At Solace Psychology, South Edmonton, we believe in using the most effective therapeutic modalities for healing and recovery, which is why most of our Therapists are trained in EMDR.

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is the gold-standard treatment for healing from emotional distress related to past trauma (or PTSD symptomology) or life-threatening experiences. When experiencing or witnessing trauma, your whole world can be shaken and things may never seem to go back to normal. You may become triggered easily by reminders of the event, have trouble sleeping, or are irritable and on edge a lot of the time. During the traumatic experience, your brain became flooded and did not file the memories away properly, so distressing emotions, body sensations, memories, and dreams can pop up easily today.

You need more than temporary coping skills to fully recover from these experiences. EMDR heals the core of your pain. In the initial sessions of EMDR therapy, you will learn and practice effective grounding and resourcing techniques, which will help you cope with reminders of the traumatic experience. With your Psychologist's guidance, you will then work through the distressing material by bringing it to mind while you hold on to alternating hand buzzers or watch the EMDR light bar. Your brain does all the work as both hemispheres work together to make sense of and properly file away the traumatic memory. 

Once the trauma is healed, you will still be able to remember the incident, but you will not have such a strong, overpowering emotional or physical response anymore. You won't become easily triggered, your body won't react as intensely, and you will be able to live a normal life again.

*Research shows that EMDR is much more rapid and effective than talk therapy and results in a significant reduction of trauma-related symptoms (Shapiro, 2014).

** Please note that EMDR Therapy is not hypnotherapy and is not related in any way to hypnotherapy.