Here’s my personal experience.

If you’ve never actually been to a therapist to help deal with stress or other life-related crap, chances are you’ve heard that they exist, both the therapist and the life-related crap.

No? Well, then you must have at least heard this one…

A therapist walks into a bar and the bartender says, “Am I being replaced?”

Whether we admit it or not, we’ve all gone through stuff in our lives. Not properly dealing with it can cause even more stuff in our lives.

“Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a psychotherapy that enables people to heal from the symptoms and emotional distress that are the result of disturbing life experiences,” that’s straight from emdr.com,

Nope, I don’t like it either. I just read psycho and therapy in the same sentence. Fine, slightly out of context, but it still requires an admission of sorts. My life’s had some ups and downs, and I wanted to address the downs that were weighing me down.

If my experience and explanation below help to point you in the direction of finding some inner peace and a bit of a better life, then admitting that I’ve dealt with my share of stuff, too, is well worth it.

A nickel for your thoughts

Personally, talking to complete strangers about my deepest, darkest secrets or traumatic experiences never sounded much of a good time. The first thing they tell you in session number one is that “this is a safe place and anything we discuss here is completely confidential.”

Mmhmm.

Me? Trust issues? Nah.

Still, over the years, I’d had a couple of sessions with therapists to try to figure out the best course of action for allowing more rays of sunshine to beam into my social media seeming life. You know, when on the outside, you show everyone the best side of you even if that side is complete BS and actually in no way reflects who you are or how you’re actually feeling?

Yeah, that was me, except for the fact that if you used to follow me on social media, we’d never actually go anywhere because I never posted much. I didn’t want to brag about the walks with my dog or the days that I didn’t feel like walking with my dog.

The problem with my previous therapeutic stints was that with the first, it took me all of 10 minutes to realize that I was the smartest person in the room. She was a very sweet lady, but she couldn’t keep up and I quickly noticed her looking down at what seemed like a two-thousand-page book in her lap as she sat behind her desk every time I answered a question. The book was as big as she was and I didn’t have time for her to go find the pages about me when Google existed and I could just stay home and figure it out for free.

The second one got me- quickly. Sure, she had to use a proverbial can opener to get me to elaborate more on certain things that I mentioned in our right-around lunchtime sessions. Still, I enjoyed the conversations, and if nothing else, it was a bit of mental fresh air to feel comfortable enough to at least consider trying to make this work.

I had initially chosen the timing of our meetings in hopes that if it wasn’t working out and she heard my stomach growling, she’d excuse me early and let me get something to eat. This would prevent me from further having to expose myself, mentally speaking. Apparently, therapists have a name for this tactic, but she left the practice before I had a chance to find out what it was, also leaving me cold and hungry to fend for myself.

I’d had enough at that point. I just couldn’t muster up the energy to meet with someone new and have another verbal sparring session to determine who got to sit behind the desk and who actually belonged on the couch.

Back to my dog walks it was.

I had no idea

A friend of mine had recommended EMDR after he said it literally saved his life in just a small amount of sessions.

I’d known him for decades and he never seemed like the type to be anything but pretty happy with life. It turns out, he was. He’d just dealt with being pretty sick and even after physically getting better, he went through a patch where he felt suicidal.

Never having feelings like this of any sort in his life up until this point, he spoke to his wife about it. He didn’t want to take any medications and after talking to a few close friends, this type of therapy was suggested as it was said to provide much faster results than standard talk therapy.

He and I were catching up on the phone and he’d given me the quick recap of the past couple of months where he’d gone from dire mental straights to back to being his happy self with what seemed to almost be a too-good-to-be-true story. He credits his EMDR therapist completely for saving his life.

His ordeal marinated in my brain for the next few months. The thought of medication for feeling down more days than I thought was normal wasn’t my idea of a good time. I second-guess myself when I have a headache and reach for an aspirin wondering if I really need it.

EMDR doesn’t require oversharing

When I spoke to the therapist initially on the phone, she was quick to tell me that there was no guarantee that it would work. She also mentioned that after changing to nothing but this type of therapy two years prior, it had been successful for one hundred percent of her clients. I was up for the gamble and booked a session.

Have you ever been in the middle of something and out of nowhere, it stirs up a memory? Sometimes the connection is obvious. Other times, the memory is so far from what you’re currently doing that you find yourself daydreaming.

Now, picture that memory as a two-foot-long piece of string. Yes, I know, stick with me here.

Imagine yourself holding that piece of string directly out in front of you, one end in the right hand, the other in the left. Now, let it fall to the ground. If one end of the string was the beginning of the memory and the other the end, you could very easily see where it starts and stops.

Continue doing this with every memory that you’ve ever had, each as a piece of string, each falling to the ground on top of the rest until there are hundreds of them.

Now, look down.

Can you still see where the first one begins and ends? Are you able to see where any of them begin and end, or, which other specific strings they seem to touch in some way? Chances are, aside from a few, you can’t.

