EMDR therapy: For more than just trauma

EMDR therapy, originally known for its effectiveness for processing trauma, has been growing rapidly in popularity in recent years. There is now a growing, promising research base for a wider range of client difficulties, which may appear 'smaller' or 'less severe' to you.

This article will explore how EMDR therapy can be used to work through difficulties that extend beyond trauma and benefit a wider range of individuals.

The core principles of EMDR therapy

EMDR theory is based on a couple of central ideas. One of the key ideas is that many difficulties today arise from unprocessed material from the past. When things are unprocessed, they repeat when triggered and are, therefore, “re-felt” or "re-lived" in the present moment. Once the past and any current triggers are processed, there should be nothing left to be triggered in the present; therefore, eradicating the symptoms.

This basic principle can be applied to most client presentations in some way, even if it’s not clear at first. But what is unprocessed material? Unprocessed material refers to experiences that are 'stored in a non-adaptive and inaccurate ways'. Whether it’s high body memories, distressing images, feelings of inadequacy, beliefs of not being good enough, lovable or worthy, high emotional charge remaining over time, and more.

They can even be experiences where something didn’t happen that should have, which then creates negative or inaccurate belief systems. These can be tricky, as it can make it hard for people to pinpoint, but a good therapist can help you.

How can EMDR help?

Social anxiety: Replacing limiting beliefs

There could be many reasons for social anxiety; however, there is a belief system in place which gets triggered around people. A belief system that says “I’m not good enough, people will laugh at me, I always mess things up, I don’t deserve to be here”, etc. Tracing these beliefs back in time can help us learn the origins of these beliefs. 

Maybe it's in experiences of shaming. Maybe the origins are in failures of nurture. Maybe early school memories of messing up a class presentation, which then got pushed into the back of the mind and not properly processed. Either way, they can be reprocessed so those beliefs dissipate, and the beliefs can get replaced with stronger, more adaptive and accurate beliefs. This could be “I messed up then, but that’s OK” or “So what, everyone messes up from time to time”, or "I got it wrong, but the people that matter don't care".

With successful EMDR therapy, these beliefs start to become felt at the gut level, not just at the knowledge level. When this happens, anxiety in the present dissipates or reduces to a healthy and appropriate level. Some situations may need further work to build up skills and confidence, which is why EMDR’s three prongs of past, present and future are really useful.

Depression: Healing developmental deficits

Someone feels depressed with low motivation and often lives life in a passive manner, leaving themselves in a life where their potential isn’t reached as they don’t have the motivation or belief to go further or hold appropriate boundaries.

Exploring past and present may identify unprocessed experiences of busy parents who couldn’t nurture them properly. Let's say parents showed love when they could, but work and financial pressures meant they couldn’t attend to the person's attachment needs, and the person then blocks out the emotions but understands it rationally. What can then happen is that the person knows they were loved, but never really felt it, which therefore makes people feel undeserving. Because they were loved and their parents never did anything wrong, the person feels bad for feeling bad “without reason”.

The reality is, essential needs of nurture were not met, and beliefs of worthiness were not instilled enough, meaning that developmental deficits occur, and therefore the person had fewer inner resources to draw on. This can then lead to an inability to act and believe in the self, which in turn creates depressive symptoms. These can then exacerbate beliefs, and the cycle goes round.

These experiences can be reprocessed, incorporating appropriate nurture to the younger parts of ourselves, which rebuilds developmental milestones and increases sense of self-worth and self-belief, which in turn starts to create more positive cycles and can then start lifting the depression. Self-worth, motivation and future beliefs can then start to increase.

These are just two examples, and of course, depression and anxiety may have different causes. However, the principle of working out past experiences (or non-experiences) and re-working them still applies, and this can be done with EMDR.

There are so many ways EMDR theory and practice can help most individuals. Yes, it is initially a trauma processing therapy. But if we change the word 'trauma' to anything which is left 'unprocessed' or 'stored in an unhelpful way', we open a larger world of healing with EMDR, which most people can benefit from.