Do you have some unresolved issues? Could you benefit from EMDR therapy? To find out, take this brief self-test.
- Think of something that chronically bothers you.
- What negative feelings are you experiencing? Anxiety, sadness, panic, worry, agitation, anger, and frustration are common.
- What negative thought do you have? Common thoughts in unresolved issues are thoughts of being worthless, alone, not good enough, not safe, unvalued, trapped or powerless.
- Now, allow yourself to think back to an earlier time, perhaps sometime in childhood, when you felt and thought the same way. When was that time? Unprocessed memories often cluster together throughout the years, where an event today can trigger a cascade of other memories from earlier in your life.
- Does the memory create physical sensations in your body? Common somatic responses include nausea or tightness in your stomach, pressure or heaviness in your chest, heart rate increases, a lump in your throat, or your eyes being tearful (caused by your autonomic nervous system activating from the memory).
- If you have identified an earlier time, on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is no disturbance and 10 is as high as you can imagine, how distressing are these feelings or body sensations right now?
Results
If you rated this memory at a 2 or higher, then that memory may be stuck and could benefit from being reprocessed with EMDR.
If you rated that memory at a 3 or higher, that painful memory could be negatively impacting you.