Attachment-focused EMDR (AF-EMDR) is an innovation in EMDR and the field of trauma in that it specifically works to repair the effects of relational/attachment traumas on the mind-body throughout the lifecycle. Common issues include anxiety, phobias, depression, relationship issues, and creative blocks. Relational traumas can include parental misattunement, alcohol/substance abuse, medical traumas, significant early losses, and physical, sexual, and emotional abuse and neglect. The consequences of such traumatic events are often unintentional yet persistent and pervasive. In fact, they actually become part of your brain’s neural circuitry and can affect how you feel, think, perceive, and act, in relation to yourself and to others.
Research on EMDR therapy has demonstrated that the brain’s information processing system naturally moves toward mental health. However, if the system is blocked or imbalanced by the impact of a disturbing event, an emotional wound can fester and can cause intense suffering. Once the block is removed, healing resumes. Using the detailed protocols and procedures in EMDR, clinicians help clients to remove their mental and emotional blocks, and activate their natural healing processes.
Unlike talk therapy, EMDR provides insights to clients not from clinician interpretation, but from the client’s own accelerated intellectual and emotional processes. As a result, EMDR therapy makes you feel empowered by the very experiences that once hindered you. As a natural outcome of the EMDR therapeutic process, the clients’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are robust indicators of emotional health and resolution—all without extensive verbal therapy or “homework” assignments required by other therapies.
Dr. Jayn has witnessed that when people invest in themselves by embarking on the intensive EMDR treatment, they report that they feel happier, exhibit less mental health-related symptomatology, are more effective and efficient at work, have healthier relationships, and exercise better judgment, and make healthier choices overall. The results obtained from only 1 session of EMDR are equivalent to the results from 4-5 sessions of talk therapy. EMDR has been extremely successful for clients who want to get over relationship breakups, childhood abuse, divorce, spousal abuse, accidents, anxiety, fears/phobias (whether rational or irrational), depression, and losing a companion or other loved one (whether human or animal). EMDR is an investment in yourself, so that you can finally function at your optimal level—mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically.