Everything You Need To Know About Eye Movement Desensitization And Reprocessing; The New Type Of Psychotherapy

EMDR is Not Traditional Exposure Therapy

EMDR has frequently been confused with traditional exposure therapy. While the two methods both target an individual’s cause of fear or anxiety, the approaches to doing so are vastly different. Unlike EMDR, exposure therapy is primarily based on the Pavlovian concept of respondent (or classical) conditioning, which involves the individual learning an entirely new behavior based upon associations. In other words, a therapist will exposure a client to a feared or disliked stimulus in order to reduce fear, thereby breaking the chain of anxiety. Exposure therapy is considered a form of CBT. EMDR is more focused on how traumatic memories get processed and can be reprocessed through therapy.