Is EMDR Therapy Only For Major Trauma? (No!)

EMDR therapy has a well-deserved reputation for successfully treating people who have experienced highly traumatic events, or who have PTSD symptoms that profoundly disrupt their lives. And it’s certainly true that EMDR can be very helpful in these situations.

But people who hear about EMDR often don’t know that EMDR can also be very effective for helping you navigate all manner of difficult experiences that don’t rise to the level of major trauma. The truth is that EMDR can be a wonderful support for helping you navigate and heal from the full spectrum of challenging life experiences, be they major or minor.

All of us go through upsetting and painful experiences in our lives. Sometimes at the time when these experiences occur, we are not able to fully care for ourselves, to fully feel, process, and heal what we have gone through. You may notice the sting or the hurt, but you may tell yourself to just move on, that it’s a minor thing and you just need to ignore it and keep going. In this way, the pain and frustration and confusion of the event can get stuck within you in a sense, continuing to come up for you as a range of challenging feelings—anxiety, worry, panic, sadness, emotional exhaustion, difficulty being vulnerable with others in relationships, or low-self-esteem and inaccurate and deflated beliefs about your self-worth and your abilities and capacities.

For instance, maybe you had a boss at work who treated you badly over a period of time—not badly enough so that you felt justified leaving the job or complaining to HR, but your stress level remained high over a long period of time because you didn’t know when the boss was going to lash out. Or maybe you were in a romantic relationship or a close friendship that was painful—not necessarily rising to the level of what felt to you like abuse, but you were burdened for a long time with an inner current of worry, anxiety, and pain. Or maybe you had childhood experiences that were difficult, but which you’ve always interpreted as in the vein of ‘normal’ challenges of growing up—and yet you notice that echoes of these experiences stay with you, returning to you in moments of remembering, or dreams, or causing your current relationships to feel less safe and secure than you would like them to.

EMDR has a beautiful way of supporting you to process and heal from all manner of difficult experiences and patterns, and in this way, helping to free you from their ongoing impacts. And keep in mind that EMDR is not just for addressing pain that feels huge, but also for helping you heal from challenging experiences that you have dismissed as ‘small’ but that remain with you. Working together in this way we can support you to find relief from these burdens that you have been carrying.

If you are interested in exploring EMDR to address issues that feel large or small, I invite you to call me at (510) 500-9722 so that we can talk about how EMDR therapy can help.