Emotional stress and trauma disorders, EMDR therapy: effective and fast

Given the growing demand from patients and doctors, the Villa Santa Chiara Nursing Home has organized a three-day training course on EMDR for psychotherapists, starting today. The course instructor is Dr. Isabel Fernandez, cognitive behavioral psychotherapist, president of the EMDR Europe Association, and president of EMDR Italy.

“People who experience trauma, especially the most painful kind, are left with feelings and difficulties related to these experiences,” explains Dr. Fernandez, adding, “We all tend to remember the negative things that have happened to us more often. With EMDR treatment, we work on the memory of these experiences in order to help the mind process what has happened.” “Since the pandemic, there has been no respite for people’s minds, in the sense that we are always worried and preoccupied with stressful situations that were previously more circumstantial or easier to bear,” adds Fernandez.

Painful experiences linked to traumatic events such as road accidents, the loss of loved ones, violence, or more common but emotionally stressful situations tend to leave lasting traces in the mind, causing suffering that, even decades later, continues to affect people’s well-being and prevents them from finding a new balance. For these conditions, EMDR treatment activates standardized procedures that involve simultaneous focus on both the spontaneous associations of images, thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations related to the traumatic event and, at the same time, bilateral stimulation, which commonly takes the form of rapid eye movements.

Processing trauma with EMDR allows patients to change their perspective, integrating emotions that are more appropriate to the situation and reducing physical reactions. In this way, the memory of the traumatic experience is placed in the past, taking on a more detached connotation so that the event is considered a distant memory that no longer causes distress or intense emotional charges.