EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) is a highly structured and highly 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.
Talking about trauma is talking about stress. Generally we associate the word “stress” with a busy lifestyle, with that feeling that we have all experienced at some point that we do not achieve everything: in those moments one can say “I am stressed”, in the face of experiences that we live as if they were overwhelming to us. .
Stress is a term that has its origins in physics, it is a concept that tells us about the force that a material can withstand before deforming or breaking. This, applied to the mind, tells us that our mind can withstand a certain amount of pressure before being damaged. When something exceeds our capacity to resist, we begin to notice discomfort in the form of symptoms; we are overwhelmed by the situation.
A trauma is a life event that, Due to its high emotional charge, it overcomes this capacity for resistance and leaves a deep mark on the memory.. When we go through a situation like this, our nervous system, which is responsible for processing information, is overwhelmed by overload and cannot work efficiently. He 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 disaster such as a hurricane or an earthquake, a terrorist attack, a kidnapping, a robbery or any other similar situation, extremely dangerous and potentially deadly.
These types of experiences are what we call “trauma with a capital T” and are situations that, due to the high emotional load they entail, They 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 what can lead to “trauma with a small t.”
These events are more common and are not life-threatening, although they can inflict deep emotional wounds.especially when they are suffered in the early stages of life, a particularly vulnerable time in which our nervous system is much more sensitive to external impressions.
Sometimes the person who goes 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 admit to having blank periods of their lives.
When this happens, it is common for the person to react with intense crying, with disproportionate anger, not being able to trust others, carrying a generalized feeling of guilt, or feeling like they have to be constantly on alert and not knowing why. this happens. This creates a lot of helplessness and often leads people to believe that something is wrong with their mind. or it makes them 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, it sometimes cannot correctly process 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 “non-declarative” or “implicit” memory network. In other words, our mind was so overwhelmed that we have not been able to do adequate mental digestion and we have stored the information in the wrong storage.
Bilateral stimulation techniques are a set of procedures that EMDR uses to access memory networks and thus be able 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 happens, it is the hippocampus that comes into operation, a brain structure that is very important in the role of memory, and this hippocampus stores the information about what happened in “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 the past.so that our adaptive information processing system can digest the experience and place the memory in the appropriate store.
When this occurs, the person reports a feeling of liberation; The memory remains but the emotional charge no longer accompanies it, the past stops conditioning the present and generally this processing is accompanied by valuable learning that in psychology we call “pautraumatic growth.”
If you are interested in starting a therapy process applied to problems like those we have seen here, seek professional help as soon as possible.
