EMDR Therapy and PTSD

Explore how PTSD memories haunt and re-experience themselves, and how EMDR therapy, introduced by Francine Shapiro in the 1980s, has become a recognized treatment.

Explore how Francine Shapiro accidentally discovered EMDR during a forest walk, leading to a protocol of therapist-led consultations using eye movements to desensitize and reprocess trauma.

Explore the EMDR controversy over eye movements and the lack of solid evidence, and learn the adaptive information processing model linking PTSD with memory processing to guide therapy.

EMDR stage by stage protocol for PTSD, guiding memory recall through imagery, feelings, thoughts, and sensations, using eye movements to reduce distress and reframe beliefs.

Explore how the adaptive information processing model explains PTSD, where traumatic memories stay vivid, and how the MDR protocol uses bilateral stimulation to facilitate processing.

Discuss the controversy over ptsd diagnosis, focusing on whether symptoms require exposure to death or violence. The lecture notes professional disagreements and emdr therapists' experiences with symptoms without such exposure.

Compare simple ptsd from a single event to complex ptsd from repeated trauma, diagnosed by the nature of the incident, in emdr therapy, with road accidents, assaults, abuse, or torture.

Identify simple ptsd symptoms, including sleep problems, headaches, muscle tension, hypervigilance, detachment, intrusive memories, thoughts, and intense emotions, and recognize complex ptsd's distorted self and abuser views and relationship difficulties.

Explore how trauma leads to post-traumatic stress disorder, including delayed onset and memory gaps in complex PTSD, and examine stress as the first layer of symptoms before addressing EMDR.

Explore how the immune response and the orienting response prepare the body to assess threats, triggering either the relaxation response or the stress response.

Our beliefs about safety trigger the stress response, producing a surge of energy to fight or flight, with turbulence illustrating that a stressor is subjective.

The stress response boosts energy by increasing oxygen and glucose delivery for fight or flight, then reallocates energy from hair growth, healing, and bones, leading to illness under chronic stress.

Explain acute and chronic stress, how brief stressors trigger a temporary stress response versus lasting symptoms, and how acute stress disorder can progress to PTSD after one month.

Explore how the brain processes challenging experiences, forms memories, and recalls them, and examine theories about how MDR seems to relieve PTSD symptoms through bilateral stimulation.

Explore how experiences begin as sensations from the five senses and how the brain translates them into electrochemical language via transduction.

The thalamus routes sensory data as an electrochemical language to the prefrontal cortex and amygdala, enabling the brain to evaluate significance and determine action.

Learn how sensations are transduced into an electrochemical language, broken into perceptual pieces, and reassembled by the brain to produce perceptions.

Explore how past experiences shape perception, as brain modules like the prefrontal cortex and amygdala blend sensations and memories to determine whether a loaf of bread feels safe or threatening.

The hippocampus holds the immediate past in short-term working memory to help you remember why you act next, while data enters via the thalamus to shape your moment-to-moment experience.

Explore how the hippocampus selects experiences from short-term working memory for long-term storage in the cortex, balancing memory preservation against limited capacity.

Explain how the hippocampus decides which short-term memories to store based on emotional intensity and how the amygdala provides the emotional context that shapes long-term memory.

Identify how the amygdala flags potential threats or rewards and guides the hippocampus to store or discard short-term memories for long-term storage, shaping survival learning.

Recall traumatic memories to activate the hippocampus, which retrieves long-term emotionally tagged memories beside short-term working memory; observe how recall lowers emotion for most people but stays high in PTSD.

Learn how emotional memories rely on sensory mental imagery stored by the hippocampus in the cortex, forming visual, auditory, and other sensory images that fade with recall, except in PTSD.

Help individuals with post-traumatic stress reduce emotional intensity and vivid sensory imagery of traumatic memories. Explore how processing, possibly involving the hippocampus, reduces distress, self-criticism, hopelessness, and bodily sensations.

The working memory theory explains EMDR efficacy by dividing attention between a traumatic memory and a moderately taxing task, such as following a finger, beeps, or taps.

During EMDR therapy, a therapist guides eye movements while revisiting a traumatic memory, dividing attention to reduce emotional intensity and vividness, leading to reduced memory vividness and PTSD symptoms.

Explore semantic memories—words, facts, and figures learned throughout life—and contrast them with procedural memories that guide actions, with hippocampus involvement noted.

Understand autobiographical memories, or episodic memory, and how the hippocampus retrieves life episodes. Note how hippocampal damage disrupts personal memories while semantic and procedural memories remain intact.

Explore how memory depends on the hippocampus and amygdala through Amelia's case of hippocampal damage, showing how autobiographical memory fades while threat detection shapes recall.

Identify unconscious memories and their impact on fear, noting that the amygdala is fully developed from birth while the hippocampus develops later, leaving some experiences without coherent autobiographical recall.

Therapists should avoid rushing to link early-life memories to distress, recognizing adults cannot reliably recall events before age two, and let clients process feelings without unfounded suggestions in EMDR therapy.

Autobiographical memories are reconstructions, not exact replicas, even for recent events. Retrieval mixes memory fragments from multiple traces, undermining reliability and contributing to eyewitness testimony errors.

Explore how autobiographical memories are reconstructed from broken pieces, often blending memory with fantasy, and why recall varies each time in EMDR therapy contexts.

Explore memory consolidation: the hippocampus transfers autobiographical episodes to two stores, one emotional with imagery, the other semantic and emotion-free. In PTSD, incomplete consolidation can trigger recollections from coffee cues.

The REM sleep theory of EMDR suggests side-to-side eye movements create REM-like brain waves for memory consolidation during therapy, but bleeps or taps challenge this explanation.

The interhemispheric theory of EMDR proposes that bilateral eye movements boost left and right brain communication, involving the hippocampus and amygdala, to reduce PTSD symptoms and access positive memories.

Explore how bilateral visual and auditory stimulation in EMDR therapy, via a guided video, fosters mindfulness and relaxation, reducing stress through simple, repetitive attention.

Engage in a candle-focused, breath-centered emdr inspired exercise to observe stress sensations, return to the breath, and use tenderness, nourishment, and a personal mantra to stay present.