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.
hope you enjoy this episode. Hello and welcome to the EMDR Doctor podcast. I'm Dr Caroline Lloyd and I'm glad that you're tuning in because today we're going to dive into something really important for those starting their EMDR journey. So we are going to talk about the eight phases of EMDR therapy, what they mean and how they can help you heal.
So when people talk about EMDR, often what they're referring to is the phases four to seven, which are the memory processing phases. But there's a bit of work to be done before we get to those active processing phases. So let's start at the beginning and talk about phase one, which is history taking. when you first meet your therapist, your therapist will want to get to know you and your life story,
brought you to therapy, what your goals are, what you particularly want to achieve. It's all about building trust, communication and understanding your unique experiences. So this phase is a little bit like drawing a map. So on any journey, we need to know where we're starting from, where we want to end up, the important stops along the way and what mountains we need to climb or what cliffs we might need to avoid falling down.
Rebecca Saunders (02:00.946)
So good, thorough history taking gives us the best chance of a smooth, scenic and uneventful journey. And although it sounds like a one -stop shop, history taking is actually a kind of dynamic fluid thing that slowly evolves and becomes more detailed and richer as we progress through therapy. So in one sense, the history taking never stops as you and your therapist get to know one another.
and your story unfolds and they understand a bit more about the complexity that you bring to the room. So as a therapist, we may get a fair idea of the basics in the first session, but for some people, things are more complex and we can't just dive in and ask all those questions really boldly and brutally. For some people, their story needs to be told in tiny bite sized pieces.
So for everyone, phase one is often interspersed with phase two and three and onwards, just depending on how fast we're able to move. So some therapists in that first session will do a structured timeline. Others will be more organic and allow a natural process of storytelling. It kind of depends a little bit on the therapist and their style and how comfortable you feel with them and how comfortable they feel.
taking the history from you. So sometimes clients come in with a ready -made list of traumas and whilst this shows great organisation and enthusiasm, we still do need to do the history taking as we get a lot of information about how the story is told more than just the facts on the page or the date when things happened to
So history taking can also include the good things about you. We do want to know your strengths and your hobbies and your passions. And we will often incorporate these into phase two and beyond. So phase two is all about preparation. So think about this as getting your toolbox ready. So your therapist will teach you some coping skills if you need coping skills to manage any emotional distress that might come up during therapy.
Rebecca Saunders (04:22.984)
So it's also about making sure that you feel safe and supported throughout the process. And some people have a magnificent box of coping skills already, and some only have one or two and rely on those desperately and they need to be more fully resourced. So sometimes we don't even know if a tool is missing and we try processing a memory. And then sometimes that goes a bit pear -shaped. We need to go back to phase two to fill in some gaps. So phase
a little bit like phase one can be extended or can be quite short, can flow in with phase one at the same time and can flow into phase three and four as well. they're not mutually exclusive, these phases. So phase three is target assessment. So a target is the word we use for a specific
defined memory that we decide to work on. So assessing a target is a collaborative task with a therapist is guided by you as to what's important to work on. And the therapist can help you identify themes or beliefs and where they originated from and to figure out the best approach and the best starting point. So you'll pinpoint some negative beliefs you have about yourself because of those memories.
and the positive beliefs that you'd like to replace them with. There's a bit of drilling down to do. Sometimes the negative belief is very obvious and sometimes it's not, and it takes a bit of questioning to get into the heart of things.
So moving on to phase four. So phase four is the desensitization part. This is what people usually refer to when they say, I'm doing EMDR today. This is where the magic happens. It's also the really hard work phase. This is where the bilateral stimulation comes in with the eye movements or tapping or the bilateral audio. You'll focus on those target memories while your therapist guides you through the bilateral stimulation.
Rebecca Saunders (06:35.862)
And this helps your brain process these memories in a new way, reducing their emotional charge. So I'm going to make a full podcast on phase four next week to go into it in more detail as most people have a lot of questions around what to do, how to do it, what it involves. Am I doing it right? Is this normal? So phase four is followed by surprise, surprise phase five.
So phase five is installation. So after we release the emotion of the memory, then we can learn something better about ourselves with regards to that memory. And here's where we reinforce those positive beliefs about yourself. So they may be the same as the one you identified in the setup of the target, or it may be something related.
So we work on strengthening your self -esteem and confidence and replacing old negative thoughts with new, healthier, positive beliefs about yourself that serve you better. So that's phase five. And phase six, we turn to the body. So we do a bit of a body scan and see how your body is feeling in relation to that particular memory. So the body is an integral part of EMDR.
and often will be embedded in the processing all the way along. And at the end of processing, your therapist will help you notice any lingering physical sensations or discomfort related to the memories that you've worked on. And this phase is all about paying particular attention to the body, integrating the processing of the memory with the body, celebrating the release of the body discomfort.
and embedding the relaxation into the body.
Rebecca Saunders (08:35.309)
Phase seven is about closure. So this is a little bit like wrapping up a chapter. So you and your therapist will review your progress, make sure you're feeling stable, maybe use the container, which is one of the resources that we often work on in phase two, and set up some self -care strategies that you can use between sessions. So phase seven,
maybe a few minutes or maybe 15 minutes. For some people, it's a little bit longer depending on if we finished the processing of that particular memory or not. It's all about making sure that you're feeling OK to leave the session, to go back into the world, to drive home, take care of the kids, whatever you need to do after the session.
So phase eight is about re -evaluation. So this phase actually happens at the beginning of the next session. So the beginning of the session after you've done the processing work and we re -evaluate the target that we worked on at the last session. So your therapist will check in on the target, see how it's feeling, how strong the positive cognition feels, if there are any new memories or new issues that have come
as a result of last session that you want to work on and in general, just checking in with how that work went, how you felt about it, how you feel about the memory now. And it gives us a bit of a bit of guidance as to what you want to work on for the next session.
So there we go. We've covered the eight phases of EMDR therapy in a nutshell. So remember it's a little bit artificial because each phase does morph into each other a little bit or quite a lot and we can't separate them out entirely. And the process is more organic than it feels when we just kind of go through one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. So.
Rebecca Saunders (10:40.244)
Everyone's journey through EMDR therapy is quite unique and it's really normal to have ups and downs along the way, but each phase is designed to make the process holistic and safe and thorough and to support you in your healing and moving forward.
So I hope that's given you a little bit of an outline of the eight phases of the EMDR therapy. Thanks for listening today. If you have any questions or you want to learn more about EMDR therapy, don't hesitate to reach out either to your therapist or feel free to contact me. Next week, we'll be talking about phase four in more detail and getting down into the nitty gritty of it. So in the meantime, take care, talk to you soon. Bye for
