EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It was developed by a woman in the late 80’s almost by chance. She noticed that when she was feeling upset and traumatised about something, the forced movement of her eyes helped her dissolve the emotional charge attached to the thoughts. She went on to research this observation and then to develop EMDR.

As with all these things, the only thing we have to explain them are theories. So I’ll give you some of the theory behind this technique.

It has been noted as far back as the 1970’s that if you deprive someone of stage 4 sleep, which is the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) stage of sleep, subjects become disoriented and confused. This can lead to a sort of psychosis. REM sleep is the time that we are dreaming. A lot of our dreams do not make sense, but often there are feelings and images that relate to the events of the day or to the stage we are at in our lives. It is therefore considered, that REM sleep is a very important contributor to maintaining good mental health. It is assumed the mind has an opportunity to process, through dreaming, events that are not filed away in our conscious waking reality.

Likewise, using research from the Left Brain versus Right Brain field of psychology, our emotional thoughts and feelings are stored in our right brain, and our logical linear mind in our left brain. Left brain governs right side function and right brain governs left side function. You will notice when people are recalling feelings (as per the NLP observations of eye movement and thought processing) they will often look to their left as they are accessing the emotional brain in the right hand side. When people are looking to try and make sense of something, they often look to the right hand side, thus engaging their leftside of the brain.

When someone is stuck, either in a traumatic memory, or with something that has caused them to continually and compulsively, revisit a thought or feeling, EMDR helps shift the “stuckness” of that.

By moving our eyes while being guided by a therapist through our confusing thoughts, we can find the logic, the peace and often, the emotional charge that the client has attached to a particular event, will simply leave the conscious mind and become ‘filed away’ in the right compartment. Clients often report feeling very relaxed once this has happened, and it appears to happen as a physical reaction to the therapy.

I have heard reports that certain pockets of psychiatry are using this technique though I’ve yet to meet someone who has been treated conventionally in this way. For now, it remains in the realm of the alternative, and has some extremely positive results.

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