If you’ve experienced trauma that continues to affect your life, you’ll want to know about eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), which is making headlines for healing memories of abuse that have proved resistant to standard therapy.
EMDR is an eight-stage treatment in which the patient follows the therapist’s fingers left to right while moving through the traumatic memory, assisted in reprocessing damaging thoughts and emotions by the therapist. Some patients who have been treated with EMDR recall intense reactions to the therapy—nausea, sweating, vomiting and pain have all been reported. Almost all emphasize the need for a trusting relationship with a therapist, who helps prepare patients to participate, assists them in reordering feelings that can surface and is on hand to help with closure and aftercare.
EMDR is increasingly used to treat a range of anxiety-related disorders, from acute Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to phobias and addictions. The treatment seems to have a startlingly high success rate. According to one study 84 percent of patients suffering from a single-incident trauma—such as an assault, natural disaster or accident—no longer suffered from PTSD after only three treatments.
The jury is still out on why EMDR proves so effective. Its founder, Dr, Francine Shapiro explains that the theory behind the therapy is based on an “information-processing model.” When something happens to us in ordinary life, our brains link the event to a memory network of past events. It also processes our experience. What is useful is brought into the network and assimilated. The rest is forgotten.
But when a trauma occurs, the process is interrupted. Rather than being digested into a memory network, the experience lingers in our minds in its unprocessed form. So a rape victim may continue to feel her assault long after the event is over. Every hand that touches her can bring back the grip of her assailant with terrifying immediacy in much the same way that an amputee will experience live sensation in a missing limb.
This is a description of an article that appeared in the November 2007 issue of The Intelligent Optimist. Members can read the full article here. Non-members can become a member here.