EMDR from a client's perspective: Therapist goes undercover.

To all of our future clients who are curious about what EMDR looks and feels like in practice, this one is for you :)

When I first began practicing as a psychologist, I had heard of EMDR but it was still thought of as “woo-woo.” Since that time, this therapy has gained significant popularity and a great deal of clinical research to back it up. What causes EMDR to stand out from other trauma therapies is its use of Bilateral Stimulation (BLS). BLS is a cornerstone of EMDR and refers to alternatingly stimulating the

To investigate EMDR further, a therapist "goes undercover" as a client themselves.

left and right sides of the brain, most often through eye movements, but other methods exist as well, such as tones and hand tappers. (For more information on the mechanisms underlying EMDR and BLS, see our recent blog post here.)

My supervisor at the time was an EMDR practitioner, and she frequently responded to my questions with, “I would probably use EMDR for that.” This piqued my curiosity. I thought about getting trained in EMDR, but the trainings were so expensive and time-intensive that I still needed more convincing, so I decided to try it out as a client myself. What followed was a journey of healing and self-transformation that forever changed me as a person, and as a professional.

At the time, I was a new mom and had recently experienced a traumatic birth with my son, as well as had some difficulty adjusting to my new role. My therapist and I made a list of all the things that were bothering me currently. Then, to develop our first EMDR “target,” we spent some time identifying the worst part of what had happened (the “touchstone” image), which for me was the memory of being in the hospital delivery bed at the time of my child’s birth, feeling helpless and overwhelmed, trapped and alone. We then made an outline of related feelings, beliefs and current symptoms that seemed to go along with this memory.

TheraTappers: https://theratapperinc.com/

The form of bilateral stimulation I used was the “hand tappers,” a common form of BLS where a client holds two small palm-sized paddles in their hands while they vibrate back and forth, alternatingly, between the right and left hands. After about 30 seconds of holding the hand tappers, I noticed an increased sense of calm in my body. I could think more clearly and felt less self-conscious. During processing, with my eyes closed and the hand tappers on, my therapist would then ask me to focus on the memory we had identified together and notice what “came up” for me in response to the image – what emerged was a series of sometimes seemingly random memories, images, emotions, ideas, beliefs, etc. 

One of the hardest parts of EMDR for me was learning to trust the process, and follow the path my brain laid out for me, even when it didn’t seem to make sense at the time. I really like to have a predictable list of action items to follow that will guarantee my path to success! EMDR encourages you to go on an inner journey that is unpredictable and sometimes surprising. By following the images and thoughts your brain presents when you are processing your distress targets, it will tell you why it is reacting in a certain way in the present, and what the original events were that led to development of the trigger. It’s not magical – the brain can’t help but tell you all that – all of that information is just stored along the same brain pathway, or kept in the same “filing cabinet,” if you will. If you keep following that emotion into the body, it will tell you what the negative belief is that you developed at the time (what you learned from the experiences), which now dictates your current response to related environmental stimuli.

I was quite surprised when the processing of my touchstone image led me to a memory of physical abuse I experienced as a tween where I was literally trapped and helpless. I would have never in a million years made that connection, but as we started processing with the BLS, that’s what my mind revealed. While processing this, I noticed the damage that had occurred to my self-worth due to this incident. As I followed this train of thought, it led us to memories of sexual abuse that had occurred when I was very young that taught me that the only way to be loved, was to be used. Yikes…. these were some really “dark rooms” of my life for me to peer into.

Every few minutes between “sets” of me focusing in on my target, and what came up in response to it, my therapist would stop the hand tappers and ask, “What are you noticing?” At that time, I would open my eyes and replay in my mind while reporting to my therapist the important aspects of what I had experienced during processing. I was welcome to say as much or as little as liked, but I found that sifting through the details out loud helped my brain make connections, allowed the therapist to draw connections as well that I wouldn’t have seen, and allowed me to let me guard down and ease into the process. I would get more and more excited as I went, with the insights making more and more sense out of what I was experiencing, with my underlying unconscious beliefs and their sources revealed to me through the “movie” that had played out in my mind while I was processing with BLS.

