Trauma, PTSD & EMDR

As we travel through our lives, we often times can be affected by large and small life traumas. We may recognize the painful incident or not. Often times, we feel that time will just heal the wound, but many times it does not. Examples of large life traumas could be physical and sexual abuse, military events, car accidents, and so on. Smaller life traumas may be experienced by people who were bullied, deceived by a loved one, put down by a family member, etc.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is at the forefront in treating large and small life traumas. When a traumatic or very negative event occurs, information processing may be incomplete, perhaps because strong negative feelings or dissociation interfere with information processing. This prevents the forging of connections with more adaptive information that is held in other memory networks.

For example, a rape survivor may "know" that rapists are responsible for their crimes, but this information does not connect with her feeling that she is to blame for the attack. The memory is then dysfunctionally stored without appropriate associative connections and with many elements still unprocessed. When the individual thinks about the trauma, or when the memory is triggered by similar situations, the person may feel like she is reliving it, or may experience strong emotions and physical sensations.

EMDR works to lower the disturbance level of difficult and triggering events. Sarah James integrates EMDR into her practice with individuals struggling with PTSD, chemical dependency, anxiety, chronic pain, negative self-talk/image, phobia and panic disorders, and sexual abuse.