Addiction Recovery

EDMR for Addiction Treatment – Learning to Deal with Traumatic Memories

EMDR Therapy for PTSD

Negative memories can haunt us, and if we experience a severe trauma, the memory of the event can cause serious and enduring physical and psychological harms.

PTSD is essentially the mind’s inability to deal with the memory of a traumatic event. Remembering the event causes unpleasant reactions, such as anxiety, insomnia, nightmares, irritability or anger, depression and other symptoms, and so we try not to think of the event – to repress it.

Unfortunately, this repression only serves to increase the severity of the symptoms, and lessens our ability to control when that memory is going to pop up.

Many substance abusers and addicts abuse drugs or alcohol partly to self medicate the symptoms of these painful repressed memories. Drugs and alcohol can dull the mind and do work for a while to reduce the severity of PTSD symptoms, but ultimately they only worsen the disorder, and the regular abuse of drugs or alcohol can quickly become an addiction.

And once in addiction recovery, these traumatic memories can lead to relapse, and so as a part of the recovery process, we need to learn to overcome the legacy of our past.

EMDR in addiction treatment

The most widely used therapeutic tool for the treatment of traumatic memories is cognitive therapy. During cognitive therapy, patients are asked to visualize the traumatic event. Working through the memory with a therapist, the patient gradually becomes desensitized to the effects.

This can be a slow process.

More recently, therapists have been adopting eye movement desocialization reprocessing therapy, or EMDR.

During an EMDR session, the patient will be asked to remember the traumatic event, and as they visualize the memory, at the same time move their eyes left and right by following the therapist’s quickly moving hand or light.

The process is repeated many times during a series of sessions, until the patient no longer experiences a negative reaction to the traumatic memory. They still remember it, but no longer feel the intense biological and psychological reaction to thoughts of the event.

It works and it works fast, many patients show a significant improvement after only a few sessions.

Why does it work?

No one is really sure! A relatively new therapy, it has only gained wide adoption in the last decade or so, and scientific studies lag behind the anecdotal evidence – although the few studies that have been done do confirm the effects reported by therapists and their patients.

Some hypothesize that EDMR works by replicating the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) stage of sleep, allowing the mind to finally process and store the traumatic memory – others think that the movement of the eyes somehow allows for an inter hemispheric sharing of the memory in the mind.

Research continues, but therapists aren’t waiting around. Excited by the new technique, thousands of American therapists now offer EMDR.

As an addiction treatment, EMDR is well suited to a drug rehab stay. It works quickly enough to allow patients to make significant progress in only a few short weeks, and it seems to offer patients a better chance of lasting sobriety.

Learn more about EMDR and how it can help you http://www.choosehelp.com/drug-treatment/emdr-in-drug-rehab-what-is-it-and-why-is-it-used.html/

Read TroubleBlog – and learn how meditation can end relapse http://www.troubleblog.com/spirituality/2008207/