Traumatic incidents can become frozen in time, and when you relive them, they may feel just as bad as the original incident itself. Reliving that traumatic moment can have a ripple effect, impacting your relationships and your worldview, and interfering with your brain processing and your day-to-day life. EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, has been extensively researched and proven to help people overcome trauma and stop reliving traumatic memories.

EMDR is an integrative psychotherapy method, incorporating elements from multiple approaches in order to best treat the patient. By focusing on external stimuli during the recollection of certain elements of the traumatic experience, people are able to activate the natural healing process and begin to recover. This multi-step approach has a direct impact on the way the brain processes information. Therefore, following successful EMDR therapy, a person no longer relives the feelings, images and sound that previously came to mind during recollection of trauma. While the memory is still there, remembering the trauma becomes less upsetting. The memory is seen in a new light, and no longer affects the person’s day-to-day life.