Our Therapies

EMDR Therapy

What is EMDR?

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing therapy. It is a powerful and evidence-based therapy to help the brain reprocess distressing or traumatic memories.

The idea behind EMDR is quite simple: our brains are naturally wired to heal. Just as your body knows how to repair a wound, your mind has its own way of processing emotional pain, particularly while you sleep during REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. But when something overwhelming happens, that natural process can get blocked. Instead of being resolved, the memory sits there, looping - emotionally charged, physically felt, and mentally intrusive.

EMDR can help to kick-start our natural healing system again by using gentle, rhythmic stimulation (like eye movements, tapping or sounds from left to right), known as bilateral stimulation. This allows your brain to reprocess the memory; not to erase it, but to store it in a way that is no longer emotionally disruptive.

EMDR is different to hypnosis and talk therapy. It puts you in the driver’s seat, with your therapist gently guiding the process. EMDR is backed by over 30 years of clinical research, and is endorsed by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Australian Psychological Society (APS) for trauma-related symptoms. It is also now officially recognised as a Focused Psychological Strategy (FPS) under Medicare's Better Access initiative in Australia.

am i suitable for emdr?

EMDR is not a therapy that is appropriate for everyone. It requires activating and being present in very distressing memories, which means you need to feel emotionally stable with strong coping mechanisms before being able to begin. This can mean that for some people there will need to be a lot of work done building this stability before we can start the EMDR processing. It is also not often appropriate when there are current very stressful events going on in your life.

At Little Window, we offer EMDR therapy to adults, children and adolescents.

What happens during an EMDR session?

There is a lot of preparation and lead up before EMDR processing begins, the length of which will be different for every person. Of course, it is important to identify together which memories are going to be best to target for you and in what order, and then we spend time in sessions learning grounding and containing strategies so that you feel ready for the processing.

Once the processing has begun, a session will start by activating the target memory by playing it through in your mind, and identifying the body sensations and cognitions that are present when playing the memory. Then the therapist will move their fingers from left to right about a meter in front of your eyes so that you can track their fingers. They will do this for a variable amount of time (about 30 seconds up to two minutes) and then check in with you what you experienced while tracking their fingers. They are only looking for a couple of sentences to check if your brain is still on the right track, and won’t say very much before doing another set of eye movements. This can feel a bit strange at first, but the therapist is trying to stay out of the way and let your brain do the work! If a person prefers to have their eyes closed or is not able to do the eye movements for whatever reason, the therapist may also use tapping or auditory sounds changing from one side of your body to other (bilateral stimulation) at points, as this can be just as effective as the eye movements.

How can EMDR benefit me?

EMDR can be really effective at shifting the root causes of many types of concerns you come to therapy for. It is common for people to know something on a cognitive level; for example, that something wasn’t your fault, but to not believe this on an emotional level. EMDR can shift this entirely. Processing memories that have become stuck can also reduce or entirely stop nightmares, anxiety, flashbacks and re-experiencing of traumatic events. It can also effectively shift the negative beliefs you have about yourself that are stored with these memories.

Can EMDR be applied to all mental health problems?

While EMDR was originally developed for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), we now know it can help with a wide range of issues, especially when the root of the problem lies in unprocessed memories. This includes:

Anxiety
Depression
Phobias
Panic attacks
Grief and loss
Childhood emotional wounds
Distressing medical or life events
Low self-worth and negative beliefs about the self

So many of the struggles people bring to therapy are not ‘dysfunction’, but are the imprint of moments that were felt as too overwhelming, too sudden, or too early to make sense of at the time. EMDR helps us go gently back to those places and process what was never fully integrated.

How long does EMDR take?

EMDR is not a short therapy, and also is not something that a therapist will rush into. It is very important that you feel safe in therapy, is relatively stable in your everyday life, and have an array of coping strategies you can utilise, before we start the EMDR processing.

Processing memories can take a different amount of time for every person, depending on the memory, and the previous work you have done sitting with and understanding the memory. It can take anywhere from fifteen minutes to eight x fifty-minute sessions to do one memory. However, the first memory targeted will typically take a lot longer than the subsequent memories.

want to know more?

At Little Window, our therapists are trained in EMDR and offer it to adults, adolescents and children. If you’re curious whether this is the right kind of therapy for you, reach out to our Client Support Team. We’re always happy to speak with you to see if EMDR could be a helpful next step in your therapy process.

The below Therapists provide EMDR therapy at Little Window: