Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a reality for a large number of people who suffer in silence.
Are you enduring the aftermath of a traumatic event? Have you spent years tormented by the memories of an abusive childhood? Is your ability to work, relax, or maintain healthy relationships compromised by a distressing and disturbing past?
You are not alone. Trauma that interrupts life and interferes with the ability to move forward is all too common.
But you don’t have to suffer. PTSD need not be a constant burden. Most of all, you can heal and move on. Eye Movement Integration (EMI) therapy can help.
What is Eye Movement Integration?
At the heart of EMI is the idea that your most persistent and painful memories can be reprocessed and helpfully integrated into the events of your life. Moreover, you needn’t feel retraumatized by rehashing the past or endure long periods of therapy to find relief. Your natural, eye-movements have a crucial role in this healing.
First, is important to understand how trauma may have led to your PTSD.
Research indicates that when your brain’s amygdala (a primitive part of the brain that drives survival behaviors and emotional responses) and your brain’s hippocampus (a part of the brain that merges short and long-term recall ) increase in interaction due to trauma, some problematic emotional memories may be created.
As your brain and body are flooded with stress hormones, the way you process your painful past can become perpetually linked to anxiety and upset. You, like many other PTSD sufferers, may frequently experience flashbacks, avoidance, nightmares, and panic attacks.
Though you are no longer in danger, your brain remains “stuck”, unable to appropriately process and file away the memories harmlessly.
How can understanding eye movement help?
Research by EMI pioneers determined that a person’s spontaneous eye movements can reveal various thought patterns. Their work suggests that the direction of our gaze or eye movement reflects sensory information. This information is connected to thoughts and memories, especially traumatic ones.
For instance, a trained EMI therapist might notice that you look up and to the left when certain memories occur. This is a strong indication that your memory is visual. Often, bodily sensations and emotions are associated with a downward gaze. Primarily, the key idea is that our thoughts affect the direction of our eye movements. Therefore, learning to direct our eye movements can help reshape the way we recall the past, think about ourselves, and perceive problems and the future.
Working with an experienced EMI therapist, your eye movements are directed in ways that allow you to access the traumatic stressors you have stored internally.
How Does EMI Therapy Help Me Feel Better and Create Lasting Change?
Fundamentally, EMI strives to help suffers from PTSD resolve the internal reactions and changes that occur after trauma. The method effectively taps into your senses, cognitive responses, and emotional expression to help you resolve your pain.
To put it simply, your mind is given the opportunity to heal itself. EMI helps your brain overcome obstacles created by your overwhelming experience. It guides your eye movements, and thus your mind, to unaddressed mental places for the sake of release and reprocessing of stored, trauma-related information. This occurs without going through the unhelpful process of engaging harmful thoughts and resisting them.
Just a few 90- to 120-minute EMI sessions can provide productive access to memories and successful treatment of the associated problems. Given the proper guidance, you can experience relief optimally and quite quickly.
Finally, you won’t forget your past in EMI therapy. But you can acknowledge and settle it. You deserve to remember the past in ways that no longer hurt or control you.
Many participants report a sense of clarity and peace they haven’t know before. Why not you?
Working together, you and your therapist can work toward sustainable peace and a more hopeful way forward. Please reach out for more information about EMI therapy and contact me for a consultation soon.