EMDR: Reframing Trauma

EMDR is a psychotherapy treatment that was originally designed to alleviate the distress associated with PTSD. In other words, it enables clients to heal from the emotional distress and physical symptoms that are the result of difficult life experiences. The Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho has a quote that goes something like this - ‘To heal a wound you must stop scratching it.’ He’s likening healing to a scar. There is something uniquely beautiful about all scars. They say the pain is over, the wound is closed and the healing has happened. This sentiment is repeated by my poet crush - Lebanese-American artist, and writer Kahlil Gibran - ‘Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.’ But how do we heal our wounds so that all we have left are the scars? It’s widely assumed that severe emotional pain takes years of therapy to heal, but what we’re now learning is that the mind can in fact heal from psychological trauma in much the same way as the body recovers from physical trauma. When the system (us) is blocked by the memory of a disturbing event, the emotional wound festers - and can cause intense suffering. Once the block is removed, healing resumes. Exciting right? What we want is to stop poking 'The Pain Body', as Erkhart Tolle calls it. And this is where EMDR can help. EMDR therapy sessions can help us activate our own natural healing processes by creating the conditions where re-processing (or re-framing) the event can help heal. Simon Dubois is a highly experienced Psychologist at The Health Lodge in the Byron Bay Shire. Simon works with medical doctors and naturopaths in the centre, using a range of evidence-based therapeutic approaches including Internal Family Systems therapy, and EMDR - for the treatment of trauma based distress. See Simon Dubois' work here.