How Does EMDR Work?

Clean out the trauma that keeps you from reaching your potential. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) activates your brain’s natural capacity to heal old - often unconscious - traumatic memories that trigger overreactions. EMDR also promotes creative problem solving and working through mental blocks by allowing you to think through the strong emotional reactions that keep you stuck.

When you experience trauma, it is stored in your brain in what amounts to a biological alarm system. This alarm system's job is to keep you alive. When humans first evolved, the threats we faced were often physical - predatory animals, predatory humans, and natural disasters. Reacting fast was critical to survival. The result? Our alarm system is more quick than accurate. We have a natural tendency to exaggerate threat. This knowledge is encoded in our DNA - if something bad happened once, it can happen again. And because this sensitive biological alarm worked to keep us alive in primitive times, it has remained a part of us. Better to run away from a kitty cat you mistake for a tiger than to wait a fraction of a second and be wrong. Better safe than sorry.

Our already sensitive biological alarm is very good at becoming even more reactive to threat. And when we are faced with a threat, this biological alarm instantly shifts the body’s chemistry to mimic what it was during the original trauma.

Now let's look at our biological alarm system in the present era. It values speed over accuracy, so it is prone to mistakes! It believes that if something bad happened once, it is likely to happen again. React quickly or lose. Yet, in reaction, we can actually become less intelligent. The blood in our "thinking" frontal lobes shifts back to the part of the brain that controls physical movement so we can fight, run, or even surrender more quickly and efficiently. This causes over-reactions to modern, non-physical, interpersonal threats. Our biological alarm system is so fast and so powerful, we easily get swept away to repetitive, inflexible response patterns without even knowing it! For example, anger is less about being right than it is about gaining a competitive advantage - great in the bush, but not so great when you have to cooperate under stress in modern families and modern offices. You can get stuck in loops of anger, fear, hopelessness, and depression.

EMDR helps you get unstuck. It appears to have a direct effect of turning on your ability to think while actually in the midst of an emotional reaction. In our work together, we call up the old negative emotional reaction, and with EMDR, the blocked information processing is resumed. You realize that the threat is in the past, and that the biggest problem you are experiencing is the emotional reaction that gets triggered when the memory is activated. So following a successful EMDR session, you no longer relive the images, sounds, and feelings when a traumatic event is brought to mind. You still remember what happened, but it is often much less upsetting. Many types of therapy have similar goals. However, EMDR appears to be similar to what occurs naturally during dreaming or REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. Therefore, EMDR can be thought of as a physiologically based therapy that activates you inner ability to calm disturbing memories in a new and less distressing way.

For more information about the uses and efficacy of EMDR, please visit our page on EMDR Research!

“As someone who has sought counseling every few years about my weight problem, resulting in less-than-impressive results, I was initially skeptical when my coach at the ultimateU recommended that I try EMDR work with Dr. Brian Barkett. Through my sessions I am now able to acknowledge the many long-ignored issues and feelings in my life that I have kept suppressed with food as my numbing agent of choice. I have never truly tapped into the reasons before, but Dr. Brian, using EMDR, has encouraged me to talk about these strong emotions that surface when I overeat, and then he discusses with me the events/feelings responsible for them. I grew up in a family that never encouraged me to go beyond the safe constraints of my place in the social hierarchy. So when I began to realize that my potential was so much greater, I climbed the ladder of success, but always felt guilty about doing so. I never felt that my family/friends/colleagues approved of my ambition and success, so I would eventually sabotage my success, resulting in feelings of failure that I would numb with food. The best part has been that Dr. Brian has helped me to see that I have the power to change how I interpret these feelings in the future so that I accept my potential, without feeling guilty and needing to turn to food. I am experiencing a freedom in my life that I have never had before. I highly recommend Dr. Brian and the EMDR technique because, together, they have helped me to free myself from the past so that I can enjoy living in the now." -G.