EMDR for Sexual Trauma
Trauma therapy in person in Wichita & online across Kansas
Trauma: an experience that follows you like a shadow
The Aftermath of Sexual Abuse
If you feel hounded by an experience of sexual trauma even years after the fact, know that you’re not alone. While some survivors emerge relatively unscathed (enough safety to disclose, being immediately believed and receiving firm community support can all make a huge difference) for others, the shadow trails them long after. Flashbacks, nightmares, numbness, dissociation, freezing, struggles with healthy boundaries and/or intimacy, shame flooding, and other mental health symptoms can dog your path long after the sexual abuse has ended.
If you’ve been experiencing symptoms like these and are looking for treatment, you may have heard about EMDR but want to know more before you take the leap.
EMDR: Treatment for Both Brain & Body
You already live with the reality every day: sexual abuse can affect both the way you think and the way your body reacts. Sometimes you know exactly what’s related (like a flashback) and other times you’re less sure. Is that constant, low-grade anxiety related? Are body image struggles related? Is there a genuine reason you felt a wave of fear at the grocery store?
EMDR addresses the constellation of symptoms you’re experiencing at both brain and body levels. Often the answer to these questions arrives hand-in-hand with beginning to find relief from these experiences! So if you think something is related, it probably is: you know yourself better than anyone.
But knowing things are related isn’t the same thing as knowing how to calm them down.
Some of those experiences live on in your mind: sexual abuse can generate all kinds of beliefs about yourself, your body, other people and the world. Even if you cognitively know it wasn’t your fault, for example, your brain can still fall into endless loops of thinking about what you could have done differently to prevent it. EMDR can help you process the beliefs that your brain connected to the abuse, so that those thought loops become less emotionally overwhelming and harder for your brain to feel drawn in by. Old thought loops may still pop up in future, but they will be easier to let go of and will have less power to send you spiraling.
You’re probably also experiencing physical, body-based symptoms: insomnia, high anxiety and/or depression, tensing when you’re touched, freezing in conflict, struggling to feel pleasure, and more. EMDR also attends to the sensations that your brain has stored as memories. Some sessions of EMDR end up entirely focused on sensations, some focus on beliefs, and many sessions weave sensations and beliefs back and forth.
What emerges from your brain and body as we work, is the guide forward. You won’t be rushed or pressured: we’ll be curious together about what got stored as part of the memory network so that all the fragments can be picked up and brought for healing. Healing doesn’t erase what happened, but it does change your relationship to the memories so they can recede into the past.
Trauma: often stored as fragments rather than complete memories
What If I Don’t Remember What Happened?
Sometimes people notice symptoms in themselves that lead them to wonder if a forgotten or preverbal assault is part of their history. Other people’s brains blocked some of the memory from forming in real time, to protect them from overwhelm or from knowledge it thought was too risky to hold onto. Either way: if you find yourself without a complete memory but plagued by symptoms, you’re probably more normal that you think. And: healing isn’t predicated on having complete memories.
EMDR doesn’t focus on determining what happened. Instead, it focuses on healing what’s happening now: the beliefs in your brain and the sensations in your body that won’t let go. You don’t have to have clear memories to bring healing to what you’re living with today.
So if you’re experiencing symptoms (or exhausted from trying to keep them at bay), EMDR therapy can approach that without needing to construct a complete narrative. We’ll work with the distress of what you do know, what triggers you now, nightmares that flare, emotions that are hard to manage, and the rest of the constellation. Your brain and body have “kept the score” even if you don’t know exactly what happened, and healing can still be the next response to those symptoms.
Trauma: it can feel like a long road to the light
Do I Have to Talk About The Assault in EMDR?
You’re probably already living with some intrusive flashbacks: the idea of deliberately approaching the memory and also having to tell someone the details can be completely overwhelming. (That’s just one of several reasons that people often choose to wait years, decades, or forever, to disclose what happened.) So let’s talk about what you actually have to do in EMDR.
First of all, the details belong to you. Therapy isn’t a court room or forensic examination: you get to choose what to disclose in therapy. If there comes a point where telling the story would feel empowering and healing to you, you get to choose that. But if you don’t want to tell any details, know that EMDR can still be helpful.
In EMDR, we’ll gather enough information to make a rough outline to guide the treatment, but the real work happens in the bilateral movements, not in talking. In sessions I am often nudging clients to say less between sets and instead return to the bilateral movements and processing, so we can move it through the brain and body as quickly as possible and find relief! So if you don’t want to speak about the details, EMDR can be a great fit.
Second, if the entire memory is too overwhelming to approach, a treatment plan can be built to work with components of it at a time. The whole memory doesn’t have to be addressed at once. Beginning with things like a recurring nightmare, a recent trigger, or pieces of memories that happened before or after, can begin to shave down the intensity of the memory and make it more manageable before we approach the core. We begin with what feels doable to you, in that moment. Sexual assault may have removed choice from you, but healing work gives the choices back to you. You decide what happens when.
Trauma: healing comes fastest when you’re held in caring relationships
Therapy for Sexual Trauma in Wichita, KS
If you’re in Kansas and considering therapy to help you in the journey of recovering from sexual abuse, read more about me here then reach out today to schedule your free consultation. I offer free consultations to all new clients because I believe you deserve to enter therapy with confidence that you’re in the place that will help you find healing!
Elizabeth Peters, LMSW is a licensed therapist seeing clients in person in Wichita and online across Kansas. She provides EMDR and somatic therapy for adults who are overwhelmed by anxiety, painful relationships, spiritual harm, and trauma.