Have you experienced a recent stressful event that continues to affect your wellbeing and studies? Trauma can stem from a single incident like a car accident, the loss of a loved one, an assault or a difficult placement experience.
Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) is an evidence-based therapy designed to help individuals process trauma, reduce distress, and improve emotional wellbeing. Watch this video to learn about how EMDR works.
UniSA is offering EMDR group therapy sessions for students who have recently experienced a stressful event (within the last 12 months) that still impacts their daily life and academic performance. Through this therapy, you'll have the opportunities to reprocess distressing memories and experiences in a safe and supportive group setting, helping to reduce the emotional charge of the trauma and build resilience.
All sessions will be held at City West campus
If you would like to participate in the EMDR group therapy, please complete an online form to register your interest. You can select which group dates you’d like to attend, and you will need to commit to attending both sessions.
Members of the counselling team are trained n EMDR therapy and are equipped to provide a safe and supportive space.
This group is for you if you have experienced a recent stressful event (within the last 12 months) that continues to bother you. We will also provide some questionnaires and have a discussion with you to help work out if the group format is right for you; and if it’s not, we will provide an alternative option to help with the difficult memories.
No. In the EMDR group, you won’t be required to talk about the traumatic event itself. Instead, you're encouraged to share positive aspects of your life and your hopes for the future, only if you wish. Sharing details of the trauma is not necessary.
After expressing your interest, you will receive an email communication about the next step. The group consists of one individual personal counselling appointment and two group processing sessions.
The individual session includes time to explore and practise strategies to manage elevation and stress in the body. We call these resourcing techniques.
During the group processing sessions, you will be given a worksheet to draw aspects of the event that is causing you stress (for your eyes only). This step is to help your brain activate the memory. At this time, you may utilise the grounding strategies to support your coping. You will also rate how distressing or how much charge this is holding for you.
We will then spend 30-45 minutes of the session processing, where you will focus on the event or situation in question and engage in bilateral stimulation (finger tapping) in short sets (between 30-60 seconds) at a time. At the end of each ‘set’ you will be asked to write down anything you notice that’s coming up for you.
During the processing time, if the stress level becomes too much to tolerate, we will have an EMDR-trained counsellor to support you to use the grounding techniques to help with the distress.
No! You can choose to write key words instead.