EMDR facilitates the accessing and reprocessing of traumatic memories and adverse life events. Its goal is to restore the client’s innate ability to heal from psychological trauma. EMDR focuses on the memory of the traumatic experience and utilizes therapist directed eye movements and other forms of alternate bilateral (right/left) stimulation to treat disturbances connected with traumatic experiences or distressful events. After successful EMDR treatment, the distressing memory connected to the traumatic experience is desensitized, which means that the person can still remember the event but its content is integrated in a more adaptive perspective, ceasing to cause emotional disturbance. The theory behind EMDR therapy is the Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model, developed by F. Shapiro. This theory posits the existence of an information processing system that assimilates new experiences into already existing memory networks, allowing us to make sense of our experience. When a traumatic event occurs, it is stored in memory and encoded in excitatory, distressing, state-specific form (“frozen”), which keeps it stuck into our neural pathways and unable to connect with other useful networks. Therefore, the original perceptions linked to the traumatic memory can continue to be triggered by a variety of internal and external stimuli, resulting in inappropriate emotional, cognitive, and behavioral reactions, as well as overt symptoms (e.g. anxiety, nightmares, intrusive thoughts).
Memories that are dysfunctionally stored remain unprocessed and continue to cause distress, leading to maladaptive behaviors and post-traumatic pathology and other psychological disorders. The goal of EMDR therapy is to create new, more functional neural pathways. This process is thought to relieve emotional distress, reformulate negative beliefs, and decrease physiological symptoms.
Since its discovery in 1987, this therapy approach has been deeply researched and it is now recognized and approved as an effective form of treatment for trauma and adverse life events by organizations such as the American Psychological Association (1998-2002), the American Psychiatric Association (2004), the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (2010), the World Health Organization, and the Department of Defense. (Shapiro, 1995, 2001, 2006)
