Living through any type of traumatic experience or situation can leave a lasting impact on how you navigate your day-to-day life in the time that follows. There is a swirl of emotions, changes to routines, and potential losses.
The thing about trauma is that it can also have a significant impact on your brain and how it’s wired. Different areas of the brain respond to trauma in different ways. As your brain tries to adapt and cope with your situation, physical changes occur.
The three main areas of the brain that are affected by traumas are the hippocampus, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex. One way to get these regions back to their most effective functioning is through EMDR. Here’s a look at how EMDR works within the brain.
Bilateral Stimulation
The key component of EMDR is using bilateral stimulation to mimic your natural REM sleep cycle. While you’re working on a predetermined target memory, your therapist will be performing alternating left-to-right stimulation. This may include eye movements, tactile tapping, or specific sounds.
While this is occurring, your brain is getting to a place where it can more easily access and process any stuck traumatic memories. During EMDR, you focus on one set memory at a time called a target memory.
When you access a memory, it becomes more vulnerable and you’re able to replace negative associations with more positive ones. This works to relieve distressing side effects.
Access to Your Working Memory
EMDR has a unique way of altering the way your brain handles trauma. The concept of bilateral stimulation, incorporating dual attention tasks, can exhaust your working memory to the point where it can’t handle the lingering emotional intensity of the trauma.
Applying EMDR to your own situation can reduce the vivid nature of your memory and lessen the emotion you feel with it.
Neurobiological Changes
As noted earlier, your amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex are the main players that can be affected by trauma. Here’s a brief overview. Your amygdala is the emotional center of your brain. Your hippocampus is the main memory processing center, which makes sense as to why it can become impacted. The prefrontal cortex is in charge of emotional regulation.
With EMDR treatment, researchers have been able to see physical results through various brain scans. After going through treatment, the brain shows less activation of the amygdala (reduced negative emotions), improved functioning in the hippocampus (ability to put memories into context), and the prefrontal cortex can resume functioning and activity more efficiently.
Changes to Stress Responses
When you go through something traumatic, your body has this built-in stress response system that is meant to keep you safe. It’s often referred to as the fight-or-flight response. While good-intentioned, it can sometimes go a bit astray.
Using EMDR can help restore and regulate your autonomic nervous system, turning off that easily triggered stress response. Since your brain is able to find some calm, it prompts a reduction of your heart, lower blood pressure, and other positive body changes.
Ability to Process Information
Traumatic memories start to form their own narrative for your life, whether they’re the most accurate or not. Your brain can become triggered even when you’re not in danger or distress. Your body can experience symptoms that aren’t technically rational.
With EMDR, your memories can become transformed into more positive and adaptive ones that tell a different narrative. It helps to strengthen your connections between the emotional centers of the brain and those that have the job of processing information.
The human brain is such a complex thing and trauma can add a whole different element to the mix. Being able to return to normal functioning and a good quality of life may take some work.
Through EMDR therapy, you can not only work to find relief from the negativity, but also do so in a time-effective manner. If you’d like to see how EMDR fits into your life, click on EMDR therapy to read more or contact me to learn more.