With the BLS on, insights begin flowing.

After we were done processing the touchstone images (you know you are done because the images don’t feel disturbing anymore at some point, and

nothing comes up in response to them), we moved on to the beliefs portion of the work. In this part, we identified both the negative beliefs I had unconsciously developed at the time of these traumatic events (for example, “my purpose is to be used by others”), as well as the alternative beliefs that seemed more realistic or healthy (“I can be myself and still be loved”). At first, my negative beliefs were rated highly (i.e., felt true) and my alternative beliefs felt like they could not be true at all. This time the therapist would read the healthy alternative belief out to me and again, have me notice what came up for me in response to it, while my eyes were closed and I was holding the hand tappers. Again, it was various images and memories that emerged, some from the past and some more recent, often as examples that seemed to disprove my alternative belief. I came to know these as my “blocks,” or blocking beliefs. Then that would send us on another little journey into the cobwebs of my mind.

While my therapist and I were following the path that my brain had laid out for me, I honestly wasn’t sure if this EMDR thing was going to work. I had made a whole list of things that were bothering me in the present, and we had started with the most distressing one on the list, and then it seemed we devolved into reviewing several events from my childhood that I thought I had put in the past years ago. Now I understood why clients joke in annoyed tones about therapists always wanting to talk about their childhoods! But as a good scientist, I know you have to take the full course of a treatment if you want to truly judge its outcome, so I stuck with it.

As I worked out the tangles, the strength of my alternative beliefs gradually increased. Then, at some point, my work became more about building resources that had been missing, such as self-love or self-forgiveness, or installing a “wise self” within, to bring my alternative beliefs to fruition. We would do this through creating the resources: piecemealing the healthy thoughts, feelings or behaviors that were never experienced or taught to me but could be imagined, and then “installing” them with BLS. Eventually, I got there – my healthy alternative beliefs felt true, and were on their way to being true. At that point, changes began to bloom in my life to mirror the work I had been doing in therapy.

When your core beliefs are changing, it’s as if you’ve cast your net of life in a different direction entirely; as if you are now calibrated to a new way of seeing the world, and everything you say, think, do and perceive is a little bit different than what it would have been before. So, for instance, if I believe deeply that I have worth, I might start writing blog posts despite my fears of being judged 😉whereas I would have found a lot of excuses to be too busy for writing blog posts before. Due to changed beliefs paired with reprocessed trauma targets, new options are now available for responding to stressors, as well as building a life worth living.

I did end up getting trained in EMDR in 2015, and have since provided it to many clients. I’ve been lucky enough to see the results of this life-changing therapy from a therapist’s point of view and I’ll tell you – though it’s hard work for all parties, there is nothing in the world more fulfilling to me than seeing clients make 180-degree changes to their lives. I absolutely love what I do! It is such an honor and privilege to be part of this work. I have also started to teach and lecture on the use of EMDR and other adjunctive techniques that seem to increase its effectiveness, including a self-love technique that my therapist created and used with me that helped me to transform my relationship with myself. It’s something I really believe in, given my personal and professional experiences.

With my hard-earned confidence in the process, I have been back to therapy myself a couple of times as an EMDR client to work on issues that have come up, and it has always been successful. What keeps me courageous about facing my demons is my knowledge that, not only will a course of EMDR therapy be successful, freeing me from the chains the difficulties of life have created, it will also propel me to the next level in my health, wellness and functioning, as my calmed brain allows new beliefs to cast nets of new behaviors throughout my life, that will eventually lead me to new situations that look a little more like my BEST life.

If you are interested in receiving EMDR therapy for trauma, or other mental health concerns, we would love to be a part of your journey as well. Contact us and get set up with one of our therapists today!

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