Anyone has experience with EMDR therapy?

[Emrie]

In my search for a therapist, I've noticed many of them offering EMDR therapy, so I wonder if anyone here has experience with it? Was it good or bad for you?

I'm doing my own research, of course, and nothing will beat obviously me trying it out for myself, but I wanted to offer anyone here the chance to talk about it if they feel so inclined.

[Ulax]

@Emrie Yep I tried it but i didn't get much out of it. Although i think my being very dissociated at the time was a big block.

My general understanding is it is very effective at dealing with a single or a few big traumas. For example, trauma from a car crash.  However, can be a cumbersome tool to use with someone who is dealing with trying to overcome lots of different traumas. For example, trauma for a childhood spent with abusive parents.

[StarStruck]

4 hours ago, Ulax said:

@Emrie Yep I tried it but i didn't get much out of it. Although i think my being very dissociated at the time was a big block.

My general understanding is it is very effective at dealing with a single or a few big traumas. For example, trauma from a car crash.  However, can be a cumbersome tool to use with someone who is dealing with trying to overcome lots of different traumas. For example, trauma for a childhood spent with abusive parents.

This is my experience too.

The weird thing is that my therapist didn't know this.

[Ulax]

2 minutes ago, StarStruck said:

The weird thing is that my therapist didn't know this.

@StarStruck Wdym? The therapist didn't know that dissociation could block EMDR, or that you even had dissociation?

[StarStruck]

9 hours ago, Ulax said:

@Emrie Yep I tried it but i didn't get much out of it. Although i think my being very dissociated at the time was a big block.

My general understanding is it is very effective at dealing with a single or a few big traumas. For example, trauma from a car crash.  However, can be a cumbersome tool to use with someone who is dealing with trying to overcome lots of different traumas. For example, trauma for a childhood spent with abusive parents.

She didn’t know this. If trauma is experienced for a long duration, EMDR is not effective from my exp. 

Edited February 18, 2023 by StarStruck

[Emrie]

On 2/18/2023 at 7:23 AM, Ulax said:

My general understanding is it is very effective at dealing with a single or a few big traumas. For example, trauma from a car crash.  However, can be a cumbersome tool to use with someone who is dealing with trying to overcome lots of different traumas. For example, trauma for a childhood spent with abusive parents.

Thanks yeah that's what I was starting to conclude. So it's not really going to be super useful for me.

[flowboy]

On 18/02/2023 at 7:23 AM, Ulax said:

@Emrie Yep I tried it but i didn't get much out of it. Although i think my being very dissociated at the time was a big block.

My general understanding is it is very effective at dealing with a single or a few big traumas. For example, trauma from a car crash.  However, can be a cumbersome tool to use with someone who is dealing with trying to overcome lots of different traumas. For example, trauma for a childhood spent with abusive parents.

Yes, don’t use it for childhood trauma. Only for single incidents.

I had a friend who had an abusive early childhood, and over the course of her life she slowly improved with different healing methodologies she came upon.

Then she decided to go all mainstream, do what the psychiatrist said and get EMDR sessions.

She committed suicide after the second or 3rd session.

 I’m not sure what to think about it exactly, or what happened in these sessions, but what I do know is that EMDR is a very poorly understood “trick” that you have to pay a lot of money for, to the private person who invented it, in order to perform it on people. But the mechanism of action is unclear.

And so a run-of-the-mill psychologist can now buy their way into having a fancy session they can offer, and say they work with trauma.

Psychiatry is a very young field, we really don’t know what we’re doing. It’s been around for 200 ish years, before that the insane were considered possessed by the devil.

I’m of the firm belief that crying heals the brain, and a trauma is something that hasn’t been sufficiently cried over. Because people don’t like to cry, nor can they stand to watch others bawl, because it would remind them of all their own uncried tears, they constantly invent tricks to prevent it, like medication and EMDR, and call them therapy. And they get insanely popular because it helps therapists and patients in the whole wide world avoid tears.

Even though the tears are what they need.

I’m not sure how EMDR works, what I do know is that you get rhythmically distracted while talking through traumatic memories, and that there’s no bawling. This can only mean that it somehow helps to further the separation of feeling and factual memory, when it comes to traumatic memories (facts and feelings are stored in different locations, we can have factual memories that we have no idea were traumatic because the feeling is disconnected).

That’s not healing, that’s a method to help push the pain down further, where it can never be found.

If you do this for a car accident because you want to stop having flashbacks, it’s probably harmless and effective.

If you do it for childhood trauma, which is a network of different nodes of pain that you need to work through in order to heal, then you’re probably messing up your brain more rather than healing it.

Pain always finds a way to create symptoms. When it can’t be connected with its original source (the factual memory, remembering it, crying through and letting it out == healing), it’s unpredictable what it will do but it’s sure going to mess with you in some way.

What I said above also goes for hypnotherapy. Hypnosis can be used for good (digging out a blocked memory so we can cry about it), but usually these days it’s used in a harmful way (getting to the traumatic memory and convince the person to see them in a different way, so that they’re not so painful, thereby creating more blockages around the real pain, which is basically hypnotic gaslighting, well-meaning but very misguided)

Edited February 22, 2023 by flowboy