• Do you experience symptoms of anxiety such as feeling anxious, overwhelmed, panicky, or physical discomfort like nausea, body pains, or disturbed sleep?
• Are you dealing with feelings of sadness, low mood, hopelessness, helplessness, despair, lack of motivation, guilt, or irritability?
• Do you struggle with low self-confidence or self-esteem?
• Are you facing challenges fitting in with your peers at school or experiencing stress related to school work and exams?
• Have you recently experienced the loss of someone close to you and are struggling with feelings of grief and confusion?
• Do you feel unhappy about family issues and find yourself feeling alone in your experiences?
• Do you frequently have nightmares or difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep?
• Do you often feel inferior compared to others?
• Have you gone through negative events but tend to keep them to yourself without sharing with anyone?
• Are you using drugs, alcohol, or engaging in self-harming behaviours as a way to escape uncomfortable feelings or to fit in because you feel disconnected or inferior to others?

Remember, you're not alone. Many teenagers and adults experience similar challenges, and there is help available for all of us.

How will EMDR help? 

During positive or normal experiences, our brain efficiently processes and stores information as memories. However, when we encounter scary, confusing, or traumatic events, these memories become overloaded with intense emotions, thoughts, and physical sensations. It's like having too many dysfunctional apps on a smartphone, which can slow it down, freeze, shut down, or drain the battery. Similarly, our brains can be overwhelmed with malfunctioning "apps."

EMDR therapy offers a solution by helping us download and reprogram our brain's apps related to those distressing events. It's like updating the apps on your smartphone, eliminating glitches and improving functionality, or adding new features.

In EMDR, one technique involves moving our eyes from side to side while focusing on the negative or challenging event. Interestingly, this eye movement is not unfamiliar to our bodies, as we naturally engage in Rapid Eye Movement (REM) during dreaming, which occurs during sleep cycles.