Why You Keep Repeating the Pattern — and How EMDR Can Help
What I like best about EMDR is that it helps the past and the present meet up and heal. It’s kind of a hard treatment to explain. The name alone doesn't really give you much. EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing, which is a mouthful. Even for seasoned practitioners who have never been trained or exposed to EMDR, it’s not clear what happens other than something with eye movement. But as a seasoned clinician, who has gone on a journey to learn and practice EMDR, I can tell you what it is all about.
EMDR is really the only therapeutic treatment that allows for people to heal their current, present day stuck points, by connecting with what is happening in their body and with their past. There are lots of experiences in life that the brain does not know what to do with. It does its best, but as sophisticated and complex as the brain is, it cannot always break down complex memories and messages in helpful and adaptive ways.
Our brains naturally look for consistency and repetition. When something painful or overwhelming happens, the brain sometimes holds onto that experience because it doesn’t fully know how to make sense of it. As a result, the beliefs we formed about ourselves or the situation at the time can keep getting triggered whenever something similar happens later. This can leave people feeling stuck in patterns they don’t want—but can’t seem to change on their own. Simply understanding these patterns is often not enough to shift them. EMDR helps the brain process those earlier experiences in a new way, so it can develop more flexible, compassionate, and helpful ways of thinking about yourself and your life.
Case in point, you might see a therapist because you are struggling with saying no to your kids. You have a hard time setting limits and boundaries and being consistent. You keep telling yourself, “A good mom would be able to do this?” or “Why can’t I just set a limit and be consistent”. You buy all the apps, make all the chore or behavior charts, get a Skylight Calendar, but still it doesn't quite happen. Then when you start to feel bad about yourself, you shut down and watch Netflix, and then feel upset and angry with yourself and others because the kids are not behaving or doing what they are supposed to.
You aren’t doing anything wrong. You are just stuck. And whatever is keeping you from making a change is also the same thing that is keeping you stuck. You can try to talk your way through this and make connections, but if you find that doesn’t help and you keep repeating the same behavior, then that is a good sign you might benefit from EMDR.
In EMDR, you might find that when you engage in this behavioral pattern which makes you feel bad about yourself, you strengthen a negative brief that you have about yourself that “you are a mess”. With your EMDR therapist, you start to trace this belief back and find that somehow it starts back with a memory of being a kid and being yelled at for not cleaning your room. You don’t really get why or how that connects, but it bring tears to your eyes when you identify it.
That might be the stuck point that is showing up in the present day moment. It’s not that your brain wants to be stuck. It’s just doing the best it can with an old memory. The thing that makes this old memory so challenging is that on the surface it doesn't seem like a big deal. But when you actually start to reprocess it with EMDR, you can see that you told your younger self you were “bad and awful” for not being able to keep up with cleaning your room. And now that is the message you come back to when things are not consistent or do not go well.
What does eye movement have to do with any of this? Well, Francine Shapiro, the founder of EMDR, discovered that when we move our eyes back and forth rapidly it mimics REM sleep. And wouldn’t you know, emotions are processed in REM sleep. So by recreating that movement (eye movement), we go back to a painful stuck point (reprocessing) and we take the negative associations out of it (desensitization). This allows you to start showing up in the present day more how you want to. It lets you be connected to the truth of who you are now, not what you told yourself then.
EMDR is safe, effective, and helpful for almost any struggle. You don’t have to know how it all comes together, you just need to want to make a change. To learn more about EMDR and working together, click here to schedule a 15 minute consultation appointment.