Thoughts on EMDR Therapy ...

Thoughts on Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy and Visually Oriented Traumatic Memory Treatment Concepts:

This morning, while experiencing some traumatic visual memory recall from way back during my youth (both via images and, for the lack of a better term, short video snippets: the latter are along the lines of brief YouTube videos, experienced by myself long before either the Internet or YouTube ever existed), some thoughts about EMDR therapy concepts and related therapy treatment models concerning this came to mind.

However, it should be understood that this is not intended as criticism of either EMDR therapy or of the therapist who had previously provided it to me. In fact, I found the EMDR counseling sessions to be quite beneficial as well as rather helpful.

Photos (first and second ones posted; circa: January 1958): Old family photos of myself during more pleasant times.

What came to mind this morning is about how since these type of rather traumatic visual memories can be so deeply entrenched within the memory and mind of the person affected, that it could prove to be beneficial when the therapist is utilizing one of the EMDR techniques during a therapy session, to have the person experiencing the traumatic visual memory recall a more pleasant visual memory from that time period, not necessarily involving the person or event that had caused the trauma, but of someone else that had been helpful and supportive or otherwise something else that had been enjoyable to them.

Based upon both my own personal experience as well as observation of others over the years, I have found that it can be more beneficial to focus on the positive rather than the negative.

More often than not, focusing on the negative brings about mostly negative results. Whereas, focusing on the positive, can more often, though not necessarily always, bring about positive results. When it doesn't, this can be used as fertilizer with which to plant and cultivate something different as well as potentially better.

Truth be told, years and years ago, the above analogy was drawn from what a very wise and hard working dairy farmer had told me after I asked them how they had managed to cope with a major crop loss due to heavy rains and resulting serious flooding.

Photo: Another old family photo of myself during more pleasant times.

In this way, over a period of time, whenever the person experiences these types of traumatic visual memories, in refocusing their memory system, they can eventually learn to replace or substitute those memories with the more pleasant memories instead.

Refer to this as being the proactive act of both weeding as well as transplanting, figuratively speaking.

This would of course, in many cases, take lots of repetition as well as time and not be something that would happen quickly or overnight.

That stated, what also seemed to work, although it left the traumatic visual memories somewhat unresolved, is rather than focusing on treating the traumatic visual memories directly, was to shift focus from the past by focusing on the present as well as future during therapy sessions instead.

At least in my case, this seemed to work well or better for me.

Photo: Yet another old family photo, this one of my father and myself (circa: January 1958; he was 25-years-of-age and I was 3-years-of-age at the time).

If you have managed to make it this far, thank you for reading. In addition, feel free to share this blog post of mine by sharing the link to it with others who might be interested in the subject matter.

In case it is of interest, check out previous writing of mine concerning EMDR therapy as well as related matters (via Google Drive), here.

Update: Speaking of these and related matters, particularly in terms of emotional healing and recovery, here is a video featuring Dr. Dan Fisher speaking on the subject (circa: 2013), fyi:

Related video about Emotional CPR (e-CPR):

Find out more about Emotional CPR, here.