Have you ever felt like you were stuck in the past, going over a bad memory again and again? Like a moment in time has a hold on you and affects your feelings, your decisions and relationships? Many people continue to feel the effects of a traumatic or distressing event long after it happened. No matter how hard you try, it feels like you can’t move on.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) was designed to heal people trapped in their past traumas. It is an effective form of therapy that helps the brain deal with negative belief. In this post, we’ll explain what EMDR is, discuss its benefits, steps involved, and most importantly, show how it helps people heal from traumatic experiences leading to addiction.
What is EMDR?
EMDR is a form of therapy that helps people heal from traumatic memories and other distressing experiences of their lives. In traditional talk therapy, you might spend months or even years talking about one memory. But EMDR uses a specific method to help your brain naturally move through the memory.
How Does It Work?
The core of EMDR therapy is a process called bilateral stimulation. This means that while you think about the memory, you are engaged in a rhythmic, back-and-forth activity. This could be an activity like following your therapist’s finger with your eyes as it moves from side to side, hand tapping, listening to different sounds in headphones, or holding on to handheld buzzers that vibrate left and right. This bilateral stimulation might sound odd, but it activates both sides of the brain, which helps it reprocess the memory in a less distressing way.
When a traumatic memory gets “stuck” in your mind, it’s often stored in a disorganized way. This associates it with intense emotions, physical sensations, and negative thoughts. It’s not stored away properly like other memories should be. EMDR helps to “unstick” the memory so it can be processed and stored in a way that feels less raw and overwhelming. You are the one doing the work; the bilateral stimulation is just a tool that helps your brain do it.
The Benefits of EMDR Therapy:
EMDR is best known for treating PTSD, but it can help with a lot more than just that. It is an effective treatment with a huge positive impact on a person’s life by identifying and fixing the root cause of their problems.
- Reducing Stress and Anxiety: For people who have chronic anxiety, the world seems like a constant threat. EMDR can help reduce body sensation by making new memories and thoughts which reduce anxiety. As these memories lose their control, the person’s stress and anxiety levels start reducing gradually.
- Improved Self-Esteem: A lot of disturbing events or distressing memories leave people with negative thoughts about themselves, like “I am worthless,” “It was my fault,” or “I am not safe.” EMDR helps by getting rid of these old, negative thoughts and replacing them with positive ones. Individuals start to see themselves in a new, better way once they deal with their past traumas.
- Emotional Regulation: People who have been through a lot of trauma find it hard to control their feelings because their brains are always on high alert. Even slight triggers make you feel angry, panicked, or withdrawn. EMDR can help calm the nervous system, which can help you better control your emotions and deal with everyday life.
- Effective for Different Conditions: EMDR can help with a lot of different problems and has a wide range of applications. It can be used to treat PTSD, anxiety, depression, phobias, panic attacks, grief, or chronic pain. All of these conditions stem from unresolved past experiences.
The 8-Phase Process in EMDR Therapy
EMDR is not a quick fix; it is a structured and planned therapy process. A qualified therapist will help you through eight different steps to make sure your recovery journey is safe.
Phase 1: Assessment and Treatment Planning
The therapist will ask questions to know you and your past at first. You’ll talk about why you went to therapy and name specific memories or events causing distress. In this phase, you will make sure you have a clear path and a safe, trusting relationship with your therapist.
Phase 2: Preparation
Your therapist will teach you methods to stay calm before you start working on anything difficult. This might include teaching you breathing exercises or other ways to deal with stress. This is a very important step to make sure you feel safe and ready to deal with any feelings that come up later.
Phase 3: Assessment
This is where you choose a specific memory to work on. You’ll identify a “target memory,” a negative thought you have about yourself related to that memory (like “I am helpless”). You will try to replace it with a positive thought instead (like “I am in control now”).
Phase 4: Eye Movement Desensitization
This is the most important part of EMDR. You will start the bilateral stimulation while keeping the target memory in your mind. As you do this, your therapist will tell you to just pay attention to what comes up. You might think, feel, or see something else. The therapist will guide you, but the goal is to let your mind go where it needs to go until the memory-related pain goes away.
Phase 5: Bilateral Stimulation
When the distress is reduced, the focus moves to strengthening the positive belief you chose in phase 3. You’ll focus on the memory again, this time with the new positive belief. You’ll use bilateral stimulation to really “install” it in your mind so that it feels true and real.
Phase 6: Body Scan
At the end of the session, your therapist will ask you to think about the memory one more time and see if you still feel any tension or discomfort in your body. The goal is to make sure that the memory doesn’t hurt you physically anymore.
Phase 7: Closure
The session is over, and the therapist helps you calm down again. You could talk about what happened and how you feel. They’ll also tell you what to do between sessions, stressing that the brain keeps working even after the session is over.
Phase 8: Reassessing
At the start of each new session, the therapist will check in to see how you’re doing. You’ll talk about any new thoughts or feelings that have come up since the last session and check on the progress of the target memory to make sure it’s completely resolved before moving on to a new one.
How EMDR Helps with the Connection Between Traumatic Memories and Addiction
It’s a common saying that addiction isn’t the problem but rather a symptom of deeper disturbing thoughts. For many people, that deeper issue is unresolved trauma. There is no doubt that the two are connected.
The “self-medication” theory explains this link by stating that many people use drugs or alcohol to numb the pain, escape the flashbacks, or calm the emotional turmoil that comes from traumatic events. The substance acts as a coping mechanism, helping people deal with feelings that seem too big to handle.
This is where EMDR stands out as a holistic approach with a systematic series of actions. Other addiction treatments focus on ways to deal with problems and avoid relapsing, but EMDR goes straight to the root of the problem. It helps by:
- Breaking the Cycle: EMDR goes straight to the root of the trauma that causes addictive behavior and fixes it. The need for self-medication goes down when your brain processes the core memories that led to substance use. The brain no longer is in a constant state of fight-or-flight, and the substance stops being an emotional carrier.
- Processing Triggers: Addiction comes with many triggers that make you want to use it again, like people, places, or feelings. You can use EMDR to work through distress related memories of your addiction, like a painful memory of a relapse or a certain situation that always makes you want to use it. As you work through these triggers, their emotional power fades, making them less powerful and easier to handle within a few months.
- Improving Coping Mechanism: EMDR doesn’t work on its own. A lot of the time, it’s used with other therapies and recovery programs. As the old, unhelpful way of coping (addiction) is no longer needed, a person has the time and space to learn and develop new, positive ways to deal with stress and emotional pain.
- A Holistic Approach: EMDR treats the whole person, not just the addiction but also the emotional triggers causing it. It sets a strong base for long-term sobriety and health by relieving the brain from past traumas.
Conclusion:
Overcoming addiction is a tough challenge, and for many, it’s not just about quitting a drug. It’s about getting rid of the pain that led to your addiction in the first place. EMDR is a direct and effective way to heal, helping to untie the complicated knots of trauma that keep so many people stuck. It’s not magic, but a scientifically proven way to help the brain do what it was always meant to do: heal, process, and move on!
