Healing Childhood Trauma: Harnessing EMDR and Inner Child Restoration

Dr. Francine Shapiro highlights how negative childhood memories, entrenched in specific neural pathways, linger in a frozen and dysfunctional state within the brain. This phenomenon explains the triggers associated with past traumatic experiences. Employing EMDR alongside reparative and imaginative techniques facilitates the release of these traumatic memories. Through this process, the distorted beliefs, sensations, emotions, and thoughts linked to the trauma are purged, often resulting in diminished triggers connected to childhood trauma. This transformative shift enables individuals to perceive themselves differently, adopt positive beliefs, and reframe their traumatic memories, leading to profound healing.

Reparative Imaginative Inner Child Work.

Supplementing this processing approach, engaging in reparative imaginative inner child work proves remarkably effective in providing the healing that the younger self might have lacked. Leveraging the brain's inability to differentiate between reality and imagination, this approach fosters transformative healing by offering imagined experiences of the love and nurturing the inner child might have missed out on.

Crystal Arber, a registered social worker and registered clinical counsellor, works with the military, police, healthcare professionals and survivors of childhood trauma. She is certified in EMDR and is an EMDR consultant and Trainer. Crystal also works with refugees using EMDR in a group format, helping those who are fleeing from war to process the traumatic experiences of War and displacement.