Ella McCrystal - EDMR
Ella McCrystal is an accredited psychotherapist, clinical hypnotherapist, and EMDR practitioner with over 20 years of experience. As the founder of The Northampton Clinic, she inte...
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Who are you?
So I am Ellen McChrystal. I am a psychotherapist using both hypnotherapy and EMDR as part of my practise. These are really useful trauma tools and I'm going to talk to you about EMDR. Now,
What is EMDR therapy, and how does it function?
EMDR stands for eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing. It's an amazing trauma treatment that uses bilateral stimulation to reprocess and desensitise traumas that are held in the brain in a very particular way. So to explain that a bit more and to give context to that, it's called eye movement, and it's based on REM. So when we go into REM sleep, that's repetitive eye movement. Our eyes are moving right to left, right to left very, very quickly. And during that time, the brain is actually collating data from the day and it is applying an emotional label and it's putting it in your brain somewhere. Now with trauma, particularly acute trauma and obviously complex traumas, what happens is the trauma is collated and there's an emotional label applied and it's planted in the brain, but it sort of becomes frozen in time. And the way the brain stores that information is of the age you were or the vulnerability you had at that time, it gets frozen like an ice block. And so it's almost like when you do recall that memory or when that memory is recalled, it's like it's happening now. So you can get stuck in that feeling of trauma like that. It's never going to go away. This is where this PTSD flashbacks come and where people hold trauma in their body, they feel, even if they don't think the trauma. So EMDR uses bilateral stimulation, which means right to left, right to left. We can use eyes, but we can also use audio taps and we can also use taps in the hand. So clickers or vibrating taps, which do the bilateral stimulation for you, that alongside a protocol and different phases of EMDR allows your brain to think that it's in REM sleep, and therefore it thinks that you're collecting the data and it thinks that it's framing it in a different way, but actually it's the therapist and the process that's guiding you through that. So essentially, we desensitise the traumatic memory first and then we start to reprocess the way that you are holding that information. One last point on this, which is always fascinating if you don't know this already, when a trauma happens to you and you recall that trauma and you talk about it, your brain is actually recalling it from the last time you remembered it, not from the time that it happened. It's also recalling it from the position or vulnerability or the age you were at the time. So it's a bit like gossip. It starts to change ever slightly because your perspective changes when you're telling the story, although you are still the child or the vulnerable version of yourself when you're talking about it. So the reason that the Bilateral stimulation with the protocol works is essentially because with the help of the therapist, you are able to relocate, redesign, and reprocess how you view yourself within the trauma, which means that the brain can store it as part of more like a long-term memory rather than it's a happening now memory. And that's how that trauma is eventually released from not only your brain and put into the right portals of your brain, but it's also somatically released from the body.
How did you first learn about EMDR, and what led you to integrate it into your practice?
So when I first heard about EMDR, I'm not going to lie. I thought this sounds too good to be true. It sounds very complicated and it makes no sense to me and I don't believe in it. At the time, I was already a psychotherapist the first time I heard of it, and I was also using hypnotherapy, which is widely misunderstood in itself. So it was a bit naughty of me really, to think that. Then a couple of years after I first heard about EMDR therapy, I had a clinician come and join me at my clinic and come and work for us at the clinic, and he was doing EMDR and hypnotherapy actually, and he said to me, let me show you what this is all about. He said, have you got any traumas that you'd like to look at? I said, oh, yeah, I feel like I've kind of worked through most of it, but feel free. And so he did just one session on me actually, and I think I already understood the processes and I've done so much work already. And also being a therapist, it didn't take that long for me to get to grips with it, and I worked on something that had been the final thing that I really felt like I needed to let go of. And whilst it was happening, that first experience and my only experience with him, I was a bit like, oh, I'm not so sure about this. But within the days and weeks that followed, it had completely changed my perspective on this one thing, which was actually a feeling of guilt over something. And I kind of thought, wow, that's so reframed in my head now, and where it had sat before, it had clearly moved, and therefore I didn't have the same somatic physical reaction to the memory. I was like, this is really interesting. And it sort of sparked my interest during the next couple of years. I was like, Hmm, I might have to train again. I'm one of those people that's so curious. I end up training in all different modalities and I didn't really intend on doing more, but I went down that path and I'm so glad I did.