How EMDR Can Help Your Anxiety and Perfectionism
If you’ve heard of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing), you may have heard it’s an effective treatment for mental health disorders like PTSD. This is absolutely true, with one study showing complete resolution of symptoms from a single trauma event after 6 EMDR sessions. EMDR helps clients by processing traumatic memories and reducing or elimating trauma symptoms like hypervigilence, nightmares, and depression. For many people, the trauma symptoms they experience are not caused by a single event, but rather a repetitive series of events or even ongoing events that lead them to feel a sense of powerlessness, lack of safety, fear, shame or dissociation. This is what’s referred to as complex trauma. In this case, EMDR therapy is used to target multiple memories and helps the client reduce symptoms while also helping the client to build an internal sense of self that can hold and respond to the different parts of themselves with compassion.
So what does this mean about EMDR treating your anxiety and perfectionism?
First, let’s talk about the causes for perfectionism and the repetitive triggers for anxiety. Often, at the heart of anxiety and perfectionism are negative beliefs or underlying emotions that are unknowingly driving our behaviors and responses. Beliefs like, “I have to be perfect to be loved” or “I’m only valuable if I’m always successful” or even simply, “I am unworthy of love” can lead to symptoms and behaviors of anxiety and perfectionism such as:
intrusive negative thoughts
being unable to slow down
intense fear of making mistakes
overworking, poor boundaries, and difficulty with saying no
avoidance of any situations where you might fail
conflict in relationships, driven by persistant fear your partner doesn’t love or inability to trust
By identifying the negative beliefs behind our anxiety and perfectionism, we begin to find the pathway to change and self-compassion
How does EMDR treat anxiety and perfectionism?
We identify the places in your life currently stuck and want to change. Do you want to feel less anxious in your relationships? Do you want to feel less stress and burnout in your work? Do you simply want to feel less anxious and more confident in yourself overall?
We identify current triggers for your anxiety in your life and identify the underlying negative beliefs about yourself that come up in these moments.
After identifying the core themes and negative beliefs, we bring in somatic or body awareness to help you “float back” in your mind to the first time you felt this way. This helps us identify the root of the negative belief or the trauma that is held in your mind and body, being triggered in these moments. A trauma can be anytime you felt an overwhelming sense of powerlessness or shame, or a sense of being unsafe, physically or emotionally.
To support the reprocessing of these memories, we help you develop resources or skills to help you stay within your window of tolerance and regulate your nervous system. These resources help in the session when you move too far out of your window tolerance to return to a place of safety. They also help outside the session when your anxiety is triggered.
Together we decide on a memory to begin with, usually the one that is connected to the negative belief or current triggers that are most distressing to you. We reprocess that memory, using bilateral stimulation, such as physical tapping left and right or using your eyes to watch a target move back and forth, leading to that memory feeling less disturbing. The somatic or physical symptoms related to the memory soften and as a result that connected present triggers for anxiety feel less disturbing as well.
How you feel after using EMDR to treat anxiety:
I know it may sound like magic! I was skeptical myself until I witnessed it in clients and experienced it myself. Therapist, Jini Tyler, LCSW described the process and benefits of EMDR this way: “EMDR targets the root of symptoms in an organic way, leading many of my patients to get relief not only from maladaptive thinking patterns, but also from somatic symptoms such as difficulty breathing, chest pain and gastrointestinal discomfort.”
Benefits of EMDR therapy for anxiety may see include:
Rachel Duvall
Rachel is an EMDR therapist in Massachusetts and loves working with women who may be struggling with trauma symptoms, anxiety, low self esteem and perfectionism.
Reduction in physical symptoms of anxiety such as tension and hypervigilence
Improved confidence in your ability to handle future stressful or anxiety-provoking situations
A stronger sense of self and an internalized belief that you are worthy of care and love, no matter what you achieve or do for others.
