EMDR | Upper West Side, NYC | Therapy with Shanni

What is EMDR?

Sounds so fancy.. Let’s dissect it. .

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing.

It was created by Francine Shapiro in the 90’s when she was working with veterans. Very smart woman! She was walking in the park and she moved her eyes from side to side and had a eureka moment and discovered that hey! I feel less disturbed. She later discovered that the bilateral back and forth moving the eye can process traumatic memories and save millions of lives. This is EMDR in a nutshell. In layman’s terms.

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My Journey in becoming an EMDR Therapist on the Upper West Side

‍I got trained in 2019 through EMDRIA, and it was very protocol based. Then I decided to get a taste of it and decided to try EMDR myself with my own therapist.
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It was 4 sessions, I picked a memory, and body sensations and emotions that went along with it, and there’s a tapper (I think it really is a vibrator) that vibrates left and right. I closed my eyes and my brain was free associating at the speed of light! Like a Christmas tree with lots of lights. I started crying in one set (we call it a set, when we do bilateral back and forth and then stop to check in with clients) and once I moved through another set, I felt better. After EMDR, you will feel so tired and exhausted. I remember taking a nap for half of the day. Then I felt a lot better, when I thought of the original memory it did not affect me as much and I even stopped shopping as much. That was my experience with EMDR as a client.
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Then in 2020, I decided to go for the certification and did more training through Laurel Parnell Institute which is called Attachment Focused EMDR now. I like it because it is a modified protocol and is more person centered and robotic. There are more resources and techniques for more complex childhood trauma. This specialized training has prepared me to serve the Upper West Side community, where 14% of NYC adults had serious psychological distress in the prior month according to the 2022 NYC Social Determinants of Health Survey.

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There’s a few steps to EMDR:

First is assessment, getting a history of your trauma, and seeing if EMDR is appropriate for you
Second is resourcing you, preparing you for it with grounding exercises and other mindfulness exercises. I also use nurturing, wise, and protector figures to give my clients an extra resource.
Third is setting up your memory, the worst image, and body sensations, and emotions that go with it. We also talk about your negative cognition, which is what you believe about yourself to be true because of your trauma. For example: a common Negative Cognitive or Core Belief after trauma is “I am defective” or “I don’t deserve love”.
Fourth is reprocessing, you will do the bilateral either with the eyes moving side to side or tapping if done virtually, or tappers (vibrates on your hands back to back) and bring up the target memory. This usually takes 2-3 sessions sometimes longer depending how complicated the traumatic memory we are working on.. Sometimes we may get stuck.
We check in, and once we have 0 on body sensation and level of disturbance, we take out the Negative Cognitive and put in a Positive Cognition, and tap that in. For example: I am defective ---> I am not defective, I am stronger, I am okay.
We sometimes do a future “Imagine what it's like if this happened or your five year old had this ideal mother” and do some inner child work.
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There’s many more steps, but I simplified it for us because by the time you are reading this, you are probably exhausted from trying to find the right therapist for you!

So, whether you live near Lincoln Center, the American Museum of Natural History, or anywhere else on the Upper West Side, finding the right EMDR therapist is crucial. With 13% of NYC adults—about 845,000 people—meeting criteria for depression in 2022, our Upper West Side community needs accessible, effective trauma treatment.