I hate the acronym, to be honest. EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It was specifically created for adult onset trauma for veterans with PTSD — even though it’s useful for everyone now, since we all experience some sort of trauma in our lives.

EMDR actually modifies the hard drive of your brain — the biochemical neurological pathways. In EMDR, a therapist will walk you through a process to create bilateral stimulation. Because the brain has neuroplasticity, if you do bilateral stimulation, your left brain and right brain talk to each other.

Think of your brain like a pharmacy. When you see something that is beautiful or you feel you, you see somebody you love or something that you love, you dump serotonin into the neurotransmitters that exist between the neurons in your brain. It also dumps negative stuff like epinephrine or adrenaline. Your nerves discharge a substance — the neurotransmitter — that the next neuron picks up and takes it in a pathway throughout your brain.

So you're trying to change the pathways with EMDR. You're breaking an old pattern that was deeply grooved into your psyche. Let's just use the veteran for an example. There's this perfectly normal person who was in a war some number of years ago and a car backfires in the street and they’re digging a foxhole in the living room. If they don't actually do it, they're thinking about doing it because they are totally triggered.

So, it's like getting emotionally hijacked when you're triggered. We're not home in our grown up self. The child in us is now driving. Because the child is going back to what protected him or her all those years ago and is retreating into that because they are too terrified and their frontal lobes are asleep at the wheel.

When you do the process of EMDR, you go back in a very simplistic way using the feeling as a bridge. The veteran would find that experience that they had — with their own awareness now, in the present moment— and actually look at that situation from a distance and reframe it.

EMDR gives you back a choice because it activates your frontal lobe. It heals that old experience because you're looking at it with new insight and an adult frame. So the guy digging the foxhole heals his brain’s pathway, and it doesn't happen again. It does not recidivate.

Dr. Lynn Ianni