EMDR, an approach to trauma resolution

What is EMDR-based therapy and how is it used for trauma intervention?

EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) is a highly structured and very effective treatment protocol for the treatment of trauma, especially useful for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Let's see how it works in the face of trauma.

What is psychological trauma?

To speak of trauma is to speak of stress. Generally we associate the word "stress" with a busy lifestyle, with that feeling that we have all experienced at some time that we do not get to everything: in those moments one can say "I'm stressed", to experiences that we live as if we were overwhelmed.

Stress is a term that has its origin in physics, it is a concept that speaks of the force that a material can withstand before deforming or breaking. This, applied to the mind, means that our mind can withstand a certain amount of pressure before being damaged. When something exceeds our capacity of resistance we begin to notice discomfort in the form of symptoms, we are overcome by the situation.

A trauma is a life event that, because of its high emotional charge, overcomes this resilience and leaves a deep imprint in the memory.. When we go through such a situation our nervous system, which is in charge of processing information, is saturated by the overload and cannot work efficiently. It is not able to "digest" the experience.

T-traumas and t-traumas

When we think of a traumatic situation we often think of a natural catastrophe such as a hurricane or an earthquake, a terrorist attack, a kidnapping, a robbery or any other similar situation of extreme danger and potentially mortal.

These types of experiences are what we call "trauma with a capital T" and are situations that, due to the high emotional charge they entail, can exceed our capacity to cope with them. can exceed the capacity of our adaptive information system and generate a clinical condition known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)..

There are other types of experiences that are also potentially traumatic: those emotional wounds such as situations of humiliation, contempt, failure, abandonment, loss, marginalization, etc. These situations are the ones that can give rise to a "trauma with a lower case t".

These events are more common and are not life-threatening although they can inflict a deep emotional wound.The experience of the brain, especially when it occurs in the early stages of life, a particularly vulnerable time when our nervous system is much more sensitive to external impressions.

Sometimes the person going through these situations may not be fully aware of having lived these experiences due to a dissociative phenomenon by which the mind hides the experience from consciousness. In fact, there are people who recognize that they have blanked out entire periods of their lives.

When this happens, it is common for the person to react with intense crying, with disproportionate rage, to be unable to trust others, to drag a generalized feeling of guilt or to feel that he or she must be constantly on alert and not know why this is happening to him or her. This generates a lot of helplessness and often leads people to believe that something is wrong in their mind. or causes them to have a feeling of inadequacy, that there is something inside them that is not right.

Bilateral stimulation

When our mind is strongly impacted by extremely painful situations, sometimes it cannot process correctly what has happened, our adaptive processing system is blocked, a brain nucleus called the amygdala "hijacks" our brain, and the experience is stored in the network of the amygdala. and the experience is stored in the "non-declarative" or "implicit" memory network. In other words, our mind was so overwhelmed that we have not been able to do a proper mental digestion and we have stored the information in the wrong storage.

Bilateral stimulation techniques are a set of procedures used by EMDR to access the memory networks in order to rework the experience, separating the memory of the event from the emotional charge that accompanies it and thus allowing the metabolization of the memory.

When this occurs, it is the hippocampus that is activated, a very important brain structure in the role of memory, and this hippocampus stores the information of what happened in the "declarative memory" or "episodic memory". In other words, through a process called dual attention, we allow our mind to place itself simultaneously in the present and in the past, so that our processing system is able to process the information that happened in the present and in the past.In other words, through a process called dual attention, we allow our mind to place itself simultaneously in the present and in the past, so that our adaptive information processing system can digest the experience and place the memory in the appropriate store.

When this happens, the person reports a feeling of liberation; the memory remains but the emotional charge no longer accompanies him/her, the past stops conditioning the present and generally this processing is accompanied by a valuable learning process that in psychology we call "pautraumatic growth".

If you are interested in starting a therapy process applied to problems such as those we have seen here, seek professional help as soon as possible.

Bibliographical references:

• Shapiro, F., & Forrest, M. S. (2009). EMDR: A revolutionary therapy to overcome anxiety, stress and trauma (Tra ed.). Nirvana Libros, S.A. deC.V.