EMDR for Anxiety, Depression, or General Distress

We talk a lot about how effective EMDR is for trauma and PTSD symptoms, but the truth is that we use EMDR to treat a variety of presenting concerns. Anytime that you have an unrelenting symptom of distress, there is a root cause, and EMDR is almost always very helpful at treating the root cause so that the distress or unprocessed emotions can be processed and released all the way up to the present situation.

I'll give a simple example that illustrates this. Let's say that you have a pattern of dating people who are harshly critical and yell a lot. You've recently left a partner who treated you this way, and you are sick of it. You don't trust your judgment anymore, because it seems you are always drawn to people like this. You have anxiety about dating, you feel jumpy and scared when you think about your last partner, and you feel depressed and somewhat hopeless overall about your romantic prospects. You know that some of this stems from childhood - you also had a parent who had rage outbursts and yelled a lot at home. You have done a lot of work to learn that you deserve better and to try to stick up for yourself, but you still end up in unhealthy relationships and you are feeling stuck, hopeless, and honestly a little frozen.

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In EMDR therapy, we would go over your history and see the connections between these events, and work with you to develop a list of "targets" for processing. These are the memories that we would treat with EMDR, and they would likely include your first memory of your parent yelling and you feeling scared, any particularly bad memories of this type from childhood, and then the most recent distressing memories from your relationship. As your brain is able to unwind and reprocess those old memories using EMDR, your nervous system will start to settle. You will leave fight or flight mode and start to feel calm and grounded. Those old memories won't feel distressing anymore - more like a sad thing that happened a long time ago that doesn't seem important anymore. You will feel strong and have good boundaries around your ex, and you will feel firm and capable about not accepting any mistreatment going forward. All sense of confusion and stress about this will melt away, and we will know you are ready to graduate because you won't feel worried anymore that you won't be able to find a healthy partner or that you won't be able to trust your judgment.

This is the power of EMDR - it allows you to unlink the current stress from your past, process and completely clear the past from your body and your nervous system, and stand firmly in the present with confidence and calm. It's a powerful modality that can be life-changing for clients, and we would be happy to chat with you to see if it could help with your issue. We have offices in Alpharetta and in Athens for in person therapy, or we work virtually across the state of Georgia.

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Keywords: EMDR Therapy, EMDR Intensives, Anxiety Therapy, Depression Therapy, Heal Patterns