EMDR Therapy
on Long Island
Because sometimes seeing is more than just believing.
Are you ready to heal, but less prepared to revisit the details of traumatic or repressed memories?
What if we told you that with the support of a trained therapist, we can use your eyes to navigate the healing processes in your brain?
EMDR can help you heal without spending a lot of time rehashing the things that hurt you.
There is nothing wrong with you if you struggle to talk about what’s happened to you.
Trauma can be difficult to process. In order to truly move past the things you’ve gone through, it requires re-living them. This is understandably difficult and can be an exhausting process.
If the thought of talking at length about old hurts and hard feelings makes you feel uncertain or overwhelmed with anxiety, EMDR therapy may be the tool you’ve been looking for.
EMDR is internationally recognized as a beneficial treatment to heal the brain from the residual and lingering effects of trauma.
With over 3 decades of research behind it, Eye Movement Desensitization And Reprocessing is often used to treat PTSD and other trigger-based trauma disorders but that’s not all it can do.
EMDR is a beneficial part of treatment for:
Chronic Health conditions
Depression
Grief and Loss
Stress Management
Substance Abuse
Eating Disorders
Mood regulation
Anxiety
Panic Attacks and Phobias
Dissociative disorders
Sleep disturbances
Sexual Assault Recovery
Performance Anxiety
Personality Disorders
What makes EMDR different?
To effectively heal, your brain needs to have a conversation with itself. Three different parts of your brain are involved in that conversation. Respectively, they’re responsible for stress response (fight or flight), learning (both making memories and assessing danger) and behavior analysis (what you’ll do and what others are doing). When that conversation breaks down, so does your ability to heal from the things that happened in the places it stopped effectively communicating. You freeze- permanently trapped in the alarm state of those events instead of moving through the stages of processing we typically have in response to them.
EMDR works by using repetitive rhythmic stimulation to help push your brain through that freeze so it can organically resume the healing process it’s been trapped in.
The stimulation we use is often a repetitive eye movement, but may also include things like tapping with your hands, or external cues like a tone or sound that’s repeated.
This bilateral stimulation is substituted for the time we often spend dwelling on experiences and emotions.
Instead, you’ll briefly recall the trauma you experienced while also experiencing this repeated stimulation. This begins a process of reducing the vividness of your response by allowing your brain to do the work of healing without the need of prolonged emotional exposure to the memory.
Powerfully to the point
If you only have a fixed amount of time or are looking to do focused work on overcoming a single trigger, EMDR is a great choice for your therapeutic tool. While it can be used alongside or within many therapy modalities, you can begin to see improvement quite quickly without the intensive exposure to your triggers that may have held you back from seeking the support you deserve.
When we are working through a single memory, you can expect to have 1-3 sessions with your therapist.
For prolonged trauma healing, EMDR treatment often lasts for 6-12 sessions that can be done weekly, with some sessions occurring on consecutive days.
Wondering what to expect?
While the therapeutic experience isn’t the same for everyone, EMDR Treatment is a structured process. Don’t worry, there’s no one standing over you expecting your response to be as uniform as the guidelines. There’s plenty of room to move at your own pace and comfort level.
Phase 1
Introductions and history gathering so we’re familiar with one another before we begin.
Phase 2
Getting you ready. It’s a priority for us to ensure you always know what to expect.
Phase 3
Assessing what it is you’d like to target. We’ll identify the memory, sticky spot or trigger to focus on.
Phase 4-7
These are the active EMDR phases where we use repetitive exposures to create new pathways for your brain to heal. EMDR relies on Adaptive Information Processing, so during these phases, we’re focused on rewriting your memory storage.
Phase 8
Results and evaluation. We’ll review your treatment together and the results of our work. This gives you the space to determine how you feel now, and what comes next.