Sometimes trauma won’t let go. And when trauma won’t let go, it requires treatment. Why?
Because trauma can turn life inside out. It can drag you back and weigh you down. When you feel like trauma-related flashbacks and depression are weighing on you, seeking help can seem like an unwelcome opportunity to rehash the worst experiences of your life. It’s easy to feel stuck, hopeless, and even ashamed.
Yet, navigating your story of abuse, tragedy, sudden change, or the confusing, persistent signs of PTSD needn’t be a solo venture. Please know that while treating trauma is necessary, it needn’t be a stigmatizing or even a heavily verbal and redundant process. Talk therapy isn’t the only way to process your pain and relieve your mind and body. A method called Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR) is safe and proven. This treatment effectively addresses trauma in ways that other therapies do not.
There Are Lots of Trauma Treatments: Why EMDR?
Are you a survivor of childhood abuse, abandonment, sexual assault, trauma, depression, anxiety, and/or substance abuse? Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) can be very helpful in overcoming a variety of problems and symptoms. Some studies indicate that EMDR can actually ease the aftereffects of neglect, mistreatment, and personal crises in half the time of other treatments.
So, what makes EMDR such an effective trauma treatment? Let’s start with the link between your brain and body.
Stored Trauma is Expressed By Your Body
When you keep pain locked away, your body will inevitably seek a way to process and express it. You may experience chronic aches in your back or neck as a result of the posture you’ve adopted to hide your distress. Unexpressed, this emotional pain can go on to manifest as discomfort or tightness in your throat. Alternatively, you might feel a sense of numbness, as if you're attempting to avoid any feelings altogether.
It's important to note that each person's experience is unique. However, people living with chronic post-traumatic stress in the body are reported to have more long-term health problems. Over time, PTSD symptoms cyclically increase anxiety, depression, and relational difficulties that eventually take a physical toll.
Here are some physical symptoms you might be experiencing:
Muscle Tension: Chronic stress and unresolved emotions can cause your muscles, particularly in the back and neck, to tense up. This tension is your body's way of holding onto stress.
Headaches: Stress-induced headaches, often referred to as tension headaches, can occur due to prolonged anxiety and emotional strain. You might feel like a tight band around your head. Due to hyperarousal, you might experience headaches often. This can exacerbate trouble concentrating and overwhelm in certain surroundings.
Digestive Issues: You may have very little appetite or struggle with nausea and heartburn as the digestive system’s muscles tense in response to stress. Emotional strain can often manifest as stomachaches or bloating, too.
Fatigue: Emotional exhaustion can leave you feeling physically drained. Such fatigue is often due to the constant mental and emotional energy expended in suppressing your feelings.
Increased Heart Rate and Palpitations: When your mind is burdened with emotional stress, it can manifest as an increased heart rate or palpitations. This is your body's fight-or-flight response kicking in, even if there is no immediate physical danger.
Skin Reactions: Emotional stress can also lead to skin issues such as acne, hives, or eczema flare-ups. The stress hormones can trigger inflammation, causing your skin to react.
Inflammation and Low Immunity: When you relive your trauma, your body becomes stuck in a state of chronic stress. The ongoing flood of cortisol in your system promotes chronic inflammation. This increases your risk of disease and chronic pain.
Sleep Disruption: If you deal with trauma-related flashbacks or nightmares, your brain responds as though you are experiencing the events all over again. This fight-or-flight mode makes sleep difficult.
Trauma can and will wear your body down. Untreated, the long-term effects of post-traumatic stress on the body show up everywhere, from your skin to deep in your cells. Of course, if you’re experiencing physical conditions, visiting your physician can also help. But if trauma is the source of your physiological problems, the only way to get long-lasting relief is to work through it with a compassionate, experienced therapist.
How EMDR Helps Relieve Trauma Stored In The Body
To combat post-traumatic stress stored in living in the body is vital. To effectively treat the symptoms of trauma, you have to get to the root causes and release the tension they create. The first step? Accept that persistent discomfort in the body is not coincidental or accidental. Your body and mind are inexorably linked. Whether you have a clear picture of your trauma or, at some point, the memories were lost or distorted, your body remembers and holds on.
Fortunately, there is a way to let it go.
How EMDR Helps PTSD
When you feel you can easily cope with and manage the stressors in your life, you’re within your “window of tolerance.” Trauma creates physical distress because the experience shrinks that window. At that point, any stressor more readily upsets your emotional well-being. Confronting stress or pressure increasingly puts you in a state of hyperarousal, irritability, discomfort, withdrawal, and even disconnected numbness.
The way you deal with the tension inside you becomes unreliable. Your perceptions, thinking, and physical sensations are over-sensitive and stuck in a loop instead of being released properly.
EMDR can help in a few key ways:
EMDR employs your brain’s natural propensity to heal.
Emotional resistance and mental blocks interrupt healthy and timely trauma recovery. One of the most beneficial aspects of EMDR therapy is the core belief that healing needn’t be protracted or prolonged. Once a block has been identified, EMDR can relieve the stress and anxiety of trauma in ways that are completely natural and sustainable. EMDR can help reestablish your natural thought processes and reasoning, even those that have been unaffected by other trauma treatments.
EMDR facilitates important mental connections without retraumatizing you.
EMDR uses bilateral stimulation to sort out and transform your emotional responses to traumatic thoughts and memories. The standardized treatment strategy incorporates hones in on memories.
Francine Shapiro, Ph.D., EMDR creator and developer, explains: “Specific procedures are used to help clients maintain a sense of control during memory work as the therapist guides their focus of attention. They need only focus briefly on the disturbing memory during the processing while engaged in the bilateral stimulation (eye movements, taps, or tones) as the internal associations are made. The client’s brain makes the needed links as new emotions, sensations, beliefs, and memories emerge. All the work is done during the therapy sessions. The client doesn't need to describe the memory in detail, and no homework is used.”
EMDR triggers immediate relief and ongoing recovery.
Trauma is particularly devastating to some people because it creates a persistent feeling of being emotionally out of control and powerless over the physical fallout. You and your therapist can use sessions to redirect eye movements linked to your trauma and find release. Because therapy is direct and unambiguous, you will likely find that the relief you experience via EMDR is quick, trustworthy, and unique to you.
Studies reveal that over 80% of single-trauma victims experience relief from PTSD after participating in just a few 90-minute EMDR sessions. Treatment participants often feel more open, receptive, and emotionally aware. EMDR allows for an improved perspective, more logical decision-making, and more permanent recovery moving forward.
If you sense that trauma or PTSD is taking too high a toll on your well-being, consider the healing potential of EMDR therapy. Remember, your past doesn't have to shape your future. Let's chat about ways to alleviate your discomfort. You are not alone in this. Please call (805) 374-1770 or email me at Linda@lindafisherman.com for compassionate care and support.