Mental Health Monday: What is EMDR?

What is EMDR?

Adam Copland writes,

The Best Drug I’ve Ever Taken Wasn’t Even a Drug. It was EMDR Therapy.

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, and it’s a highly effective treatment for trauma. Here’s how it works:

EMDR is a helpful form of therapy for people who

1) want an experience that is somatic (reorganizing the brain and body’s reactions to trauma, stress, and anxiety) and/or

2) want to do something that can accomplish a lot in a relatively short period of time and/or

3) want to do less talking with a therapist (though this can be part of it too if desired), particularly if it’s hard to put emotions into words.

Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk, the author of The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain, and Body in the Healing of Trauma shares that “I’m pretty sure that our EMDR study had by far the best outcome of any PTSD study ever done… It proves that there is something unique and amazing about EMDR.”