EMDR & CBT
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What is EMDR?
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.
What is CBT?
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is a talking based therapy that helps people understand how their thinking patterns affect their emotional responses and influence their behaviour. The goal of treatment is to identify dysfunctional patterns and replace them with more helpful ones. The client learns how their negative core beliefs were first formed and how these contribute to current issues. A range of strategies are used to challenge these patterns on a cognitive, emotional and behavioural level, both in session and as homework activities. CBT has a good evidence base and is widely used to treat a range of mood disorders and other conditions.
