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Trauma

As an Accredited EMDR Practitioner, I work with both single-event trauma and developmental trauma. EMDR — Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing — can calm your brain’s alarm system and help you process distressing memories that have become stuck.

How your brain responds to danger

When we are in danger or feel under threat, the alarm system in our brain activates automatically. In an instant it assesses:

  1. Can I fight this danger?
  2. If not, can I run away from it?
  3. If not, I will freeze or flop until the danger has passed.

Once the danger has passed, the alarm system switches off and the body returns to a relaxed state. The adrenaline and cortisol that were pumped into your body are naturally absorbed back. This is why people in shock sometimes shake: the body is getting rid of those chemicals.

Single-event trauma

Sometimes a single traumatic event leaves the brain unable to switch off. It keeps reliving what happened. This can show up as flashbacks, nightmares, feeling tense or jumpy, depression, low motivation, or avoiding reminders of the event (for example, avoiding a road where you had a car accident).

If this sounds familiar, EMDR can help your brain move the event into a lived memory: something that happened, rather than something that is still happening.

Developmental trauma

What happens when, as a child, you regularly felt unsafe? If your brain’s alarm system was on high alert throughout childhood, it is common to carry that heightened alertness into adulthood, not realising the alarm no longer needs to be on all the time.

Experiences that can cause this include:

  • Being witness to parents fighting or shouting
  • Being witness to parents drinking heavily or taking drugs
  • Being bullied at school by peers or teachers
  • Being sexually or physically abused
  • Being emotionally or mentally abused
  • Being spiritually coerced
  • Living in poverty
  • Receiving little or no emotional support from primary caregivers
  • Moving frequently, which prevented you from making friends
  • Dealing with serious illness — your own or a caregiver's
  • Family dealing with early bereavement due to illness, suicide, or accident

EMDR can help your brain acknowledge that it is no longer in danger, that the adult version of you can now take control of situations that the child could not, and that the alarm system can be switched off except when there is real danger.

Ready to talk?

If you'd like to explore whether EMDR is the right approach for you, please get in touch.

Contact me