Heal from Trauma with EMDR Therapy in Dallas
What is EMDR Therapy?
Our skilled clinicians in Dallas, Texas, use Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy. This is one of our highly effective psychotherapy interventions. EMDR therapy is an evidence-based technique designed to help people overcome trauma and other disturbing experiences. It is recognized by the American Psychiatric Association, the World Health Organization (WHO), the Department of Defense, and more.
Because EMDR treatment helps alleviate emotional stress associated with traumatic memories, it has proved very beneficial for patients in recovery.
How EMDR Can Help Your Recovery
Our EMDR-trained therapists will direct you through a series of side-to-side eye movements while exposing you to challenging stimuli in a safe environment. Additionally, they may incorporate hand-tapping and audio stimuli. These techniques may be used to process traumatic memories by creating new associations in your brain.
Looking Back, at the Present, and Looking Forward
When you participate in EMDR therapy in Dallas, TX, our trained therapists will help you look at your past, present, and future. They will guide you toward healthier ways to process information and eliminate emotional distress. As EMDR helps desensitize you to present emotional triggers and calms your brain, you’ll learn new insights about your past and practical skills to respond and adapt to the stresses of future events.
This three-fold approach gets to the basis of your existing dysfunction and helps you adapt by forming new links in your brain. By helping you recognize and name your internal and external triggers, EMDR enables you to target the precise instances that are causing you stress in the present moment. Finally, your therapist will help you imagine future events causing you to worry so that you can acquire and practice the skills you need to adapt.
Empowering Your Brain to Heal Itself
Through EMDR therapy in Dallas, you’ll learn to identify disturbing life experiences and their associated mental blocks in a way that facilitates faster healing, cutting down on the time you’ll spend in psychotherapy. We’ve learned that the mind can heal from trauma, similarly to how the skin heals itself from a physical wound.
If you get a cut on your leg, you immediately notice how your blood starts to clot and close the wound. Experience tells you that if dirt gets in the cut, it will cause pain. You know to wash it carefully and keep a close eye on it to facilitate healing.
Using this analogy, the EMDR techniques target the brain’s natural ability to heal and move toward mental health by addressing the wounds that cause your pain. When emotional blocks are removed, healing resumes. In addition to helping with trauma, EMDR treats more common daily memories that lead to low self-esteem and feelings of powerlessness.
The Process of EMDR
There are several critical phases of treatment. First, your therapist will take a thorough history to determine which complex memory to target first. Next, you will be asked to hold different aspects of that traumatic event in your mind and use your eyes to follow your therapist’s hand as it moves back and forth across your field of vision.
Researchers theorize that this back-and-forth eye movement mimics Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep. That’s when your body’s biological mechanisms kick in to help you process the memory and disturbing feelings and transform them into something healthier.
You and your therapist may start working with childhood-onset trauma and move gradually to adult events. You’ll be taught a variety of imagery and stress reduction techniques you can use during and between sessions to maintain equilibrium to keep up with rapid and effective changes. As you move through the phases of EMDR, you’ll begin to pinpoint negative self-beliefs and related bodily sensations.
What Makes EMDR Unique
Your therapist will help you focus on the image, negative thoughts, and body sensations while you engage in the EMDR processing techniques such as eye movements, taps, or tones that work for you. Thoughts, feelings, images, memories, and sensations will arise as your therapist guides you to find the best processing tools. You’ll gradually learn what self-calming activities and EMDR techniques work for you.
For more information about EMDR therapy in Dallas, TX, call Origins Counseling at 561-841-1264.
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