EMDR Trauma Therapy in Lancaster, PA: Ready to Move Past Trauma & Thrive in Your Life?
The EMDR or the Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy is integrated psychotherapy that is used to treat mental stress and psychological trauma. It is efficacious therapy, especially for PTSD. In these sessions, the person relives triggering experiences in small doses during counseling sessions while the psychologist notices the movement of the eyes. Since remembering distressing memories is often less emotionally disturbing when your focus is distracted, EMDR is considered to be beneficial. This enables you to be exposed to experiences or emotions without undergoing a strong psychological reaction. This strategy is thought to mitigate the effect that memories or emotions have on you over time. EMDR therapy, unlike most therapies, relies specifically on the memory and on changing the way the memory is processed in the brain, thus reducing and removing troublesome symptoms.
History
EMDR was created in 1987 by therapist Francine Shapiro to assist people in dealing with and healing from emotional trauma. EMDR has become a more common technique for treating mental health challenges; therefore people have started researching more about it.
Phases
This prolonged treatment is completed in 8 phases.
1. Planning and History of Treatment
This process normally takes 2 or 3 sessions at the start of therapy and can last longer, particularly if new difficulties emerge. The therapist takes a detailed history of the client and establishes a recovery plan during the first phase of the EMDR treatment. One of the unique aspects of EMDR is that the person seeking assistance is not required to talk about each of his or her troubling memories in depth. While certain people are at ease with and often enjoy providing detail, others may prefer to provide a general image or description.
2. Preparation
This process would take about 1-4 sessions for most clients. Others, with a more traumatic experience, may need more time. Your therapist will show you basic strategies in this session so that you can quickly deal with any mental trouble that might occur. If you can do that, you should be able to go on to the next level. The establishment of a trusting bond between the client and the therapist is one of the main aims of the preparation process. Moreover, the therapist will discuss the idea of EMDR, how it is performed, and what the client should expect before and after therapy during the Preparation Phase. Finally, the therapist will show the client a series of coping methods to help a person settle down in the event of an emotional episode before or during the session.
3. Assessment
The client will be encouraged to access each requirement in a standardized and structured manner during this step so that it can be processed efficiently. Processing does not entail discussing it. Instead, different sections of the target are identified by the EMDR therapist to be assessed. The client selects a single image or mental representation from the target incident that best reflects the memory. Then he selects a sentence that reflects a negative self-perception connected to the incident. These pessimistic views are merely expressions of lingering negative feelings. The individual then chooses a more optimistic self-statement to assume. Using the 1-to-7 Validity of Cognition (VOC) scale, the therapist will encourage the client to determine how accurate a positive perception feels.
4. Desensitization
This stage primarily focuses on the client's alarming emotions and sensations as calculated by the SUDs rating. As the targeted incident alters and the upsetting aspects are overcome, this step deals with all of the person's experiences (including all other memories, observations, or connections that may arise). This allows you to recognize and address any related incidents that could have happened in the past that are linked to the objective. In this way, a client can achieve more than his or her original objectives and recover faster than anticipated. The therapist guides the client through a series of eye gestures, noises, or clicks with necessary adjustments and variations of focus till his or her SUD-scale levels are reduced to zero or near zero. Starting with the prime focus, the various connections to the memory are followed.
5. Installation
The aim is to focus on and strengthen the client's confidence to replace his or her initial pessimistic belief. For example, the client can begin with a mental picture of his or her father abusing him or her, as well as the pessimistic perception that "I am weak." During the Desensitization Phase, the client would have regenerated the trauma of the experience and completely understood that as an adult, he or she now has power and freedoms that were not available to him or her when he or she was a teenager. The person's optimistic cognition, "I am now in power," will be reinforced and built during this fifth step of therapy. The Validity of Cognition (VOC) scale is then used to determine how much an individual believes in constructive cognition. At a level of 7, the individual must agree to the full reality of his optimistic self-statement (completely true).
6.Body Scan
The therapist will encourage the client to recall the initial target case and see if any remaining tension is present in the body after the constructive cognition has been reinforced and added. These sensory sensations are then targeted for reprocessing if this is the case. Numerous EMDR sessions have been evaluated, and the results show that there is a physical solution to unanswered emotions. As a result, an EMDR session is not deemed satisfactory until the participant can recall the initial goal without experiencing any physical discomfort. Positive self-esteem is important, but it must be accepted on more than an analytical basis.
7. Closure
Closure means that the participant feels healthier after each session than they did at the start. If the processing of the stressful target experience cannot be completed in a single session, the therapist will aid the person in regaining a sense of balance by teaching them various self-calming strategies. He or she is often given information on what to assume in between sessions (some learning will occur, new content will emerge), how to keep a diary to monitor these events, and what coping strategies may be used to self-soothe other than the therapy.
8. Reevaluation
The Reevaluation Phase helps the psychiatrist through the many recovery plans that are required to address the client's issues. The Reevaluation Phase, as with any successful medication, is critical for determining the treatment's long-term effectiveness. While clients may experience satisfaction almost instantly with EMDR, it is just as essential to finish all eight phases of treatment as it is to finish an antibiotic course.
Benefits
EMDR therapy is considered to be particularly beneficial to people who are coping with painful memories or who have PTSD. It's thought to be especially fruitful for people who find it difficult to speak about their prior experiences. EMDR therapy is also used to treat a variety of diseases, even though there isn't enough evidence to prove its efficacy in these fields. To name a few, it treats illnesses like depression, stress, different addictions, and panic attacks. Since remembering distressing memories is always less emotionally disturbing when the mind is distracted, EMDR is proven to be successful. This helps you to be subjected to memories or emotions without feeling a powerful psychological reaction.
