Reducing the Emotional Charge with Eye Movement Therapy

Have you ever had a nightmare after watching a scary movie? 

It happened because your brain was still processing the emotions it created after the movie was over. If the movie was particularly haunting, you may have a few nightmares but after several days, you go back to sleeping soundly.

What if the nightmares continued for weeks or months, and the subject of them was not a movie but something you saw in real life? What if it wasn’t just nightmares but also daydreams that disrupted your daily activities with debilitating fear, anxiety and panic? 

You might be experiencing a response to trauma known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which is more common than you might think.

Understanding trauma response

Trauma is basically unprocessed emotions stuck in your brain. Each time something triggers you to remember the trauma, your brain goes through it again as if it were happening in the present. The more often your brain relives the trauma, the more severe the emotions can become, instead of fading over time.

Although PTSD is commonly associated with military service, anyone can develop it. According to the American Psychiatric Association, one out of every 11 people will be diagnosed with PTSD at some point in their life, and women are more likely than men to develop PTSD.

In PTSD, emotions reach an intensity where it is impossible to talk about the traumatic incident. Just the thought of what happened brings up the brain’s defenses, expressed in symptoms like headaches, flashbacks, nausea and unpredictable emotions, and pushes you around that endless loop again. 

Real life experience

Joyce Urban, LMHC at Urban Counseling in Ocala, experienced the effects of PTSD for several years before she became a licensed mental health counselor and certified EMDR practitioner. 

One day, Joyce got the call every parent fears; her daughters were in a serious accident. 

Her daughters recovered, but the sight of the accident scene stuck in Joyce’s head along with the sick, panicky feeling that her daughters could have died that day. “For weeks after the accident, anytime I saw flashing lights or heard sirens, I would throw up,” Joyce says.

That’s when she discovered Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). After just three sessions, Joyce was able to deal with her emotions and relegate the memory of the accident to a deeper place in her brain. “I will never forget what happened, but I can talk about it now without the intense surge of debilitating emotions,” Joyce explains. 

Connecting eye movement to emotions

It might seem like an unlikely connection, but lateral eye movement has a desensitizing effect on negative emotions. 

The EMDR Institute developed an EMDR treatment protocol and trains mental health professionals all over the world.

EMDR therapy uses the eye movement protocols in conjunction with traditional cognitive behavioral therapy, often referred to as talk therapy. EMDR is not a cure for PTSD; it simply makes it possible to work on the trauma and release the emotions.

Patients use visualization to establish a safe space where they can retreat to any time emotions become overwhelming. The eye movement part of the therapy has an almost immediate affect to reduce the emotional response. Once the emotions are safely managed, the patient can more easily participate in the talk therapy portion of the treatment to address the trauma.

“I had a client who faced extreme anxiety about going to concerts and other crowded places,” Joyce recalls. “The initial steps of the EMDR therapy helped us discover the root of her anxiety. She remembered being a newborn in an isolette in the ICU with many people crowded around. After three EMDR sessions, she called me from a concert where she was having fun without any trace of her previous anxiety.”

The exact neurological reason that EMDR works is not clear. The lateral eye movement induced during EMDR replicates the conditions of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. One study published in the Journal of Neuroscience suggests that emotional memories may be processed during REM sleep. Another theory suggests that EMDR connects the two hemispheres of the brain, helping to resolve negative emotions.