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| What
is EMDR? |
| EMDR
is an acronym for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing,
an innovative clinical treatment originated and developed by
Dr Francine Shapiro in 1987. EMDR is effective in treating individuals
who have experienced psychological difficulties arising from
traumatic experiences, such as assault, road traffic accidents,
war trauma, torture, natural or man-made disasters, sexual abuse
and childhood neglect. EMDR is also increasingly used to treat
complaints which are not necessarily trauma-related, such as
panic disorder, phobias, performance anxiety, self-esteem issues
and other anxiety-related disorders. |
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| EMDR is a complex method
of psychotherapy which integrates many of the successful elements
of a range of therapeutic approaches in combination with eye
movements or other forms of alternative dual attention stimulation,
such as alternative hand-tapping or alternative audio tones,
which appear to stimulate the brain's information processing
system. |
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| During EMDR treatment
the client attends to emotionally disturbing material in brief
sequential doses while simultaneously focusing on an external
stimulus. EMDR appears to facilitate the accessing of the traumatic
memory network and the information is adaptively processed with
new associations being made between the disturbing memory and
more adaptive memories or information, leading to more complete
information processing, alleviation of emotional and physiological
distress and development of cognitive insights. |
| EMDR is a three-pronged approach
involving processing of: |
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past
events that have laid the groundwork for dysfunction |
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present
circumstances that illicit distress |
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future
templates dealing with potentially distressing situations
in a more adaptive manner |
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