EMDR therapy gives your body and soul the time NOW to reprocess when your mind and body couldn’t at the time of trauma because it was only doing what it was supposed to do, and that was to survive.

EMDR means Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, it’s a psychotherapy method that has been proven to help people recover from trauma, anxiety, PTSD, and depression.

I’ve tried Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) and Psychodynamic Therapy to try to heal from traumatic events in my past for on and off seven years. In trying to heal from my traumas, I grew more and more frustrated with therapy. I began to realize, I left therapy most times feeling worse off then I was going in. I felt like I was talking on a hamster wheel, on and on, going in circles about my traumas. I mean, how many times can I dissect this?

It was almost nauseating. I noticed my body was reacting each and every time I talked about my traumas. I would beat myself up, “This incident happened over a decade ago, why am I still talking about this? Why can’t I heal from this?” I lost count how many times I’ve cried to my therapist, why do I still feel this in my body as if it happened yesterday.

Unfortunately, she wasn’t trauma informed. But the reason, I still felt it in my body is because trauma can’t be intellectualized, or it can but only to an extent. Trauma lives in the body.

Imagine your body like a filing cabinet, the trauma are the files. So when you’re going through trauma, your brain and your body are doing what it has to do to survive and your brain has no time to process it. So, that unprocessed trauma goes back into your body aka the “filing cabinet” and those files get pushed all the way into the back and EMDR unlocks those files. The ones all the way in the back that probably has dust on them, the ones you probably forgot and you don’t realize are there are being stored into your body. Those unprocessed files manifest into other things like anxiety, PTSD, and depression.

EMDR unlocks those files so you can go back and process those trauma files as you are at this moment because you’ll be able to see it clearer for what it is versus then when you were just surviving.

The event of witnessing a loved one attempt many times is something I’ve been trying to heal from for over a decade and I was healed it with EMDR therapy in a few months. I now understand how much the body holds. I now understand, you can talk about your traumas until you’re blue in the face but unless you get to the root of the trauma, it will continue to live within the body.

I knew I was healed because things that once triggered me no longer did. I didn’t feel those twinges at my heart anytime I heard that specific word, heard a story of someone experiencing something similar, watching a show or reading about it on social media, the very topic alone would trigger me. For years, I was tormented by that event. I’ve tested myself, I’ve watched shows that have suicide in it, or if I was scrolling through social media and saw someone who lost someone in that way, I didn’t feel those twinges. And that was HUGE for me.

For years, I thought I would never heal or that something was wrong with me because maybe I wasn’t doing something right. But once you understand trauma is in the body, that’s where true healing can begin.

Going back to your traumas can be scary. And I’m not going to lie, it is rough. But with a good experienced EMDR therapist, they are with you the entire way. I am in complete control of the session if it becomes to be too much. If this sounds like something you may be interested in but you’re afraid to go back to those traumas, ask yourself question, “how is that going for me?” not healing from it. Holding onto the pain and or not healing the trauma in your body, carrying around the heaviness is worse to me than the trauma itself.

And as a dear friend of mine, Dana Carreta-Stein, who is an EMDR therapist has said, “If you survived the trauma, you’ll survive the recovery.”

Healing is possible. Healing is a process and it’s waiting for you to live the life you deserve.

Looking for an EMDR therapist?
www.emdria.org