Treatment of Post-traumatic Stress Reactions

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a psychological method for treating emotional difficulties that are caused by disturbing life experiences, ranging from traumatic events such as accidents, assaults, illness, and natural disasters to upsetting childhood experiences that have had a lasting effect on one’s life. EMDR is a complex method that brings together elements from well-established theoretical orientations, including psychodynamic, cognitive, and behavioral and client centered approaches. For many clients, EMDR provides more rapid relief than conventional therapies.

While EMDR is best known for its treatment of post-traumatic stress reactions, it is also used to treat anxiety, depression, and other clinical presentations such as complicated grief reactions, phobias, and self-esteem issues. Self administered EMDR is also used to help alleviate performance anxiety and to enhance the functioning of people at work, on the playing field, and in the performing arts.

During an EMDR Period, the physician works with the consumer to recognize a specific issue or issue that will become the focus of the treatment session. Utilizing a structured method, the professional helps the customer identify an experience that relates to the issue, working on factors of the experience that continue to be upsetting to the customer in the present. As the customer focuses their attention on the focused event, the doctor activates eye movements.

Once the client is engaged in the experience, he or she is likely to experience various aspects of the initial memory or other memories that are associated with the targeted event. The clinician pauses with the eye movements at regular intervals to insure that the client is processing adequately on their own. The practitioner acts as a facilitator, making clinical decisions about the direction of the client’s processing during EMDR, in an effort to reach an “adaptive resolution” to the problem that was initially identified. EMDR is a client-centered approach that appears to activate an inherent healing mechanism in the brain that stimulates an information processing system. It allows the client to access a disturbing experience that has been a source of discomfort, and have the experience reprocessed in EMDR in a way that it is no longer a source of distress to the client. These experiences that were once stored in the brain in their original state are altered with EMDR. The physician uses EMDR to stimulate that encounter with all the ideas, emotions and body system emotions that are still associated with the encounter. Through the flexible details handling program in the mind, EMDR is able to stimulate desensitization and a reprocessing of that preliminary encounter, thereby providing it to a more flexible quality. While it is not obvious how EMDR works, there is continuous research of the possible systems involved. What is obvious is that existing day situations can resume pessimism, feelings, and physical feelings that occur from previously encounters that are distressing. This indicates that EMDR can change the organization of those encounters, significantly reducing the current problems about past and existing activities. For more information visit the site http://selfbetter.com/ .