EMDR: How I Used the Concept Without Knowing
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprogramming (EMDR) is a psychotherapy method used for trauma, anxiety and depression that I recently discovered and relate to. Though I never used eye movement when I needed to distract my thoughts, I did apply the method of bilateral stimulation. Bilateral stimulation, as I understand it (I’ve never studied it) is creating an alternate resource where one can feel safer during trauma. I relate it to the act of concentrating on music to alter my thoughts.
Living with epilepsy in my youth when epilepsy wasn’t yet widely understood, I had to commit to observing myself and my environment continuously. I noticed that I would get scared and anxious when I felt an aura and when I followed my reaction, the seizure would come faster. Desiring a way to cope for myself, I experimented with guiding my thoughts to imagining success scenarios instead of pending disaster. A change of thought wasn’t enough of a distraction, so I added humming and, eventually, body drumming to make myself concentrate harder when the situation felt intense. Humming helped me to not feed the fear I inevitably felt and, with the theory of distracting my brain from the seizure path, I had hoped drawing attention to different parts of my body would force it to change paths. Although it didn’t always work to stop the seizure, it did calm me down and gave me more time to prepare. I found that my distraction method also made it easier to surrender to the seizure and wake up in a more composed state. In concentrating on how I wanted to be before passing out, I was able to more easily present a calm and collected person after a fall, which helped to lessen the fear from people around me while I recovered.
Today, I continue to use distraction methods whenever I don’t like my situation. Almost as if preparing for a fall, I reprogram thoughts on how I’d like to be and feed the positive aspect of the situation before letting life take its course. After the situation passes, I try to make time to dig through the situation’s layers to learn something new. I’ve concluded that I don’t have to like what happens and it’s okay to not understand right away but there’s always something new to be discovered.
As I study EMDR briefly, I’m amazed with the various solutions that a person can come up with when cornered to survive. We are never able to predict our hardship, and we don’t want to have to imagine the worst, but should we ever be placed in it, we are well-equipped to survive and grow.
Find out more about EMDR with this link: What is EMDR?
Photo By: Tim Mossholder https://unsplash.com/@timmossholder
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