Healing Trauma in a Virtual World (with EMDR)

In a world pre-COVID, telehealth was a difficult pill to swallow for anyone—insurance companies most of all, but clients too, and the counselors they wanted to work with. There were some people who understood the advantages, like the ease of use for anyone with full schedules, or that it broke barriers for anyone who didn’t have the capacity for in-person therapy. You don’t need a car, and two free hours for transportation and the session. You don’t need to eat beforehand, or find time to change after the gym.

And now, even if you are stuck in isolating after a COVID scare, you can still see your therapist. But, at the time, most people didn’t feel comfortable with it, and therapy had and always would be sitting on chairs opposite one another, privately discussing their emotions.

I love in-person therapy, but mostly because I love doing therapy in general. To sit across from someone whose journey led them to pouring their soul out in front of me, trusting me to help them with this process—it feels like my purpose. So when the pandemic moved into full-swing and I had been working in schools with teenagers who had been pushed through the system, it was hard to understand that I could still do my job while not being in the same room.

It was tough, especially for the teenagers. They had just been dismissed from school for an undisclosed period of time, things were exciting and terrifying and they had more free time than they knew what to do with. I was losing their attention after 10 minutes, and unsure how to share activities with them over video. I felt overwhelmed and burnt out.

But two months later I began my journey with learning EMDR. EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is a type of psychotherapy that “enables people to heal from the symptoms and emotional distress that are the result of disturbing life experiences” (EMDR.com). It is one of the first types of psychotherapy that move away from the widely used talk therapy model of early theorists and into memory reconsolidation, a modality that has now been shown to be at least 3 times as effective than talk therapy in 12 sessions, a vast difference from the norm for talk therapy which can last months or years.

I completed my basic training for EMDR online in June of 2020, the first of its kind. Before this, every training was, of course, in person, at a hotel convention center or something like it, and that was thought to be the only way to get the full effect. It made sense–we wanted human connection, as we always had as participants in therapy. But if there was one thing that we were forced to learn over zoom calls with our nieces and nephews, FaceTime calls on Thanksgiving with our immunocompromised parents, it’s that human connection supersedes physical presence. When our hand is forced, we can find love and a feeling of safety wherever we are. In working with EMDR, in healing ourselves from the memories and self-doubt that impair us, discomfort is a necessity. It hurts to hear it, and as a clinician it hurts to see it, but moving a few inches out of your comfort zone is the way that processing occurs. So step back, and think a moment–if you have discomfort about virtual therapy, or EMDR, or anything that feels new and difficult, where is that coming from? Research has shown that EMDR online has been proven to be just as effective as in-person, so that anxiety comes instead from the unknown.

Stay tuned for pt. 2. where I describe what EMDR therapy looks like online.