EMDR Therapy

What Is EMDR Therapy?

By tapping into the brain and body’s natural ability to heal

EMDR helps reduce the emotional charge of painful memories, making them feel less overwhelming.

At our Couples Counselling Centre

We integrate EMDR with our core approach, Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), providing a comprehensive and compassionate healing experience.

We understand how deeply past trauma can affect your relationships and personal well-being, and we are here to help you heal and move forward with ease

What Is EMDR Therapy?

At our practice, you’ll often hear your therapist say, “While we cannot change what happened, we can change the impact of what happened.” That is the core of healing from trauma! EMDR, which stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is an approach to therapy that can help you do just that. By tapping into the brain and body’s natural ability to heal, EMDR helps reduce the emotional charge of painful memories, making them feel less overwhelming.

If you’re struggling with trauma, anxiety, or relationship challenges, EMDR therapy could be the transformative experience you need. This evidence-based approach helps you process and heal from emotional wounds and doesn’t require you to rehash painful memories in detail. Instead of having you “talk through” your traumatic experiences, EMDR uses a series of bilateral stimulation techniques to rewire how your brain responds to them, creating lasting emotional relief.

At our Couples Counselling Centre, we integrate EMDR with our core approach, Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), providing a comprehensive and compassionate healing experience. We understand how deeply past trauma can affect your relationships and personal well-being, and we are here to help you heal and move forward with ease.

Have any questions? Send us a message!

How Effective Is EMDR Therapy?

EMDR is highly effective for treating trauma, anxiety, and relationship challenges, providing faster relief compared to traditional methods of therapy. Most forms of therapy only engage the conscious mind. Yet since trauma is stored in the deeper, subconscious regions of the nervous
system, full healing can only be achieved by addressing the whole person. That’s what EMDR does.
It cuts directly to the source of trauma, allowing you to experience relief in your mind and body.

There is a wide body of research demonstrating EMDR’s effectiveness. Over 100,000 clinicians all over the world practice EMDR, and millions of clients have found relief through it. Thanks to its remarkable ability to rewire the brain’s response to trauma, EMDR is endorsed by the American Psychological Association, the Department of Defense, and the World Health Organization.

At Couples Counselling Centre, we use EMDR to help both individuals and couples dealing with trauma, relationship conflict, and emotional wounds. With couples, EMDR is especially beneficial for those who have anxious or insecure attachment styles because of early childhood relationships. It can also help couples heal injuries in their current relationships, such as infidelity or other forms of betrayal.

Have any questions? Send us a message!

How Does EMDR Therapy Work?

Our practice is proud to offer virtual EMDR therapy, enabling you to work through your emotional challenges from the comfort of your home or wherever is most convenient for you. Through a secure online platform, we will guide you with rhythmic eye movements, tapping exercises, or other kinds of stimulation that help your brain process painful memories. Along the way, we’ll equip you with various skills and resources so that you can stay grounded throughout treatment.

In the initial stages of EMDR treatment, you can expect to feel a noticeable sense of relief as painful memories begin to lose their emotional charge. And in the long term, EMDR can help you rewire how your brain and body react to trauma, leading to lasting emotional resilience, greater self-esteem, and healthier relationships.

The beauty of this approach is that you don’t have to worry about doing it “wrong,” as EMDR is not a “pass-fail” phenomenon. The bilateral stimulation techniques essentially do the healing work for you, helping your brain move memories from the left (emotional) side of the brain to the right (logical) side. What’s more, you don’t even need to fully remember traumatic memories in order to benefit from EMDR. After all, even if your mind forgets your experience, your body remembers it. The work of EMDR naturally brings up emotional wounds that your body is holding onto, whether you are conscious of them or not.

Because of how EMDR harnesses the brain and body’s natural healing abilities, it’s okay to shift direction as EMDR treatment goes on and as new memories or challenges resurface. We encourage you to trust your nervous system to bring up whatever needs attention and be kind to yourself throughout the process.

How Can EMDR Therapy Benefit Your Life?

EMDR can help you overcome the emotional weight of trauma, leading to more emotional clarity and calmness in daily life. You can gain tangible skills for managing triggers, experience greater emotional flexibility, and feel more confident in handling stress or difficult emotions. You can also increase your self-awareness and better understand how trauma impacts your mind and body.

Reconnecting with your body’s responses can help you break out of negative patterns, fostering healthier attachments with yourself and others. This can create a sense of flow in your relationships and personal life, reducing trust issues and self-sabotaging tendencies. In short, you can live with fewer emotional roadblocks and a clearer path toward growth.

Why Combine EMDR With Emotionally-Focused Therapy?

At Couples Counselling Centre, we integrate EMDR therapy with our core approach, Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT). We’ve seen firsthand how combining EMDR’s trauma-focused healing with EFT’s attachment-based approach creates a dynamic, complementary process for individuals and couples. This integration allows us to address both past emotional wounds through EMDR and current relational dynamics through EFT, offering clients a comprehensive healing experience

Our decision to incorporate EMDR therapy into our practice was inspired by the powerful results we’ve witnessed in both personal and professional settings. Many of our therapists have seen firsthand how EMDR helps clients overcome deep-seated trauma, anxiety, and emotional pain much faster than traditional methods. The science behind EMDR—its ability to rewire the brain and provide lasting emotional healing—truly captivated us and continues to do so the more we implement it into our work with clients.

Accelerate Your Healing Journey Through EMDR Therapy

Ready to heal from past trauma? If so, you can call us at 647-689-5838 or fill out the contact form indicating that you’d like to work with an EMDR therapist. We look forward to hearing from you!