EMDR Treatments in Salt Lake City, UT
Our brain organizes and synthesizes information.
Our brains are fantastic structures. They control all the body’s functions, ensuring each process runs smoothly combined with all the other processes that keep us alive.
Our brains are vital in helping us receive and store information about ourselves, those around us, and the world. And they are the centers for memory, emotion, communication, and every necessary behavior that makes us human.
Most of the time, our brains gather information and organize it in a way that helps us engage healthily in daily tasks and relationships. Information flows on a smooth track.
Some information can negatively affect our brain.
We can experience strongly negative events in our lives, such as a significant, “official” traumatic event like a car crash or multiple, seemingly “benign” experiences that accumulate. These events cause our brain to learn unhelpful and sometimes damaging (and often untrue) lessons about who we are, our capabilities, and what the world is like to us.
Accumulating this information is like putting a kink in the “healthy processing” hose, creating blocks in information flows.
These messages can take the form of “I’m not good enough,” “I’m not safe,” “I’m a failure,” “I’m not in control,” and thousands of painful variations. Such negative messages keep us from achieving our goals, connecting with others, and living to our fullest potential.
EMDR with a professional therapist helps identify and target these unhelpful messages (and the memories that created them) and enables you to build new messages of empowerment, safety, and success.
What is EMDR?
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a memory processing treatment that focuses on the memories that built those damning negative messages.
EMDR starts with an exploratory process that helps you and your therapist identify the most problematic behaviors in your life. We then work together to recognize the emotions and thoughts that make these behaviors a problem and identify the memories at the root of those unhelpful thoughts and emotions.
You don’t start processing until YOU feel ready.
Bringing up challenging, often traumatic memories can be an emotionally trying task. Before any true processing begins, you’ll work with your therapist to build the skills you need to remain in control during processing and not feel emotions are taking you over.
Desensitization and Reprocessing.
The therapist will gently guide you as you process negative memories using techniques unique to EMDR (often eye movement) that target how the brain receives and stores information.
One significant benefit of EMDR is that it is not always necessary to talk about traumatic events in detail, saving clients the additional burden of voicing each step of what happened to them.
Through this procedure, the emotional disturbance connected to each memory decreases (desensitization). The goal then shifts to helping the client take on a more positive, healthy, and accurate belief about themselves (reprocessing).
Equipped with this new belief and no emotional pain relating to those negative memories, clients move forward with increased confidence, self-compassion, and a sense of being in control of their lives.
Does EMDR really work?
YES! We’ve seen countless clients tackle horrible trauma and negative experiences through EMDR and end our time together feeling less burdened, more competent, and happy with who they are.
EMDR does not erase memories, but most clients report remembering negative events with less detail and, more importantly, remember negative events with little to no painful emotions.
EMDR is one of the most widely researched trauma treatments, and the World Health Organization identified EMDR as the first-choice treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (WHO, 2013).
We’ve also experienced the growth and liberation resulting from processing negative memories through EMDR. We have been so pleased with EMDR’s impact on us that we consistently refer our friends and family to this type of treatment.
Contact Us today to set up your first session and see if EMDR is a good fit for you.