What's EMDR, and How Does It Treat Trauma?
A very excited and nerdy foray into EMDR and religious trauma treatment
My original plan for February, which is Black History Month, was to follow up my conversation with Marla with a couple posts on decolonizing our deconstruction. Well, then I had my Part 1 of EMDR training this past weekend, which has been great but I’m also pretty wiped at the end of each day! And the decolonizing posts are poking into more corners than I had originally thought. So I’m going to take another week to polish that up… and meanwhile, tell you a bit about my EMDR training and how it relates to the treatment of religious trauma!
I’ll admit: I was a bit of a skeptic to start. I’ve never been one who wants to do what everyone else is doing, and it felt like all the therapists were trained in EMDR. It seemed so formulaic and structured (it is), which is absolutely not my style. But that intense structure gave me the impression it was therapist-driven, which is also not my style. Well, what I found out is that though the therapist is providing the structure, holy moly, they are pretty much staying out of the way while THE PERSON’S OWN NERVOUS SYSTEM does the healing.
I’m going to guess very few of you are versed in how EMDR works so I’m going to give you a very short primer on trauma and healing trauma, which hopefully you’re interested in since you’re reading a newsletter about religious trauma and all.
Christine’s descriptive definition of trauma
Trauma, broadly defined, is when something happens to a person (or doesn’t happen, e.g. neglect) that overwhelms a person’s ability to adaptively respond to it. Instead of getting stored in the prefrontal cortex, aka the thinking, rational, narrative mind, it gets stored in the emotional limbic system, in maladaptive ways. In the limbic system, it lives as emotional impressions in the “eternal now,” so to speak, which is why a person might react to a triggering event as if the trauma it is recalling were happening to them right then and there. It also explains why people might not be able to tell you about their trauma, or even remember it at all: the trauma didn’t get encoded in a narrative fashion but rather in a somewhat chaotic, fragmented set of emotion-based impressions.
An EMDR primer
EMDR is a trauma-focused therapy, which means that works to directly target trauma responses and traumatic memories to bring relief and healing. If that original trauma (or traumas, as the case often is) are causing all kinds of snags and unhelpful thought/feeling patterns in a person’s brain, the treatment helps unsnag that trauma, neutralize the negative emotions around it, and become just a part of a person’s story instead of carry all the emotional (and often unconscious) weight it once held.
The actual mechanisms for why EMDR works are still a bit of a black box mystery. But some kind of bilateral stimulation (tapping on alternate sides, moving eyes back and forth rapidly) is applied while the person holds in mind the briefest of snapshots of the problematic memory (doesn’t have to be the exact original problem memory; your brain and nervous system will know what to do and where to go) along with the negative beliefs you hold about yourself and the emotions that go with those two things. You’re not going into deep verbal processing about the event, you’re not “efforting” in any way to try and make sense of your memory. You’re just holding things in mind and letting the tapping or the eye movements do their work.
I am still awestruck at how, if you manage to get yourself (and I refer to “yourself” as me, you, or anyone in the client’s seat) out of the way and trust the process, your body - your nervous system – seems to know what to do to heal itself. You might have an emotional reaction [insert picture of me literally sobbing in my office during training practice, working through what I thought was just my emetophobia (extreme fear of people throwing up) but my brain had other ideas]. You might not have a big reaction! It might just be subtle shifts in your body, your thinking, or your emotions.
The idea of trusting the body’s innate capacity for healing absolutely fascinates me and gets me excited enough that I can’t help but write a post about it after training!
EMDR and Religious Trauma
I’m also really excited for how this can help people work through their religious trauma. EMDR can be a great fit for working with religious trauma clients because of the deliberate focus on pinpointing negative cognitions (aka beliefs) about oneself. And as we’ve been dipping our toe into lately, religious trauma causes a host of negative beliefs.
One thing I’ve been wanting to unsnarl lately (which we’ll dive more into in March, if my tentative timeline goes according to plan) is how religious trauma and childhood trauma play into each other. Say you were raised in a very strict, religious home, and there seems to be a ton of overlap with the religion and parenting pieces. Your religion was heavy-handed, but so was the parenting you received. Your religion delivered shame in spades, but so did messaging from your parents.
The beauty of EMDR is that if you just start by picking the general area you want to work on (let’s pretend it’s believing you’re a terrible person who can’t do anything good without intervention from God), your mind can go the different places it needs to go and you don’t have to “figure it out” all on your own mentally. I do believe that you’ll probably have more mental clarity after some EMDR because those trauma memories are getting sorted out, but you don’t have to find ways to explain it ahead of time. You just identify what the problem is, what you want to believe about yourself instead, and let the process do its thing while you’re along for the ride.
