Overview of EMDR Therapy for Trauma

I’ve been an anxious, jumpy, hypervigilant person for as long as I can remember. I knew I was unhappy, and I told myself “Well, what happened to me was bad, but it wasn’t bad enough to be traumatic” Then I read Beseert van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score,¹ which details how difficult experiences can be imprinted in our bodies, becoming habitual. The book inspired me to take a chance with a treatment approach called EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing), and it improved my life enormously. I’ve been truly happy for the first time in decades (as long as I avoid all news about world politics).

This is a skimpy, personal description of my EMDR therapeutic process, which was what helped me leave behind many traumatic experiences and their accompanying unhappiness, hyper-arousal, and self-loathing. My tl;dr is: EMDR doesn’t require intellectual analysis. It was effective for me because it detoured around my obsessively worrying brain.

( in greater detail )