Imagine again that these strings, or memories, are events in your life that your brain never completely processed. Most seem irrelevant and quite possibly are things, events, or people that you haven’t thought about in years or even decades. Still, somehow, they’re connected. Not all of them, but each string, or event, that comes into contact with another, is connected in some way. We just don’t know how, or even why.

A simple example

Paraphrasing a bit, EMDR helps a person alleviate particular stress that seems to be caused by traumatic events.

For example, if you’ve always been a dog lover and one day on your walk home from school or work you were attacked and bitten by a dog, that traumatic event may cause you to now fear all dogs. EMDR has the potential to fix this. You won’t forget the event that happened, but it will no longer cause you to be fearful of dogs.

You can insert your fear of choice here as we continue. It could be anything from a vivid event that’s happened to you, a place or person that makes you uncomfortable, a fear of heights, or anything of the sort. This is your life. If something is causing a traumatic response inside of you, that’s your thing.

In my experience, the memory of what was causing the stress or fear rarely, if ever, comes to mind once the processing has been done.

A session is normally considered to be approximately one hour of this therapy. Depending on the extent of the trauma, anywhere from a few sessions to a dozen or so may be needed. This is completely dependent on the event, the individual, and how well they take to the stimulation.

Side note; I wasn’t bitten by a dog.

How it works

EMDR is nothing like Talk Therapy. The therapist only needs to know what is currently happening to find a starting point for reprocessing. Yes, you heard correctly, what is currently happening. Unlike traditional client/therapist sessions where you may be asked about your childhood or how you were treated in school, EMDR therapy starts with what’s happening now and works backward.

After discussing the basic issue and how it affects you, you’ll be asked to focus on each of those things as your eyes follow a light at a speed determined by the therapist. This isn’t like trying to trick your cat with a laser pointer, these people are actually trained in this, and there’s a science to it.

Other bilateral stimulation methods may also be used such as each hand holding a vibration device, but the goal is to stimulate the left and right brain by purposely pulling your attention to the left and right very deliberately, yet fluently with a specific rhythm. As this begins, you bring the thought to mind as well as how it makes you feel.

What happens next, is perhaps the magic and genius of it all.

I should take a moment to stop here and explain that what goes along with what is about to occur during this process seems very much related to one’s personality.

If the client being treated is someone who is normally very emotional, a river of tears may start flowing. If the person is normally very strong and emotions don’t normally get the best of them, they could simply go through this process unscathed. However, take it from me who leans toward the latter, heartstrings will be tugged on regardless. There are some memories that we just aren’t prepared for, good, or bad.

As the light or bilateral stimulation is being done and you’ve brought that thought to mind and how it makes you feel, you do nothing.

That’s the wonder of this. You do absolutely nothing, aside from following the light with your eyes.

As long as the therapist has chosen the correct starting point, your mind will begin to almost wander, but in a way that takes you down a lane of memories that may at first seem connected, followed by some that you may not see any correlation to your initial thought at all. As I mentioned earlier, some of the memories may have not ever crossed your mind before and you aren’t quite sure what they have to do with this. Some of my memories during the process went from quick flashes of a person or place to a specific moment in time, seemingly staying there to get all of the details of a few moments 35 years prior.

Why “these” memories?

At some point, they weren’t properly taken care of by your brain. It’s quite possible that most of them never needed to be right up until that one event occurred that happened to be tied to them. It’s then that those that seemed unimportant became valuable to resolving the issue.

Remember the strings that you dropped on the ground and couldn’t find the ends or identify what other strings they were touching? Through the process of EMDR, we don’t know what memories are tied in together or “touching” until we start to follow one end of the string. Some may only come in contact with a few others, while some may be attached to a dozen or more. Additionally, some of the memories may be short and simple, with others being more drawn out. Some of these thoughts may not affect the person at all in the process, while others may be so far forgotten but so impactful that they create an emotion of extreme sadness, happiness, or anything in between.

The good news is that once this reprocessing is completed, you no longer are affected by what was causing your reaction. The trauma has been mitigated, for good.

One caveat, while dealing with a major traumatic event will almost feel like a heavy weight has been lifted within the next twenty-four hours, it may leave space for other smaller events to come to the surface that will now also need to be addressed through additional EMDR sessions.

Fixed

I no longer struggle with the things that were weighing me down in my everyday life. EMDR has allowed me to focus more on what’s happening now versus things that happened in my past or future worries that I had.

Life still sneaks in some unexpected twists and turns that need to be dealt with. With no longer being affected by things that were completely preventing the ability to do so prior, the day-to-day stuff is more manageable. I also now look forward to walking my dog each day.

I equate the success of EMDR therapy in my life a bit to getting out of the stress of financial debt and coming into some money. You still have problems to deal with, you just don’t have any money problems.