How Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing Can Help Alleviate Depression

Do your feelings of depression seem to be taking over your life? Have you tried different forms of therapy and medication but nothing seems to help alleviate your feelings of depression? If you answered, "yes" then Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing (EMDR) could be just the thing to help you overcome depression. To help understand what EMDR is and how EMDR can help alleviate depression, I have interviewed psychotherapist Annabel Agee.

Tell me a little bit about yourself.
"I am a Licensed Professional Counselor/Mental Heath Services Provider in private practice in Maryville, TN. I have been using EMDR as a therapy tool for a little over two years and have found it to be an extremely powerful and effective modality. If you want to see more about me and my background, you may look at my resume via my website: annabelagee.webstarts.com or view my professional profiles on the Psychology Today or Good Therapy platforms."

What type of impact can depression have on someone's overall life?
"Depression is a very serious and life-threatening illness. Even if the person suffering with depression does not want to actually act on suicidal thoughts , the person may accidentally put herself/himself in harm's way. Depression is like a cloudy filter for everything the suffering individual experiences in life, from getting up in the morning to taking the dog for a walk to communicating with family and friends. Especially difficult is the experience of others not understanding why the person cannot 'just snap out of it' by going for a walk or getting busy doing something. A person who has not experienced the profound sadness and debilitating lack of energy commonly associated with depression has a very difficult time understanding how it is different from 'ordinary' mood swings ."

What is Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing?
" Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a therapy tool that was developed in the early 1990s as a tool for helping people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder . The efficacy of the process is based on the concept that the brain is an organ of the body, just as are all the other organs of the body. It already knows how to heal itself. For example, your skin is an 'organ' of your body. If you scratch your arm and the skin 'breaks,' your skin already has the knowledge needed to repair itself. You might need to wash it, apply some antibiotic ointment, and use tweezers to remove a splinter, or even get stitches to assist your skin in performing its healing task. But you do not need to teach your skin anything because it already knows what to do and immediately goes about its business of taking care of you. Even your blood is programmed to clot so that you will not lose too much. So, with EMDR work, the basic assumption is that your brain already knows what to do to heal itself, but you may have somehow left a 'splinter' in there that needs to be removed to help the process go forward.

The EMDR process is a sort of simulation of dream sleep, i.e., rapid eye movement (REM) sleep that naturally occurs during the normal sleep cycle. During REM sleep, the eyes move back and forth rapidly, which alternately stimulates the right and left sides of the brain . It is believed that this alternating stimulation (also called bilateral stimulation) is a physiological process that facilitates the work of the brain. We know that if your body is deprived of this opportunity to dream, either by medication-induced sleep or by interrupted sleep, problems emerge. Thus, REM dream sleep gives your body the opportunity to sort of 'run maintenance' to sort things out and backup files, perhaps somewhat similar to a computer defragmentation process. You know when your computer is running slow and the tech comes to 'clean it up' he or she is probably (among other things) running a 'defrag.'

EMDR work involves some form or bilateral stimulation --- visual, auditory, and/or tactile. Thus, it simulates the physiological process of REM sleep and thus provides an opportunity for the brain to do some work that it has not been able to do, for one reason or another. The brain already knows how to heal itself, so EMDR is a way to facilitate this natural process. During EMDR, the client remains aware of the present at all times even though he or she is thinking about (observing) experiences from the past. This dual-awareness is the critical factor that makes EMDR different from hypnosis. Also, different from hypnosis, the symptom relief that occurs with EMDR seems to be permanent, not temporary.

For more information about EMDR, google it. There is a lot of research out there, so I always encourage clients to find out more on their own."

How can Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing help alleviate depression?
"While much of the research on EMDR has involved trauma issues, along the way, clinicians have discovered that it works with other problems, too, including depression. Chronically depressed individuals often experience an incongruence between what they know to be true about themselves --intellectually-- and what they feel -- emotionally. For example, a person may be able to say, 'I know that I am a good person. I am intelligent, creative, and resourceful.' And at the same time express feeling 'not good enough, less than, and unworthy.' The EMDR process literally 'brings up' the emotional stuff and the body memories associated with the emotions and allows the cognitive, adaptive messages to map onto the emotional and body experiences in such a way that the memory can be filed in the brain properly. In other words, so that the emotional charge of the experience, while useful at the time it happened, it is clearly in the past. If the emotional charge is not useful in the present, it does not need to drive a person's experience of the present. Thus, if a person's supervisor is providing constructive criticism, the person needs to be able to hear it as such rather than hearing it as he or she heard a berating parent in the past. EMDR makes it possible for a person to experience the present as it really is rather than being 'triggered' to feel like the child who could never do enough to please the parent."

What would a typical Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing session be like for someone that wants to alleviate feelings of depression?
"The EMDR process involves preparation and the building a therapeutic rapport. So, I would need to meet with a client a few times and gather enough information about his or her life experience to understand the basic landscape and to establish a trust relationship . Proceeding to a reprocessing session where bilateral stimulation is used would be productive only after basic trust is established because the brain will only do this kind of real work if it is safe to do so. The brain already knows what is safe. So, how long I would see a person before a reprocessing session would depend on the situation. EMDR works much faster than ordinary talk therapy, though. With EMDR work, a client can experience significant relief of symptoms after even one session of reprocessing (bilateral stimulation) and may feel completely relieved within 4-6 sessions. With ordinary talk therapy, this amount of relief typically would take months or years.

It is difficult to describe a typical EMDR session as very different from an ordinary therapy session. An EMDR session has a beginning, middle, and end, just like any therapy session should. The middle part, however, involves bilateral stimulation."

Thank you Annabel for doing the interview on how EMDR can help alleviate depression. For more information on Annabel Agee or for any questions you can email her at annabelagee@gmail.com

Recommended Readings:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/5674574/how_to_overcome_depression.html?cat=5">How to Overcome Depression

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2944934/treatment_for_depression.html?cat=70">Treatment for Depression

Healing Depression Through the Expressive Arts