EMDR for Anxiety & Related Symptoms
You’re going about your day, grabbing a coffee at your local place, making a photocopy at work, or driving home at the end of the day when suddenly, it’s happening again. You’re overwhelmed with a feeling of nervousness where you’re on edge, your heart is racing, and you feel like something terrible is about to happen, even though nothing around you has put you in danger.
You’re all too familiar with this sudden feeling of intense stress, seemingly out of nowhere. In your discomfort and fear, you may wonder: Is this permanent? Is this just how you are? Why is this happening?
Anxiety disorders and how to treat them
If these anxiety attacks popped up only when you were doing adrenaline-fueled activities like rollercoasters or in actually dangerous situations like a near–miss in traffic, they’d make sense. But when they’re popping up during even the most boring parts of your day, day after day, you’re likely experiencing an anxiety disorder.
Anxiety disorders are a distortion of your body’s normal response to stressors. It’s good to have heightened awareness of your surroundings when stressful things happen. But when your body gets so used to being on high alert, it will respond with fear and even panic to normal, everyday experiences, even when nothing is wrong.
EMDR is effective for anxiety disorders
There are many approaches for treating anxiety disorders, from talk therapy to medication to trauma-informed therapy like eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR. While there’s nothing wrong with pursuing support from medication or other therapy modalities, EMDR is unique in its efficacy for the treatment of anxiety in a relatively quick manner.
You may be wondering, how does EMDR help with anxiety? EMDR is particularly well suited for anxiety because it is a structured process, with steps that create a whole support system for you within the therapy room. You’ll receive guidance from your therapist as you’re guided to remember and incorporate positive truths into your difficult memories and feelings. EMDR helps you release the fear trapped in your body and mind, changing your relationship with your anxiety-driven memories and emotions and changing the impact anxiety has on your day-to-day life.
How does EMDR work?
EMDR is an evidence-based therapy modality that was specifically developed to address trauma. It allows you to validate the feelings that stem from your experiences and rearrange your relationship with your memories to reduce how they impact you in the present.
EMDR is an 8-stage therapy process that starts with you choosing what memory or negative belief to tackle. Your therapist will guide you in practicing coping mechanisms to make the process feel safer. Then, you’ll use a combination of reviewing the memory paired with side-to-side eye movement (or other stimulation that includes both sides of your body) to approach the belief from a state of bodily calm. This bilateral stimulation helps keep your mind in the present while remembering, reducing the impact of the memory and allowing you to finally, fully process the hurt it brought on.
You'll be the one to lead the process of exploring the memory while also incorporating positive beliefs to better reflect who you are now; you won’t have to delve into details unless you want to, and whatever thoughts or physical sensations come up through the process will be validated and heard. As your EMDR session wraps up, you and your therapist will review your progress and perform some calming exercises. You'll also be asked to keep track of any reminders or thoughts that come up throughout the week. Your next session will review your progress, and you and your therapist will decide if you need to continue with the same event or work on a different one.
EMDR is powerful in its supportive structure, where you can feel safe while also exploring distressing memories, and in its leveraging of the brain’s tendency to stay more in the present when there’s bilateral stimulation. You’ll spend time noticing your thoughts and the physical sensations in your body, helping you reprocess the entirety of the memory. You’ll choose how you want to relate to the memory now, empowering yourself even in the face of tough life experiences.
How does EMDR help with anxiety and panic attacks?
Anxiety can often be kicked off by a traumatic event of the past or several small traumas (small t’s) that affected you throughout your life . When you and your therapist track down the sources of your anxiety and panic, you can use EMDR to change your relationship with those experiences.
Difficult life experiences can instill negative self-beliefs in us, even if we don’t realize it at the time. Feeling helpless, or like the situations around you are unsafe, can be fuel for the fire of anxiety, reinforcing it. On top of that, when you’re remembering an anxiety-provoking event, it can feel like it’s still happening in that very moment, leaving you stuck in an anxious state. When you spend enough time in a fight-or-flight state from chronic anxiety, you can even experience panic attacks.
EMDR encourages you to stay in your body, noticing how you feel and what you’re thinking in the moment, even when reviewing anxiety-inducing experiences. With EMDR, you’ll be able to reprocess anxiety-inducing memories to incorporate positive beliefs that you choose, and you’ll give your mind and body space from the memory so you aren’t yanked back into intense anxiety or even panic over and over.
EMDR can also help with anxiety by changing your relationship to your anxiety disorder or panic attacks. Reprocessing your memories and feelings around having panic attacks or anxiety issues can reduce your dread and shame around having an anxiety disorder, lessening the power it has over your attention and helping you worry less about when anxiety might next cause problems for you.
How does EMDR help with OCD?
Obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, causes people’s minds to bring up intense, anxiety-inducing thoughts called intrusive thoughts or obsessions. To soothe that anxiety, someone with OCD will perform compulsive behaviors or thought processes; this only ever works in the short term, and in the long term, it increases anxiety from obsessions. OCD obsessions are all based on things the person fears the most, and those fears often center around harm coming to others or themselves.
OCD often escalates when triggers increase or when there are substantial changes in their life that strengthen or reinforce their OCD. OCD itself is also traumatic, adding significant stress and fear to a sufferer's life. Having your greatest fears come to mind over and over can be intense and upsetting.
People with OCD can use EMDR in at least three different ways.
EMDR can help people reprocess their current OCD-triggering experiences to lessen the impact of the fear and anxiety. This can make resisting compulsions easier, helping break the obsession-compulsion cycle.
Because OCD itself is traumatizing, EMDR can help people reprocess their memories of when OCD was particularly difficult to cope with, so their relationship with having OCD can be less anxiety-inducing. Reducing fear around having OCD can help someone cope with reducing compulsions even when feeling anxious.
Since OCD compulsions center around fears, EMDR can help someone reprocess traumatic events of the past that trigger or reinforce those fears. This doesn’t directly address OCD, but reducing the impact of past traumas tends to ease current OCD behaviors.
How does EMDR help with fears and phobias?
Fears and phobias often center around a single, specific subject. They also often arise from a particular event, though they can also be reinforced by other events that happen after the initial fear develops. Phobias tend to be outsized fears that don’t reflect the amount of hazard the situation or object creates for a person, e.g., fearing spiders even though they are easy to avoid, relocate, or even step on.
Intense fear toward something that isn’t a substantial hazard can be very disrupting, but EMDR can help in three ways:
Addressing the event or events that brought about that first experience of fear can reduce the fear in the current moment.
EMDR can also help you reprocess your experience around a recent phobia exposure; working with EMDR to shift your relationship to your memory of a recent event can be especially helpful in reducing that memory’s impact on you.
Phobias can also be self-reinforcing, so using EMDR to reprocess the fact that you have a phobia and have experienced significant fear events in your life can help you reduce your hypervigilance around encountering something you fear.
How can EMDR therapy in Florida help you?
If you’re struggling with anxiety, panic attacks, OCD, deep fears or phobias, EMDR therapy in Coral Springs, Florida may be the exact support you’re looking for. As a certified EMDR therapist, I’ve seen firsthand how reprocessing traumatic events can help people shift from doubt and fear to healing and self-acceptance. You have the capacity to heal; even if you doubt your abilities, I believe in you. When you’re ready, connect with me to learn more about how EMDR can help you.
