Trauma Therapy and EMDR
Adults and Children

How does EMDR achieve remarkable results for both adults and children?

EMDR is able to replicate the brain activity typical of the dream state and thereby bolster the natural psychological healing of distressing memories, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, sensory and psychological reactions, negative views of the self, nightmares and bodily indicators of stress or tension.

 

Earlier life experiences set in motion a continued pattern of affect, behaviour, cognition, and consequent identity structures.

Insufficiently processed information stored at the time of the event range from simple PTSD and phobias to more complex conditions such as panic disorders, some forms of depression, dissociation and personality disorders. The dysfunctional nature of traumatic memories, allows the negative affect and beliefs from the past to pervade in the present. EMDR processing of such memories allows the more empowering and positive present affect and cognitions to generalize to the associated memories throughout the neurophysiological network and leads spontaneously to more appropriate nontraumatic based behaviours in the present.

 

An explanation of EMDR for parents and children

When we have bad or negative events happen in our lives, the brain creates ‘files’ that contain all of the feelings, thoughts and body sensations connected to those events.

When we have events that are not ‘too bad’ the brain has the capacity to work on these files before storing them and locking them up as memories. What is stored has been sorted out and organized so the negative stuff has been let go, allowing us to keep the good stuff and learn from this experience. When the event is really bad or has happened over and over again, the brain gets overloaded and can’t do the work of sorting things out, so the files becomes messy and mixed up.

Something that happens today can be a trigger to open up the files causing the mixed up feelings/thoughts and body reactions to happen again. When the files reopen it causes is to behave or act in ways that are ‘too big’ or exaggerated or ‘too small’ or shut down.

 

Our Trauma – EMDR Services

• EMDR Trauma relief for adults
• EMDR trauma relief for children

 

For participation in EMDR Advance training please register with the ACT-G program.

Lee-Anne is currently looking for interested individuals as she begins her EMDR Advance training. View Lee-Anne’s profile here.