The brain is incredible at making patterns and identifying cause and effect. It’s part of our survival instinct. The brain wants to identify patterns to make sense of the world around us and keep us safe. It files information away in narratives that we return to again and again when making decisions. However traumatic events are like hot memories that the brain struggles to find a proper place to store. A memory or emotional experience might lay dormant for a while, but it can be woken up when you experience another event that feels stressful and unsafe, triggering an emotional response that is tethered to the fear and damage of an earlier experience.
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Trauma treatment comes in multiple forms. Traditional talk therapy is aimed at guiding the client to a conscious realization of previously subconscious attitudes and behavioral patterns that arise from a lived experience. It is believed that moving from the subconscious to the conscious, the client will correct the attitude and change the behavior, which will then lead to an improved emotional state. However, there is another mode of therapy called Eye-Moment, Desensitization, and Reprocessing (EMDR) which aims to access the individuals “adaptive information processing network”* to ultimately decrease the sympathetic nervous system response and the distressing emotions that come with traumatic reactions.
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