and EMDR is one such experience.