Trauma Treatment: EMDR
There are various trauma treatments. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is one, is very effective, and frugal of time and resources.
It is theoretically based on a naturally occurring behavior that we already engage in during deep sleep. Every night our brains process the previous day’s events and consolidate the new information into our short-term and long-term memories, much like a computer does with a document when it is saved.
Imagine creating a new document, writing about a memory, saving it, then the next day you add some more information—maybe edit the previous memory a little, and then save the document again. Each time we open the document and add or edit it, the new information is consolidated when we save it.
That is how our brains work to consolidate new experiences when they occur. However, when a trauma occurs, the process is frozen. We can open the memory, but we cannot save any new changes. The memory gets stuck in our heads and bodies as we experienced it, with every thought we had, everything we saw, felt (emotionally and physically), smelt, tasted, and heard being stored just as we experienced it.
EMDR helps to un-freeze the experience and lets us continue consolidating new information.