EMDR in children, children process and record their negative experiences or traumas. This recording can be in the form of both body, emotion and thought content.
The child begins to grow or develop with the memory networks recorded with the negative experience or trauma. Negative thoughts can form the basis of almost all memories. The basis of EMDR is to restructure the negative thought contents that the child basically has in the form of "I am worthless" or "I am an unloved person" into "I am a valuable person" or "I am a loved person".
One of the biggest misconceptions about EMDR is that it only works with traumas. In addition to traumas, many problems and negative experiences can be worked with EMDR. Successful results can be obtained with EMDR in many areas such as test anxiety, phobias, eating disorders.
How is EMDR Therapy Applied in Children?
The application of EMDR Therapy in children is different from adults. When working with children, various structured techniques are used in play therapy to reduce anxiety and fear. While applying these structured techniques, children are loaded with positive/positive resources. Thus, the child's internal resources are increased and coping mechanisms are supported.
In younger children, EMDR can be applied together with the mother. Positive thoughts, which are prepared specifically for the distress experienced by the child and which are thought to be especially important for the child to gain, are placed in the story. Thanks to this technique, which is applied while the child is in the mother's lap, both the attachment between mother and child is supported and the negative feelings and thoughts that the child harbors inside begin to decrease.
Phobic Reactions in Children and EMDR
A phobia is defined as "an intense and persistent fear of a particular object, situation or activity that is considered by the person himself/herself to be unwarranted or excessive". In the context of phobias, even if adults sometimes accept that their fears are absurd and unwarranted, this is not possible for children. For this reason, it is very important that children with phobias receive expert support.
Phobias can be divided into simple phobias and process phobias. Simple phobias can be defined as the feared object being a living creature or object such as a cat. Fear occurs with the appearance of the object. The fear of encountering the feared object begins to reduce the quality of daily life. However, process phobias involve phenomena such as boarding an airplane and require the active participation of the child or adolescent.
It is possible to work with phobic reactions in children with structured protocols within EMDR. After the first experience of fear, children may start to be afraid of fear. For this reason; in the basic framework, the child's self-control is tried to be ensured. It should be ensured that the child recognizes the past events that led to the development of phobia because children often fail to recognize the first memory or develop phobic reactions based on the experiences of others. In addition, it is also very important for children to recognize their own physical reactions.
Vicarious Fears in Children and EMDR
Indirect fears are fears that the child develops without having his/her own experience. Children develop these fears through others or they may develop them unconsciously towards another situation or phenomenon. The majority of children can gain secondary gain from their indirect fears. Therefore, it is very important to take a good history with individual and family therapy before starting EMDR.
It is possible to work with children's vicarious fears with EMDR, but in addition to EMDR, family counseling should be carried out together. In this way, the solution can be more permanent.
EMDR, or "eye movement desensitization and reprocessing", which was born as a technique towards the end of the 1980s, has been referred to as "EMDR Therapy" in recent years. EMDR is a separate field of competence and only a therapist with competence can decide to proceed through EMDR and create the treatment protocol based on EMDR criteria. We can see that the World Health Organization recommends the use of EMDR and the use of Cognitive Behavioral Technique in the treatment of children, adolescents, young adults and adults with post-traumatic stress disorder, especially in the application principles guide published in 2013.
EMDR is applied with the systematic movement of the person's eyes accompanied by finger movements defined as bidirectional stimuli. In cases where it is not possible to work with visual stimuli, the target memory is started to be worked on by giving auditory or tactile stimuli in a systematic way. The target memory can usually be a photo frame reflecting the traumatic event experienced. The aim of EMDR is to turn that photo frame into a fainter, more blurred photo frame. By enabling the client to reprocess the photo frame we have in imaginary form, the impact of negative life experiences on the person's life, psychological and emotional mood can be reduced.
EMDR is most commonly used in trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder. Trauma is usually more than the feeling of reliving those moments; it is our memories afterwards. In this case, it can be considered as post-traumatic stress disorder in its simplest form and has many symptoms. However, traumas experienced in early childhood are very difficult to remember and therefore cannot be directly encountered. On average, traumatic events experienced before the age of 3 may appear as "I feel bad". In cases aged 3 years and above, the remembered events can be studied through the pictures drawn by the child. Thanks to EMDR, major traumatic memories that have taken place in the child's life can be worked on within the framework of various techniques and certain protocols.
Traumas that are not worked on in the early years can manifest themselves in many ways in the following years, such as depression, mood disorders, eating disorders, anxiety disorders, conduct disorder, alcohol and substance abuse and low academic achievement. Since children encode information by breaking it into pieces, it can appear in many different forms.
Apart from all these negative situations; EMDR can also be applied in cases where there is no history of trauma in the life history of the child and adolescent but there is intense stress. If there is performance anxiety or negative self-image, if they feel inadequate and worthless, or if they have intense test anxiety, "source attribution", which is an important step of EMDR, can be performed. In its simplest form, source loading can be defined as reinforcing the good and positive aspects of the person and reinforcing more functional thought contents rather than negative beliefs.