The Path to Progress with EMDR

Having a positive and productive experience with counseling is a process with many facets.  Rapport with the therapist, trust, empathy and understanding are all key elements of having a positive therapy experience and foundational to the therapy journey.

In order to have a productive experience (meaning your mental and emotional health improving), there are some things that can help keep the process moving forward and focused on what is important.

Identifying a goal that is impactful and staying focused on it:  

Sometimes therapy can be tangential, but having a goal that will be the focus of the work is important to get the most out of the experience.  Someone may want to identify a goal of “reduce my depression”, which is a good start but being more specific can be really helpful.  For example, a more specific (but still very relevant) goal could be “address my negative self-talk by processing childhood memories of my fathers frequent critical remarks”.  Certainly, negative self-talk is a very pervasive and challenging dynamic for many people with depression and addressing the origins of it can be very helpful. The specificity of the goal will both increase the effectiveness and the speed of the EMDR process.  EMDR is a very structured process that stays focused on the goal, ensuring that therapy doesn’t wander too much into less productive topics.  

Having a broad (or specific) goal before meeting is helpful, but not necessary.  With most people, I can help identify an appropriate goal based on symptoms and background information after talking for one or two sessions.

Tracking the Goal

EMDR includes measurements each session to help track progress, but making mental notes of how your goal is progressing is also important to assess and adjust the process if necessary. These measurements are based on your experience, such as giving a numerical rating to questions like “how much were you bothered by negative self talk since our last session?”

EMDR is Efficient Therapy

Philosophically, I like to be efficient with therapy.  Over time, I have found EMDR can help most clients achieve something noticeable and helpful in a relatively short period of time. In order to do this I try to be very upfront as I do my initial assessment based on the client background and history and make clinical decisions with the client to identify the right starting point.   Taking a focused approach in EMDR can yield surprisingly good results in relatively short periods of time for many clients.  Clients have expressed appreciation to me for the effectiveness EMDR in brief time frames as compared to other therapy experiences.

After Success in EMDR  

Often after finding some success with an initial EMDR series (8-12 sessions), I encourage the client to consider next steps.  This could be ending therapy, shifting to new topics with EMDR, using EMDR for future oriented topics, or doing Holistic Wellness work.  With longer term clients, I have done multiple EMDR series as well as wellness work and engaged in other methods of supporting the client.  Adjusting the frequency of sessions (ie from weekly to monthly) is also an option to monitor the progress of EMDR and do any necessary additional work if needed.