Wanted To Share - My First EMDR Session

[Lucycat]

I notice there has been a 4 year delay or pause in this thread!!! However I would say EMDR can be effective. I have had it and it most certainly helped me. But it is not for everybody.

You are right that it can increase symptoms. But, for me, they then got dramatically better.

 

[anthony]

if I'm understanding correctly, the purpose behind EMDR is to bring out repressed memories and allow you to process them now that you have some distance the actual event.

That is incorrect. EMDR has no such power or technique that brings forward repressed memories.

Repressed memories can be triggered by anything, literally. No therapy has the power to recover repressed memory.

Again, EMDR is not a way to recover repressed memory.

EMDR is a psychotherapy that helps process trauma, just the same as PE, TF-CBT and a few other CBT methods; EMDR being a CBT method.

 

[KBE]

I stand corrected.
Is there a "sticky" that explains all these acronyms?

 

[AS1975]

Each to their own, everyone's experience and therapist is different. However the one I see isn't charging me more for EMDR sessions. He uses it in combination with other techniques. Its very hard work, I have got worse/better/worse/better again but all in all I have improved massively since we started it. I have remembered things and made links that I never knew existed. That in itself has and is very frightening but if then it's managed and dealt with you get better. Well that's what has happened with me anyway. Its made everything make much more sense.

My therapist (or Psychiatrist in my case) is using EMDR, but there are no flashing lights and no buzzers. I'm simply asked to try and get a good 'view' of what is being dealt with, which is easy enough -reliving is kind of simple after a bit, even to the extent that I feel the clenched feeling in my stomach as the adrenaline surges/dumps, my lips even went numb when reliving being on fire - then concentrate on their hand moving until things stop being so difficult to control. Then, where possible, try and associate a positive outcome with the memory.