EMDR is a trauma processing modality that uses bilateral stimulation. It has origins in Indigenous techniques of processing trauma, based in dance and other forms of back-and-forth or bilateral movement that crosses the midline of the body. EMDR is a way to metabolize trauma to help people reduce symptoms of trauma such as depression, anxiety, and dissociation from trauma that is stored in the body and limbic system.

The conscious mind can operate in such a way that it is disconnected from the trauma that lives in the body. EMDR works by using the Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model. It adapts trauma memories, so the system is able to see and understand that they are no longer living in the time of the trauma. This allows the client to metabolize their trauma out of the limbic system and into the frontal lobe, where memories are supposed to be stored, which is called trauma reprocessing. This helps someone access their adaptive qualities to live life in a healthier and happier way.

EMDR is client-led, which is an important, trauma-informed feature of this modality — it is not the therapist dictating where the client’s mind is going, the consciousness of the client goes where it needs to go. This can help with equalizing the inherent power dynamics between a mental health professional and a client. The brain wants to heal and will gravitate toward healing, which is researched backed and incorporated in the AIP model. The therapeutic container provides the right environment for the mind to gravitate toward healing.

Cash practices trauma-informed EMDR, tracking the client to pay attention to their dissociation levels, learning how they ground and providing grounding techniques to help clients stabilize while doing deep trauma work. They also checking in and asking for consent with every step.

EMDR is an 8 phase modality. It’s important to make sure that people feel very grounded and know how to ground before diving into a trauma memory. Cash understands that even grounding can sometimes be triggering for people with trauma because the body has learned that it is not a safe place to be. To work with this, they help the client titrate where necessary, to become ready.

EMDR is both inherently queer and psychedelic. Queerness, psychedelics, and EMDR all illicit an altered state of consciousness from the dominant “normal” cis het, racist, able bodied, oppressive, consciousness. Those who are Queer are living outside of the normal culture and authentically bravely live as their truest selves. In this way, living out and queer is a non ordinary state of being which links it to being psychedelic. EMDR explores mindfulness and bilateral stimulation depending on what phase of the modality someone is in. Both of these aspects draw the human consciousness into non ordinary states of being which links the modality to having roots in queerness and psychedelic conciousness.