EMDR Intensives: Accelerating Your Healing

EMDR, short for Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing, is a therapy that’s great for dealing with trauma. It was developed by Dr. Francine Shapiro in the late 1980s. EMDR combines parts of different therapies like cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), psychodynamic therapy, and somatic therapies into a structured method to help people feel better after experiencing trauma.

How It Started

Dr. Shapiro came up with the idea for EMDR during a walk in the late 1980s. She had gone for a walk to work through a particularly stressful moment but noticed that by the end of her walk, she felt a lot calmer despite nothing having changed about the situation. She realised that her eye movements during the walk might have helped change her mood.

Curious about this, she began to study it more closely. This simple observation led her to develop EMDR, which uses eye movements (or other types of bilateral stimulation) to help people process and heal from traumatic memories more effectively.

How EMDR Works

EMDR works through a structured eight-step process: taking your history, getting you ready, assessing, desensitising, installing new thoughts, doing a body scan, closing the session, and re-evaluating. A key part of EMDR is bilateral stimulation, which can involve moving your eyes side-to-side, listening to sounds, or tapping your hands on your shoulder or knees.

Bessel van der Kolk explains that traumatic memories get stored differently in the brain than regular memories. During a traumatic event, the brain’s language processing area can shut down, causing memories to be fragmented and disorganised.

Because of this, traumatic memories often feel jumbled and hard to recall normally. In EMDR, bilateral stimulation helps access these fragmented memories and piece them together more coherently.

In the desensitisation phase, you revisit memories while doing bilateral stimulation to make them less distressing. New, adaptive information is added to give a fuller context of the trauma, helping you see your resilience or understand that the danger is gone. The final step, re-evaluation, checks how effective the treatment was and addresses any remaining distress.

Advantages of EMDR Intensives

EMDR Intensives are long sessions, usually 3 to 6 hours, that let you dig deeper into therapy. These are great for people dealing with single-event traumas like car accidents or assaults and for those with complex PTSD from ongoing trauma.

In typical 50-minute sessions, it can often feel like it takes 10 to 15 minutes just to settle in, another 20 to 30 minutes to really get to the core of an issue, and then you have to start winding down to get back to your day. With longer EMDR Intensives, there’s more time to focus on the core issues, work through them, and reach a resolution. This allows for a more immersive therapeutic experience, giving you time to process everything and then smoothly transition back to your daily activities.

Because these sessions are longer, you can explore and process traumatic memories without the usual time constraints of weekly sessions. This focused approach helps speed up healing and makes it easier to work through and resolve your trauma.

Combining EMDR Intensives with Weekly Therapy

If you’re already in weekly therapy, adding EMDR Intensives can boost your progress. Your EMDR therapist and your weekly therapist can consult together to provide the best support for you. After an EMDR Intensive, many people find it helpful to return to their regular therapist for ongoing support. This way, you can build on the progress made during the intensive sessions and keep the healing going.

Who Can EMDR Help?

Think of someone who’s been in a bad car accident and now feels really anxious about driving. Or perhaps you’ve experienced a medical emergency that’s left you feeling shaken and unable to move on. While weekly therapy can be beneficial, progress may feel slow. An EMDR Intensive could bring about significant changes in just one extended session, helping to reduce anxiety and support a return to a healthier baseline.

People dealing with complex PTSD from things like childhood abuse might also struggle to make progress in weekly therapy alone. EMDR Intensives provide a focused time to work through tough memories, often leading to better mood stability, relationships, and overall quality of life. Sometimes, several sessions are needed for full benefits when dealing with CPTSD.

It’s important to know that EMDR Intensives aren’t a quick fix. They can be a great option if you don’t have time for regular therapy or if your trauma symptoms are intense, but you might need multiple sessions for lasting change.

Things to Consider

While EMDR Intensives can be really effective, they need careful planning. You’ll have a thorough consultation to see if it’s right for you and to create a personalised treatment plan. It’s important to be ready for the intensity of these long sessions and have a good support system in place to help you process any emotions that come up during and after the therapy.

Final Thoughts

EMDR Intensives are a step forward in trauma therapy, focusing on healing through longer sessions. By using EMDR principles intensively, it’s possible to resolve traumatic experiences that once felt overwhelming. Whether used alone or alongside regular therapy, EMDR Intensives offer a valuable option for people seeking lasting relief from trauma-related distress.

If you or someone you know is interested in exploring how EMDR Intensives can support your healing journey, feel free to contact me for a consultation. For more information, visit https://clodaghmcgrath.com/emdr-therapy or email me at info@clodaghmcgrath.com.