What is Trauma?
Psychological trauma can be anything that has happened to us that continues to have a negative impact on our lives. You may be experiencing upsetting feelings, memories, and anxiety that won’t go away. It can also leave you feeling numb, disconnected, and unable to trust other people.
We all have unique capacities to handle stress. What can be experienced as highly distressing to one person may not cause the same emotional response in someone else. To understand trauma, we need to examine how it affects the individual rather than the event itself.
EMDR Therapy
Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy (EMDR) is a therapy modality that focuses on restoring the brain’s natural healing process and enabling the mind to heal itself by removing whatever is preventing the system from working.
When we experience distressing events, sometimes the information can get stored in our brain as it was originally encoded, with distortions in our thoughts, feelings, and bodies.
Every time a new event reminds us of a disturbing event, our brain will access the dysfunctional memory network, making it stronger. EMDR helps “repair” the mental injury from that memory. Remembering what happened to you will no longer feel like reliving it, and the related feelings will be much more manageable.