Vicki Grove: Posted on Friday, January 24, 2014 1:34 PM

You can sit around all day hoping and praying that you will finally be able to get over what happened to you in the past, but if you don’t get up and do something, you may find yourself in that dark, painful place called hopelessness. 

That might seem obvious, but it’s still scary to face your demons, right? 

Many people put off dealing with upsetting memories because of fear …

    - Fear that they will never be able to get over their pain

    - Fear that they will lose control

    - Fear of who they will be without their pain…the list goes on and on. 

But finding hope involves taking action and taking a risk.

Having said that, allow me to jump on top of my soap box for a moment and sing the praises of an evidence-based treatment for trauma that has brought hope to me and so many of my friends, colleagues, and clients:  EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)

EMDR is a unique therapy in a few ways:

1.     It doesn’t require that you voice all the gory details of your upsetting 

        memory to the therapist. As long as you know what you are thinking or    

        feeling, that’s enough.

2.     It doesn’t require that you relive the painful experience over and over 

        again to become desensitized to it, only once.

3.     It tends to be quick because it goes deep to the heart of the matter in a 

      short period of time.

4.     It allows you to rely on your own insights and brain to heal your pain, 

      rather than on someone else’s.

5.     It looks so “new age,” but actually it is just brain science with an 

        abundance of scientific research and positive results.

Every experience and emotion, good or bad, has a beginning, middle, and end.  

Working through your traumatic memories is no different, but if you keep stopping in the beginning or middle because it’s painful, then you miss the sweet joy that the end may hold.  

As one EMDR client put it, “Something is continuing to happen as a result of EMDR. It’s like continual weight loss that allows me to do more and be more. It’s quite frankly awesome. I never realized how much I was holding on to. It’s very freeing.”

If your past “junk” keeps rearing its ugly head in the present, I’m hopeful you’ll give EMDR a try for your a New Year in 2014!  

If you would like to talk more about EMDR, I would love to help.