Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a therapeutic approach that can help overcome the effects of trauma. The word “trauma” may sound extreme but in psychological terms, trauma is defined as an experience that overwhelms our capacity to cope. Simply put it’s an adverse experience. The conclusion your brain comes to in response to an adverse experience is individual to you, so people can go through the same experience but will have different reactions to it. 

 

In ordinary circumstances, an experience is filtered through our brain and is processed and stored in both the implicit (facts and language) and explicit (emotion) memory regions of the brain. This allows us to recall a memory as a “story” with language and facts to describe it. 

 

During an adverse experience though the brain can become overwhelmed and so is unable to process information. The memory of the experience is only stored in the explicit (emotional) region of the brain and so becomes frozen in the form of images, emotions and body sensations. It remains in this unprocessed raw form without a verbal “story” of the experience. The memory itself may even be forgotten but the painful feelings, such as anxiety panic or anger are continually triggered in the present.