Healing Trauma through EMDR

Living with Trauma

Most people’s nightmares are the stuff of imagination. But not yours. It seems that every night leaves you drenched in sweat after forcing you to remember one of your worst days.

On the outside, you put a sunny disposition on it, but life is a struggle. Your friends and family don’t understand why this is bothering you. Why you can’t “just get over it.” Someone’s tone of voice can remind you of that painful experience.

You find yourself avoiding people because they remind you of that awful moment. And you’re wound up so tight all the time. People tell you to relax, but you feel like you have always been on your guard so that you won’t be hurt again.

The worst part of it is, you end up in the same situation over and over. People take advantage of and hurt you. Right now, you need the cycle to stop.

Pain of All Sizes

Trauma doesn’t always have a “capital T.”

You may have even convinced yourself that what you experienced wasn’t that bad. You didn’t go to war or get physically attacked. Trauma isn’t a competition. You don’t have to pass some imaginary mile-marker to join the club or to get help.

Maybe you were a caretaker for a sick relative, and you saw them wither away from the sickness and eventually die, leaving that image burned into your memory. Maybe you had a car accident, and you feel yourself becoming jittery every time you get behind the wheel. Or perhaps, you can’t even identify something that feels like a “trauma,” but you get incredibly scared around certain things that don’t make sense: like snakes, birds, elevators, or plane rides.

At Dallas Psychotherapy, there’s no trauma too large or incident too small for us to help you. If you find yourself rearranging your life, avoiding things that you once loved, or always feeling on your guard, it’s time to get help – and we can provide that.

The memories are like shadows, hanging around every corner, ready to attack.

And it’s exhausting. And unfair. You didn’t do anything to deserve this, but here you are shouldering a burden that gets heavier by the moment.

We do all sorts of things to try to cover up that burden…

Sometimes we try to bury it with food or drown it with alcohol.

Sometimes we try to act with a forced smile as though nothing happened.

Sometimes we do what our parents told us: to rub some dirt on it and soldier on.

EMDR is a well-established treatment for trauma.

Volumes of neuroscientific research support Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). But if I start with neuroscience, your eyes will glaze over, and you might even fall asleep. So instead, we’ll tell you what really matters.

It all starts with an image from your past that still bothers you to this day. Your therapist will help you identify all the thoughts, feelings, and sensations associated with that memory. During an EMDR session, you’ll use something called bilateral stimulation (BLS). It generally takes one of two forms at Dallas Psychotherapy – butter-fly taps (crossing your arms and squeezing alternating biceps) or visual stimuli where your eyes follow a moving object from one side of your computer screen to the other side.

During the BLS, your mind focuses on the image and start to process the feelings of hurt. Eventually, many patients say that they feel as though the energy has drained out of the image and can think of the image without being upset. Then we work on cementing a positive belief about yourself so that you not only feel rid of the overwhelming negative feelings, but have strong positive thoughts about yourself.

Trauma is your past, but what’s your future?

Too often, when we struggle with trauma, we settle for a life plagued with fear, doubt, and pain.

There are so many messages in society about trauma that make us feel bad about ourselves. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Trauma can eclipse all of the good things that are happening in your life, but EMDR renders it to the past, leaving you free to live your future.

Give us a call today, and let’s talk about EMDR during your free 15-minute consultation: (469) 225-0344.