It is eye movements, so that basically means that you would follow a light, for example, on a light bar that moved from one side to another, or you would follow the therapist's fingers, so they would move across your field of vision from left to right.

You go quite fast, and the theory behind the eye movements is that it replicates REM sleep, which we know is the part in our sleep stage that is very involved and very important to adaptive information processing.

It's kind of where we do our downloading and processing and figuring out what we need to do.

That's Dr Cheryl Cross. She is a charted clinical psychologist, and she feels that EMDR therapy can be transformational.

This is the Lizar Wellbeing Show, the Transformational Podcast, helping us all to have a better second half.

And I'm Lizar, on a bit of a mission to find ways for all of us to thrive in later life by investing in our health and our wellbeing today.

And I think today we are hearing a lot more, aren't we, about how trauma can shape us, it can hold us back and influences our behaviour in later life.

Well EMDR was a therapy that I have had personal experience of, not actually me, but within members of my family.

And I have seen firsthand just how extraordinarily helpful, fast and beneficial the whole therapy can be.

Well Cheryl works with clients who have experienced severe trauma and have symptoms of PTSD,

disassociative disorders, anxiety, depression and other really chronic mental health difficulties.

And her work always honors that mind, body connection and our innate human capacity to heal.

Well one of the therapies that she specialises in is EMDR, and that stands for iMovement De-Sensitisation and Reprocessing Therapy.

It's a really powerful, scientifically proven psychotherapy, relatively recently discovered actually,

that uses both the mind and the body to help people recover from traumatic events that have led to poor mental health.

Well Cheryl, welcome, it's such a pleasure to talk to you, I can't tell you how I have been looking forward to this conversation

because my family has had personal experience, I've just had brilliant EMDR therapy is.

So before we get into that, can we just talk a little bit first about trauma generally, what it is and how you define it?

And let's sort of drill down into that before we then look at how EMDR can help.

I think trauma is absolutely the perfect place to start because I think we talk about it a lot,

and rightly so it's discussed so much more now, but actually I think there's still a lot of misunderstanding actually about what it really is.

And there's loads of very definite definitions and diagnoses in things like the DSM and the ICD-11,

...