Hi all, I am currently going through EMDR treatments for PTSD due to some events in the past year. It also is helping my Health Anxiety. This post is long, so I apologize for rambling. I'm just excited and hopeful about my experience so far, and wanted to pass along the idea to others who may benefit.
Something that has come up with my therapist is that EMDR helps with some things that you might not expect to be traumatic. For me, this addresses the root of my HA. According to my therapist, who is trained in EMDR, the therapy helps the brain move experiences that are just in the emotional part of your brain to the cognitive, so you can logically think it out and dismiss it without the emotional anxiety reaction. It is confusing, and confused me as well until she explained it better than I can here.
Most of the time the brain can transition experiences that way on its own, but sometimes things "get stuck" there. Some that get stuck more often are events that happen as a child, events that occur over and over again and pile up, or any traumatic experience. If you experience something as a child that may not seem traumatic to an adult, the child could still experience it as a trauma.
Anyway so yesterday we focused my EMDR on my HA instead of the traumas I have been going through. I believe that my HA developed because I was raised in an environment of hypochondriacs/people with health anxiety. My mother had it, and so did her sisters and mother. She was very vocal all the time about it, putting her fears on us as children. Because this happened as a child and over and over again, these memories got stuck in the emotional part of my brain. Her recent death to cancer was a traumatic experience for me as well, so that is stuck there to. Just the repetition of her fears being projected to me was the "pile up" referred to before.
So we focused my EMDR on that stuff. The EMDR is supposed to trigger your brain and different pathways to move those experiences to the cognitive part that is more able to logically understand without the emotional reaction. My therapist said that things that pile up over time can take longer with EMDR, but it still helps when "talk therapy" can only get you so far to trigger the brain to process these events. So even though it can take time, as of yesterday I already feel a little more at ease. It's crazy. I remembered experiences of my mom being so vocal about her fears that I haven't thought about in a long time.
So sorry for the long-winded post, but this EMDR has given me some hope for myself where I did not have hope before.
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