One downside I can see, especially for people who are still early in their recovery and unsure what they’re “allowed” to believe, is the part about picking a positive cognition that you want to believe instead of the negative one. If you’re still early in religious trauma recovery, believing a positive cognition like “I am good,” “I am trustworthy,” “I am powerful,” etc might feel really scary/ bad/ disallowed. However… I also have a hunch that if people can open to the process, they might find that the once-unbelievable positive cognition becomes a whole lot more believable once they’re able to sort through all the gunk that got in their way.
I’ll stop my nerding-out adventure for now and open the space for comments. Has anyone done EMDR? (Or I know we’ve got a few therapists here; feel free to chime in from the professional side if you wish!) Are you curious about the process? Have thoughts about healing trauma? Curious about connections with therapy and religious trauma? Have any questions I can try and answer? Let’s talk to each other in the comments and see what we discover!
If you know someone who would do well to read this post, would you do a writer a favor and forward it to them or share it on the socials? I hope this community can start reaching all the people who need it but don’t yet know it exists!
I've been in EMDR for nearly a year and a half now, and it's been transformative for me. We've focused on one of my negative core beliefs ("I'm not good enough") in a lot of events.
I identify with the possible pitfall you pointed out. I couldn't really believe that "I'm enough" (my positive cognition), in large part due to my religious upbringing's central tenant that I'm wicked at my core and can't choose right even when I want to (along with life experiences that reinforced that - if I could have been good enough, this negative thing wouldn't have happened, etc.). And as you said, it got better over time as I began to trust the process and my practitioner more, and as I felt safer and less hyper-vigilant due to working through some of these traumas.
One hurdle I had to overcome, which still comes up at times for me, is that I over-intellectualize everything. It was/is how I make myself feel safe in the world- by trying to understand things. But that isn't how EMDR works. There were a number of sessions where it was mostly me voicing how I didn't think it could work and getting tripped up by trying to do the exercise perfectly. I think being vulnerable and just admitting those things in the moment to my therapist helped, and actively reminding myself of how I'd seen progress from it previously / already, trying to reassure those parts of me which were resistant and trying to sabotage, as they were just trying to keep me safe the only way they knew how. I still wish I felt more when my therapist asks what sensations I notice in myself, at points during the sessions, because often it is just numbness or that I am not able to really tell. I am hoping that my ability to feel those things continues to grow.
I also realized I need to be gentle with myself in this process. I tried going into it too fast and too hard, initially, and there was a point after one session where I got so overwhelmed that I was ready to abandon EMDR and even therapy altogether (why do this if it is making life worse and amplifying these negative things?). But... I think that happened in large part because I was laying impossibly high expectations on myself and also not just being open to my therapist about my doing that. Once I did, by telling her how I was just done with EMDR and about ready to quit therapy entirely, things got better and I basically regained faith in my therapist and the process, by how she responded and adjusted things. It's been much smoother since.
I'd love to do EMDR with a specific focus on religious trauma. It has come up _a lot_ in my process so far. I'm curious what treatment specifically for religious trauma would look like.
Lastly, thank you for doing this publication - I always look forward to reading your posts when I see the email notifications come up for them. I hope you get a bunch of people signing up for paid subscriptions.
Christine, thanks to you and your readers for some great thoughts and comments. I have done EMDR off and on in therapy and have found it very helpful and healing. It is especially effective for me when I can’t seem to access my emotions or memories about a topic.
In my case we had to learn to stop about 10 minutes before the end of sessions and do a therapist-guided meditation to a safe and calming place so my emotions could subside and I could compose myself before leaving.
In The Body Keeps the Score (excellent book on trauma), Bessel Van der Kolk speculates EMDR may emulate REM sleep during which our mind reviews and works out problems. But with EMDR our conscious mind can help with the process in a way that it can’t while we sleep.
As an aside, I can really see the deep connection between religious and childhood trauma for those raised in church. For me, painful emotions arising from religion came later in life when I chose to go to church, and perhaps because it was something I did to myself by choice, I seem to have found letting go of religious trauma and harmful beliefs easier than what you and many of your other readers have shared. Not that letting go of religious guilt, shame, anxiety, fear of hell etc. were trivial for me. They did take significant time and processing to let go of. But I am guessing my religious trauma as an adult was less damaging and more easily overcome than that of those who were traumatized as children.