We are Built to Heal: Understanding Trauma and EMDR
We are built to heal
We Are Bigger Than What Happened To Us
Trauma is what happens when something overwhelms our brain’s ability to process it—to understand it, make sense of it, and let go of it. When something is too big, too much, too overwhelming for our brain to process, that is traumatic.
If your brain were a computer, trauma would be what happens when the system gets overloaded, the bandwidth is exceeded, and that dang spinning wheel comes up.
· Trauma = experience + insufficient processing capacity
· Trauma is an internal event, not an external event.
· If experience > processing capacity → trauma
Now shifting from a computer analogy to digestion, our brain digests experiences the way our GI system digests food. If everything is working well with our digestive system, we eat something and our body processes it, absorbs the good stuff, and lets go of the rest. The same goes for the brain—when everything is going well, it takes in experiences, processes them, absorbs the relevant information, and lets go of the rest.
But if we eat something we can’t digest, we get stomach distress, and when we have experiences that our brain can’t digest, it causes mental distress. Those undigested pieces of experience hang around, and they repeat on us in the form of thought patterns, emotional patterns, behavioural patterns, and relational patterns.
Luckily, there are mental digestive aids. Therapies that work on what’s called an Adaptive Information Processing model, like EMDR, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Somatic Experiencing, and Deep Brain Reorienting, all facilitate the mental digestive process, and can help the system process, make sense of, and move past experiences that weren’t able to be digested at the time. Today we will focus on EMDR.
What is EMDR
EMDR, which stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is an evidence-based (it’s been scientifically studied and proven effective), nervous-system-centred (it’s based in neurology and how our brain stores information) psychotherapy that targets neural circuitry responsible for the symptoms of mental distress. Here are some points that build the foundation of EMDR.
We Are Built To Heal
It is widely assumed that severe emotional pain requires a long time to heal and is something someone has to live with. EMDR therapy shows that the mind can in fact heal from psychological trauma much as the body recovers from physical trauma.
When you cut your hand, your body works to close the wound. If a foreign object or repeated injury irritates the wound, it festers and causes pain. Once the block is removed, healing resumes. EMDR therapy demonstrates that a similar sequence of events occurs with mental processes.
The brain’s information processing system, described more in the next section, naturally moves us toward mental health. If the system is blocked or imbalanced by the impact of a distressing event, the emotional wound festers and can cause intense suffering. Once the block is removed, healing resumes.
Adaptive Information Processing (AIP)
Our brains are naturally equipped to process information and resolve experiences. How our brain does this is called the Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model. This system digests and integrates new information, particularly emotionally significant experiences, and stores them in a way that makes them accessible and manageable—absorbing relevant information and letting go of the rest.
Key players are:
· Amygdala: The brain’s “alarm system.” It triggers emotional and fear responses to potential threats.
· Hippocampus: Responsible for organizing and storing memories, the hippocampus contextualizes experiences, helping differentiate past from present.
· Prefrontal cortex: This part of the brain aids in decision-making, self-regulation, and rational thought, allowing us to interpret experiences logically.
When these brain areas work together, they effectively encode memories in a way that integrates them into our overall understanding of ourselves and the world.
When AIP Becomes Blocked
In the face of overwhelming events—whether it’s trauma from an accident, a painful relationship, or early life challenges—our brains may struggle to process memories effectively. In these cases, the amygdala’s “fight-or-flight” response can take over, flooding the brain with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. This response pulls energy away from the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, which are critical for logical thinking and contextualizing experiences.
As a result, traumatic memories are stored in their raw, unprocessed form rather than being integrated into long-term memory. The memory of the event remains vivid and highly emotional, causing individuals to relive the trauma repeatedly or to become disconnected from it.
In essence, these memories become “stuck,” as the brain is unable to reclassify them as past experiences. It’s as if these groups of files, rather than being organized in one of the cabinet drawers, are instead laminated and then used to wallpaper the filing room. Those files are accessible (often far too accessible, being triggered much more frequently than we’d like), but inflexible, disconnected from the rest of the filing cabinet, and out of context. Because they’re isolated and out of context, such files often have the feel of gross overgeneralisations.
So…How Does EMDR Work
We know that the more emotionally intense a memory is, the more isolated and therefore inflexible it becomes. You can see it, but you can’t make changes to it. And while it makes some evolutionary sense—because at some point in history, you can imagine it would have been a useful strategy that if something evoked an intense surge of fear, our brain etched it in stone to ensure we’d never make that mistake again—in the present day, it often leaves us stuck with past information that is no longer useful and that is incorrectly stored.
So, we’ve got intensely emotional files laminated on the walls of our brain, which don’t get updated as the times change, and which create the atmosphere under which all the other files are viewed.
Utilizing EMDR, we peel these isolated files off the wall and file them into the appropriate cabinet drawer, allowing them to be seen in the context of the rest of the files and updated accordingly.
More technically, EMDR connects isolated memory networks with the rest of the brain, such that those once-siloed areas are able to receive new information and correct outdated data. As those memory networks become more connected, that “I am bad” file (maladaptive) can be accessed in conjunction with other files that hold information like “I was young,” “I didn’t know any better” (adaptive), and it not only becomes logically true, but also feels true.
Bilateral stimulation (the eye movement part of EMDR) is used to stimulate the information processing system in our brain to help move this filing process along, shifting the maladaptive old information file towards a more adaptive and true file.
Make No Mistake… EMDR is Hard Work
To process experiences using EMDR, we are going with the “yuck”—the uncomfortable emotions, sensations, thoughts, and images. It is important for your nervous system to be ready and to have tools you can turn to in order to support your nervous system.
It is also important to remember that with EMDR and any trauma therapy, slow is fast. Taking the necessary time can ultimately lead to greater understanding, resilience, and lasting healing.
The most common symptom noticed after an EMDR session is fatigue. I would say this is the case for the majority, so it’s important to make a plan for what you will be doing after session. Some clients may also notice after a session, particularly if the experience hasn’t been completely processed, vivid dreams, becoming more emotionally activated, thoughts, and other memories popping up.
While this is your brain continuing to do what it is made to do—as processing continues (at a much slower rate) outside of session—it can be difficult, and it is important to have a plan with your therapist for how to take care of yourself and your nervous system.
Also, make no mistake… we are designed to heal.