About EMDR - My Counsellor is Recommending It

[aowyn]

The counselor we are seeing is recommending this. Would like to hear what everybody thinks about it. Thanks.

 

[becvan]

If you have more than one trauma I recommend that you explore every other option, therapy and slim chance in hell first.. This causes you to experience your emotions and flashback your trauma very very quickly. It can make you unstable (which I am putting nicely) if you have more than one trauma as you can't handle all of it at once. Also, if you have any "unknown" trauma that you don't remember and this forces it to the front it can cause extreme damage.. EMDR should only be used after all the trauma issues have been explored, there are no unknown events or areas, and it's from singular trauma.. The pro's will argue it's safe, it's not. First hand experience...

Bec

 

[batgirl]

My old nurse therapist tried EMDR on me ONE time... I freaked out almost immediately and actually had to leave the session. So I guess I don't recommend it, although I'm no expert. I never want to try it again, though. Creepy.

 

[faerieevenstar]

I did EMDR and found it very helpful... It only dealt with one aspect of my trauma and was before my PTSD emerged and I was just being treated for depression. It was very soon after the incident.

Basically the therapist got me to follow her fingers with my eyes and asked me questions and I just told her where my mind wandered and we discussed things as we went along. It's meant to access both sides of your brain so you can proccess events that you have previously not dealt with.

The particular image we worked with does not bother me at all now... but I have more problems now that probably need the same treatment...

 

[anthony]

As Bec said, and really Faerie also confirmed, it is great for one or two isolated events, but if you have significant trauma that is "extended" over a period of time, then I would recommend that you do not go near EMDR. If you have one or two incidents that are abnormally traumatic, then it may do something for you, depending on the severity of the incidents, but the facts are, that if you have hidden trauma, EMDR can bring back too much at once, thus overload your brain and cause brain damage of varying severity. EMDR is very good for one or two isolated incidents, but any specialist that is worth their weight in gold with EMDR, would not even attempt to do it on someone with long standing military conflict, childhood abuse or a person who has been raped multiple times throughout their life, because the chance of brain damage is far to high, thus it is normally recommended to those people to move toward CBT instead, where the mind controls how much is released at once.

 

[kimdim]

My husband Scott has to have EMDR the next time he goes back to Hollybush so we'll need to wait and see how he gets on i'll keep you updated.:dontknow:

 

[aowyn]

Thanks for your replies, more than I expected as I've heard this is a relatively new therapy. What kind of brain damage are we talking about here exactly?

I'm not aware of any other trauma for d11...I don't know, something just sticks in my craw with her. Like there is something there she's not telling. We left because he was starting to move from verbal and emotional abuse to physical abuse, but when we first started seeing this counselor, she said she behaved like a child who had been sexually abused and evaluated for that. Although, she said d11 didn't even 'go there' so she didn't feel like that was a problem. Maybe it's just my maternal instincts working overtime, I don't know.

At any rate, she does have an underlying anxiety problem, so it sounds like it might not be a good option for her. I would know what kind of brain damage it can do though.

 

[Deleted member 93]

d11 I am assuming daughter 11 years old?

 

[aowyn]

yes d11=daughter, 11 years old. sorry.

 

[Terry]

I've been through it once about 12 years ago and it helped with one incident. I start EMDR again Tues. It's got me really nervous, I don't want to go there again (different incidents) Thankfully I have 2 days off after. I can't say either way if it will help you or not just how it was for me. I'll try to post after tues. Good luck.

 

[NakedAnxiety]

I was convinced by my sister and mother to seek out EMDR treatment. My PTSD is a result of multiple major fractures over an entire childhood and then several into adulthood.

EMDR made everything far worse. My symptoms continued and I felt even more raw and powerless than usual. The exprience itself was violent and traumatic in itself but since the person kept pushing me to continue and my sister and mother said it would eventually work, I kept going until I really couldn't function even at my regular unacceptable levels.

So, maybe it was the provider or maybe I'm just not a good sport or maybe it was because of the issues several other people brought up about it only helping with one or two incidents of trauma.

I did recently go snorkeling around a beautiful reef in Hawaii and found that swimming with sea turtles seems to help symptoms... then again I may be all wet.
Link Removed

 

[aowyn]

May I ask what you mean by 'fractures'? If you are not comfortable saying that is ok.