Events in your past might feel like a pile of dirty laundry in the corner of your mind.
Not only does this “laundry” crowd your personal headspace, but it also emotionally weighs you down. Sometimes to the point where you can’t function like you want to.
When you struggle with co-occurring conditions or several areas of mental concern, then you might even feel buried rather than weighed down. To get unburied, you naturally want to address the whole pile. And it might seem like too hefty an undertaking. It’s a common misperception that for each condition there needs to be a specific treatment method. With Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing or EMDR, that’s not the case. EMDR can help co-occurring conditions. Here’s how.
The Overloaded Filter
When it comes to why you hurt on the inside or the reasons you feel negatively in your life, you can usually blame an overwhelmed information-processing system.
Essentially, you’ve been unable to process events in your life. These unprocessed memories and emotions are bottle-necking within your mind. Unable to pass through your mental and emotional filter properly, they pile up like the previously mentioned dirty laundry.
This pile of dirty laundry could come in the form of one major trauma causing multiple conditions, or it could even be caused by general life events that you have trouble processing. Either way, they keep stacking higher and higher.
No matter what the cause, your filter is overloaded and it’s causing you to struggle with mental conditions. Sometimes more than one at a time.
Finding Emotional Equilibrium
When events, memories, and emotional injury are left unprocessed, they become trapped inside. As you can imagine, this creates a significant imbalance. Negative thoughts and behaviors often run your internal show.
To feel happy and calm, you must return to a state of mental symmetry where the positive and negative influences achieve balance with one another.
All therapeutic treatments aim to help you find that emotional equilibrium. Finding one that fits you and your life is the key. And further still, it’s also pertinent to find one that can address the co-occurring conditions you’re facing.
Finding emotional equilibrium, in other words, is the art of fully processing both negative and positive events in your life.
How EMDR Can Help
Looking from the outside in, EMDR can appear to be an odd form of therapy. After all, accessing such complex brain patterns through a person’s eye movement seems farfetched. But from the inside out, it makes complete sense.
EMDR therapy facilitates your brain’s information-processing system aka your currently overwhelmed filter. Basically, this system is the avenue by which you can address harmful memories and events by processing them completely.
Whether you are dealing with one major traumatic event or the general and stressful happenings in everyday life, EMDR clears the avenue for processing. This means that EMDR can address not only one condition but many conditions all at the same time.
Most conditions remain painful or worsen because they remain piled up in the corner of your mind. EMDR helps you sort through the “pile” without making you relive the pain of each memory or event.
Take the first step…
If you’re ready to consider EMDR therapy as part of your process in treating co-occurring conditions, I would like to help. I have been a Certified EMDR Therapist since 2004, and I have helped hundreds of clients benefit from this incredibly useful methodology. Please get in touch with me via voicemail or email so we can discuss how we might work together to change your life for the better as quickly and effectively as possible.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Linda K. Laffey, MFT
