Rebecca Saunders (00:03.864)
Hello and welcome to the EMDR Doctor podcast.
This is a podcast for clients where I share and explore information about all things EMDR. My name is Dr. Caroline Lloyd. I'm a mental health GP and an EMDR practitioner. And my goal is to demystify EMDR or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing to help you on your EMDR journey. EMDR is a powerful therapy which helps to reduce the distress from difficult memories. And my goal is to make it accessible to everyone.
I hope you enjoy this episode. Hello and welcome to episode two of EMDR Doctor. Today I'm going to explore that first question that people ask me. What actually is EMDR? So EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing. And the official response is EMDR is a powerful evidence -based structured eight phase therapy designed for PTSD.
The reality is that it's a quirky blend of imagination, science, somatic work, CBT and ACT all rolled up into this magic weird process that involves eye movement or some sort of bilateral stimulation that takes your horrific memories and makes them into just something bad that happened to you one time. It can also take your horrific imaginings of the future from expectations of dread
to expectations of excitement. EMDR is a memory -based therapy, not a diagnosis -based therapy. So it works across all diagnoses and it goes to the cause of the distress, which is often an incident or maybe many incidents, which caused us to learn something about ourselves, which in turn causes distress and incapacity. So for example, if I was bullied at high school,
Rebecca Saunders (02:03.99)
It may have been a really distressing time when I learned that I was useless and unworthy of having friends. And in my adult life, this may present as, for example, social anxiety with feeling anxious and fearful of going to social occasions or even agoraphobia with a fear of leaving the house. So it might present as depression with feeling low and sad and hopeless, or it may present as OCD with
paying attention to all the details to control my environment to help reduce those feelings of anxiety and hopelessness. Or it may present as an eating disorder, trying to soothe myself with food or maybe being thin enough for people to like me. So we work on the distress associated with these memories to resolve the symptoms that present as the diagnosis. I'll be talking a
about diagnoses and the ability of EMDR to work across many different diagnoses in a future podcast. But for now, the point that I want to make is that EMDR is a memory based therapy that works on the distressing memories so that distress doesn't have to turn up in our current situation and impede our current life. EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitisation and
The eye movement part is an important aspect of EMDR. So often we use a pointer or a light bar for the client to follow with their eyes from left to right, left and right, left, right. And we use that bilateral stimulation to help the memory separate from the emotion that's attached to the memory.
And when we talk about bilateral stimulation, we're referring to anything that takes the conscious attention from one side to the other, from left to right and back again. So this is usually eye movements, but can be other physical movements like tapping left and right or rocking or even listening to sounds through stereo headphones where you get sound going from the left side to the right side and back again.
Rebecca Saunders (04:18.069)
So the bilateral stimulation just needs to engage the brain in alternate left and right attention. And the purpose of this left and right brain activity is to help release the memory and allow it to be reprogrammed into a less distressing version. So when something bad happens to us that is outside of our capacity to cope, our brain stores the memory in the limbic system, which is the emotional part of the brain.
And the memory is often held as a picture, like a photo or Polaroid or a video. So the visual aspect associated with the other senses, the smells, the sounds, the physical sensations and the emotions, and also the thoughts that we were having about the situation and ourselves. So they're all the aspects of memory. So when we are under stress, the hormones that our bodies make under stress,
cause a disruption to the normal brain processes. So if you imagine being in a very stressful situation, the body creates cortisol and adrenaline and noradrenaline, all the fight or flight hormones. And all of these hormones act not only on the body to help us run away or fight or cope with the situation, however we needed to do that. But the hormones also work on the brain. And one of the effects is to hold or freeze that
memory or situation in the short -term emotional part of the brain. That particular situation then doesn't get processed into the long -term memory, it stays in the short -term memory and it's easily and readily reactivated as if we're living it over and over. So any small trigger will cause us to reactivate that memory and relive it as if it is happening right now. So that's what happens with PTSD.
So other unpleasant things that aren't particularly traumatic or are within our capacity to cope will be allowed to be processed into the long -term memory part of the brain and stored in that less distressed part of the brain. So like if I was at the supermarket and someone runs into my ankles with a trolley, which actually did happen to me the other day.
Rebecca Saunders (06:36.702)
So it was unpleasant, I didn't like it, but it wasn't traumatic. So if I think about it next week, it will likely just be something that happened last Thursday or was it Friday or doesn't actually matter. So it's been transferred to that long term part of my brain and doesn't intrude on me unexpectedly. So with traumatic memories that haven't been processed properly, what EMDR does is allow that memory to be
disconnected from the emotion and reprogrammed and then stored in the long -term less emotional part of the brain. So it can become just something that happened to me that time rather than a current reliving of it or a current crisis. And so doesn't need to intrude upon us in our everyday life. So I hope that explanation has given you a little bit
information about how memories are stored and what happens with EMDR and the way that it works to help us feel better about ourselves. So I've talked a little bit about the bilateral stimulation and how that allows the traumatic memories to become just a thing of the past. So I hope that's been helpful to you. I'll be talking in more detail about some of these things in a future podcast. So until next time, take care. Bye for now.