Experts
While these therapies are not widely available around the world, people like you in Lancaster won’t have to worry about that. For people complaining there is no counselor near me, you can rest assured that all of our team also conducts virtual EMDR therapy. These are found to be clinically effective in helping resolve trauma. Even many of our local Lancaster clients elect for virtual given the convenience.
Issues to address can include: depression, relational challenges, and sexual problems and give proper treatment and counseling. Their goal is to assist you in forming healthy relationships and making positive changes in your life. These professionals provide individual and couples therapy to help people resolve life challenges. Our clinicians help with the transformation of phases for people who feel empty, depressed, and stressed. Moreover, they help people to sail past their traumas. Additionally, the therapists also help to ameliorate the relationship between individuals. They help to cater to communication gaps, nurturing and upbringing conflicts, desire conflicts, and rebuilding trust after extramarital affairs.
Counseling
Individual counseling
Individual therapy initiates with a brief overview of the aims and objectives of a person. This comprises the family background and traditions, partnership and friendship strengths and obstacles, and other prior issues you wish to overcome and move on. With years of experience and expertise, a strategy has been devised to resolve the problems with an approximate duration and meeting frequency. For the first initial sessions, it is advised to be consistent at least for a week or two. This framework can be modified as needed. Most of the experts employ a combination of strength-based approaches that focuses on strong points and talents. Moreover, they give you the edge to inquire about their psychological background too. One of the most promising factors of the therapy that drives every individual to take the session is they will never get judged over their past actions. The experts try to help you achieve your objectives and bucket list without blaming you for your past behavior. Issues such as mental illnesses, stress, lowering self-esteem, bipolar disorder, substance abuse, co-occurring disorders, and LGBTQ societal issues are all handled under individual therapy.
Couple Counseling
Every relationship has its ups and downs. With enhanced confidence, awareness, and affection, couples therapies will help you solidify and restore your relationship. To help couples reconnect and improve their relationships, the counselors use an evidence-based approach. This includes couple counseling, training, increasing emotional focus, and catering to other problems and weaknesses hindering the relationship. One of the specialists has used EMDR to dig down and unleash the traumas of the two people, in particular, ensuring that they get equal attention. He's also used EMDR to help one or more people, outside of joint therapy, resolve some of the deepest wounds he's ever seen. He has solidified relationships and has shaped them as a result of the tenderness that can come from seeing one's spouse at their most intense weakness and recognizing that they are accepting responsibility for their past. He has also had a lot of experience using EMDR on Skype with people from beyond the borders over the last couple of years. This has proven to be beneficial too.
Depression Counseling
While some people believe that depression is a different illness, therapists have failed to find an accurate diagnosis for it. Antidepressant medicine, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), counseling, and relationship therapy are all currently prescribed treatments for depression. However, they do not produce effective and efficient results. EMDR is a psychotherapy that was first used to cure post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Many that have suffered significant trauma, such as physical violence as a child; a traumatic accident; a major catastrophe, such as a hurricane, storm, or earthquake; or an unnatural occurrence, such as 9/11 or witnessing a murder, can be helped to overcome their trauma through EMDR. Investigators have also revealed that EMDR is successful in treating long-term trauma that can lead to depression, such as growing up with homelessness, surviving toxic and unhealthy relationships, living in poverty, or having a family member with mental illness.
Effectiveness
EMDR claims to be a risk-free treatment of almost every psychological illness with no known adverse effects. Despite its growing popularity, mental health professionals continue to question EMDR's efficacy. Many EMDR trials have only had a limited number of researchers, according to opponents. Other scholars, on the other hand, have released papers combining evidence from several trials to demonstrate the treatment's efficacy. EMDR therapy has proven to be the most successful and beneficial treatment, according to numerous controlled researches and experiments. It is one of the top recommendations of PTSD (Department of Veterans Affairs). According to the survey of 22 individuals conducted in 2012, the therapy benefited 77% of them with mental illness and PTSD. It was discovered that after therapy, their hallucinations, illusions, panic, and psychological distress had drastically changed. The study also unleashed that the symptoms did not get worse as a result of therapy. In earlier findings, it was shown to be more successful in treating symptoms than traditional extended exposure therapy. The study also discovered that participants who received EMDR therapy had a reduced dropout rate. Both, on the other hand, showed a decrease in traumatic stress symptoms such as anxiety and distress. Many other minor experiments have discovered evidence that EMDR therapy is not only successful in the short run but also that its benefits can be sustained over time. In a 2004 review, participants were assessed several months after receiving either “standard care” (SC) or EMDR therapy for PTSD. This study further solidified the importance of EMDR. It was reviewed that EMDR was marginally more effective in lowering PTSD symptoms directly after therapy. They also noticed that patients retained these effects even after the therapy stopped during the three- and six-month follow-ups. Overall, EMDR treatment was shown to provide patients with long-lasting improvement in symptoms than SC. In a survey of 32 participants done in an inpatient environment, EMDR therapy was shown to be effective in treating depression. After therapy, 68 percent of those in the EMDR community reported complete recovery, according to the report. Overall, the EMDR group had a greater reduction in psychiatric disorders.
Conclusion
EMDR therapy is best for people who want to move past their trauma. A lot of people prefer this approach to traditional talk therapy as it has a concrete treatment plan targeting specific memories. With your therapist, you elect how to move through the traumas with the aforementioned phases. Overall, it has helped many people overcome their stress and has played a crucial role in helping people thrive after therapy. Please feel free to reach out to learn how this modality of therapy can benefit you individually, as part of your relationship, or for a loved one.