Why Use A Method from EMDR In Healthy Individuals?
By Dr. Amy Serin, Chief Therapeutic Advisor
EMDR Therapy is a gold standard therapy for treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Yet most people don’t have PTSD, so why should you consider using a method from EMDR to help with general stress?
The answer lies in understanding how bi-lateral stimulation (BLS) helps the brain recover from stress in real-time in people without PTSD. In anyone’s brain, the network that integrates sensory information (the salience network), effectively toggles a stress switch up and down based on incoming information from outside and inside your body. This is why you can have a disturbing thought come up automatically and feel stress in the moment when it’s not even happening. We don’t want to feel stress, but sometimes it’s an automatic reaction to a trigger that we wish we could control. This happens multiple times a day in people without PTSD- some trigger (a thought, reminder, loud sound, etc.) occurs and the stress switch goes up (also called emotional arousal or hyperarousal if it goes way up). Applying BLS at that moment changes the salience network’s response and the stress switch goes down. Because BLS works so fast, the result of lower stress in response to the trigger also means that trigger won’t create the same stress response in the future! So, it’s effectively changing the brain’s response pattern without you having to do a ton of therapy or cognitive work (which is still needed but is most effective when your stress levels are low to moderate- so using BLS first can get you in the zone where these methods work best).
Reference:
Pape, V., Sammer, G., Hanewald, B., Schäflein, E., Rauschenbach, F., & Stingl, M. (2024). Apples and oranges: PTSD patients and healthy individuals are not comparable in their subjective and physiological responding to emotion induction and bilateral stimulation. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1406180.