EMDR Therapy in Kansas City
Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR, is a special treatment offered at rehab facilities like Arista. If regular talk therapy is uncomfortable for you, or you want alternative ways to treat trauma contributing to your substance abuse, EMDR might be a good holistic modality.
Arista Recovery is a drug and alcohol rehab center that can help you and your loved ones. To learn more about our Kansas City EMDR drug rehab, call Arista Recovery today.
What is EMDR Therapy?
EMDR therapy in Kansas City is an evidence-based form of treatment. With EMDR addiction treatment, you can avoid the potential stress of traditional talk therapy, where you are forced to relive painful events from your past; instead, you only have to recall the memory (not share it out loud) while a qualified therapist helps you reprocess the emotional attachment and triggers.
Kansas City EMDR drug rehab is a way to reprocess memories and events from your past. When these negative memories and events are unprocessed, you hold on to an emotional attachment which is usually harmful in the present.
For example:
If you were abused as a child or watched your parents struggle with domestic abuse or substance abuse, those negative memories might result in blame. So when you consciously or subconsciously retrieve those memories, you reinforce blame on yourself for the events that transpired.
- If you don’t get proper treatment, guilt can stick with you and impact your decision-making.
- It might result in incorrect, negative beliefs about your self-worth.
- It might result in negative beliefs that you are the cause of bad things that happen to people you love.
- Instead, it might result in thoughts that you are a failure because you couldn’t keep your parents together or prevent the abuse from happening; Therefore, you shouldn’t try to recover from substance abuse because you’ll fail.
Ready for help? Let us guide you through our EMDR addiction treatment.
How Does EMDR Work?
With EMDR therapy in Kansas City, your therapist helps you reprocess and resolve those memories. You get an opportunity to understand how you reacted to trauma in your past and figure out how that reaction might have been inaccurate.
If you witnessed domestic abuse as a five-year-old and your reaction was that you weren’t good enough because you couldn’t stop it, for example, that negative reaction could stick with you and have encouraged or facilitated drug abuse in adulthood. Perhaps each time you tried to quit, all you could think about was how you had no power to stop the abuse as a child back then, so you have no power to stop the substance abuse now.
Resolving feelings about these interactions or encounters from the past can help you achieve inner peace. This also gives you a way to process the information differently and change the incorrect beliefs that you aren’t good enough or can’t stop bad things from happening in your life or anyone else’s. During a session, your EMDR addiction treatment therapist will help you counter those beliefs, perhaps recognizing that a five-year-old has no ability or responsibility to stop something like domestic abuse and that the domestic abuse was a reflection of bad decisions made by other people.
Improper Storage
Changing your eye movements as you recall traumatic memories can alter how your brain stores those memories. When you come to a Kansas City EMDR drug rehab center, your therapist will have you recall painful memories. They will lead you through side-to-side eye movements either with a handheld device or sounds from headphones.
Note: During a session, you will never talk about the painful memories out loud, in detail. Instead, you will simply recall them in detail while the therapist guides you through changing eye movements.
Under normal circumstances, your brain stores everyday memories of eating or going to work differently than traumatic memories. Traumatic memories get disrupted, and they don’t store properly, so you can’t process and heal them. But changing your eye movements changes how your brain stores those memories and fixes this.
Triggers
With this type of treatment, you can stop triggers and unnecessary reinforcements. Changing how memories are stored can create new neural links that no longer activate anxiety, fear, or anger based on specific triggers.
Let Arista help you build the right rehab program. Call us now.
What is EMDR Therapy Used to Treat?
EMDR therapy in Kansas City is used primarily to treat PTSD, although today, it is also used to treat conditions related to anxiety and drama. Over 50% of people who struggle with substance abuse also have some form of underlying mental health disorder like depression or anxiety.
EMDR therapy in Kansas City is used to treat things like:
You might not realize that you are struggling with undiagnosed or untreated trauma from negative or painful events in your past.
If you are aware of these painful events, you might hesitate to use traditional talk therapy because you’ll be forced to discuss the events in great detail with a therapist. For some people, this might cause retraumatization. But this is where EMDR proves so effective.
Reach out to Arista to tour our Kansas City drug rehab center.
- Generalized anxiety disorder
- Eating disorders
- Dissociative identity disorder
- Major depressive disorder
- Social anxiety
- Phobias
- OCD
- PTSD
- Personality disorders
- Panic disorders
- Adjustment disorders
- Substance abuse
Is EMDR Effective?
Yes. It is proven so effective for treating PTSD that it is one of the primary forms of therapy used on Veterans by the US Department of Veterans Affairs and the World Health Organization.
During our EMDR addiction treatment, you can expect to experience results quickly. Individuals who have only experienced a single traumatic event can see benefits in as few as three to six sessions. People with multiple traumatic events in their past might take eight to twelve sessions before they see a difference.
Don’t wait. Call today to take the first step to recovery.