Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is recognised as an effective trauma
treatment and recommended worldwide in the practice guidelines of both domestic and international
organisations. It is one of the most researched psychotherapy approaches.
Allison Cusack is a Masters Level Trained EMDR Therapist. EMDR is a psychotherapy approach that
helps people recover from abuse, grief / loss, abandonment, PTSD, and other traumatic life events as
well as depression, anxiety, phobias, OCD, eating disorders and mood disorders. EMDR assists the
client to reprocess unresolved / ‘stuck’ memories and their associated images, sounds, thoughts,
feelings and body sensations, and as a result alleviates the emotional or psychological disorder. After successful treatment with
EMDR, affective distress is relieved, negative beliefs are reformulated, and physiological arousal is reduced.
Allison has successfully used EMDR therapy with children, adolescents and adults with a variety of emotional and
psychological problems.
The theory behind EMDR therapy is that an inherent information processing system in the brain gets blocked when traumatic or adverse
events occur, causing these events to be locked in the brain with the original picture, sounds, thoughts, feelings and body sensations. As
long as these memories remain unprocessed, the brain may associate a current situation with a past traumatic experience. The
original unprocessed images, thoughts, feelings and body sensations may be triggered and cause emotional and psychological disorders.
EMDR therapy works on helping the brain reprocess these traumatic memories, and as a result alleviates emotional and psychological
disorders. The brain learns what it needs to retain for adaptive information processing purposes and what it can now discard. This helps
the client permanently distinguish between past triggers and current / future events.