Our brains are hardwired with a mechanism – an information processing system – for healing. This information processing system is designed to move any sort of emotional turmoil to a level of mental health – or adaptive resolution.
After a disturbing experience, you think about it, talk about it, feel about it and mull it over trying to make sense of what happened. This is the brain’s information processing system taking a disturbing experience and allowing learning to take place. Much of it goes on during REM sleep.
Sadly, disturbing experiences, whether major traumas or other kinds of upsetting events, can overwhelm the system. When that happens, the intense emotional and physical disturbance caused by the situation prevents the information processing system from making internal connections needed to take it to a resolution. Instead, the memory of the experience becomes stored in the brain as you experienced it. What you saw and felt, the image, the emotions, the physical sensations and the thoughts become encoded in memory in their original, unprocessed form. So, there can be a lack of resolution.
That’s why time doesn’t heal all wounds, and you may still feel anger, resentment, pain, sorrow, or a number of other emotions about events that took place years ago. They are frozen in time, and the unprocessed memories can become the foundation for emotional, and sometimes physical, problems. EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing) is a psychotherapy that enables people to heal from anxiety, depression and/or the symptoms and emotional distress that are the result of disturbing life experiences.
EMDR provides a way to forge adaptive associations between the networks of stored information in the brain and allows new connections to be made, resulting in peace and well being.