EMDR
EMDR isn't just for trauma.
EMDR, Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (it's a mouthful!), is best known for treating PTSD and trauma, but that isn't where its usefulness ends.
Research has explored EMDR across a range of difficulties, including anxiety, depression, phobias, panic, grief, chronic pain, distressing memories and other experiences where thoughts, emotions, body responses or beliefs have become stuck.
You don't need to have experienced one big, obvious traumatic event to explore EMDR.
Sometimes what needs attention is a painful belief about yourself, a pattern that keeps repeating, a particular memory that still carries a lot of charge, or a nervous system that seems to react long after the original situation has passed.
For autistic, ADHD and AuDHD women, this can also mean working with the impact of masking, rejection, chronic misunderstanding, criticism, exclusion and internalised ableism — the accumulated experiences that can leave you believing:
I'm too much.
I'm not good enough.
I don't belong.
I'm going to fail.
Something is wrong with me.
You don't need to prove that your experiences were “traumatic enough” before they're worth working with.
So, what does EMDR actually do?
At its core, EMDR helps you reprocess experiences that continue to affect you in the present.
That can include traumatic experiences, but it can also include memories, beliefs, emotions and patterns that have become stuck and continue to shape how you see yourself, relate to others or respond to the world around you.
And despite the name, EMDR isn't simply “follow my fingers and magically feel better.”
It is a structured, evidence-based therapy that follows eight phases. We begin by understanding what is happening for you, identifying what you want to change and building the resources and support you need before moving into processing.
Bilateral stimulation, such as eye movements, tapping, sound or other forms of rhythmic stimulation , is then incorporated into the processing work.
