EMDR

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is often used for healing specific severe traumas. Simple and painless, it uses gentle left-right alternating pulses or sounds to dramatically reduce the emotional charge from old trauma. You simply observe experiences, sensations, emotions, and thoughts that may come up and allow them to move through and be released. Integrating both the conscious and subconscious minds, EMDR allows clients to release severe trauma or phobic reactions, freeing them to take their next steps towards total healing.

Clients have found EMDR most powerful for...
•  defusing post-traumatic stress
•  overcoming phobias
•  recovering from severe injury
•  relieving acute neurological stress

The History

One spring day in the late 1980's, California psychologist Francine Shapiro went for a walk in the park to try to recover from an awful day at the office. As we all do, she was obsessing frantically and miserably about what had occurred -- when she suddenly noticed that although she was still thinking about the issues she had brought up, she was no longer feeling about them. In fact, she was now feeling neutral-to-optimistic about an issue she had been unable to come to grips with emotionally ever before. A scientist at heart, Dr. Shapiro asked herself what had been different about the moment in which her upset suddenly left, and realized that her eyes had been rapidly shifting from left to right, like the rapid eye movements of a dreaming sleeper. She tried deliberately duplicating the eye movements with another difficult issue and got the same results; then began working with colleagues, friends and relatives.

"EMDR has been used with near-miraculous effects on survivors of all kinds of trauma"

Finally she tested the new methodology on clients, beginning with a Vietnam vet's horrific nightmares, anxiety and deep anger -- all of which disappeared in a handful of sessions. Since that time, EMDR has been used with near-miraculous effects on survivors of all kinds of trauma, from childhood abuse, molestation or rape through earthquakes, fires, floods, the Oklahoma City bombings and the Columbine High School tragedy, even Bosnian war crimes. Simultaneously, researchers have been experimenting frantically to figure out how and why it worked, and in the last couple of years have finally established a solid neurobiological basis for what looked like miracle cures.

What to Expect

In an EMDR session, the client's brain is asked to attend alternately to either side of the body via a repeated signal (e.g., alternately touching either palm, or hearing a tone alternately in either ear. I have a small electronic "pulser" many of my clients prefer to use, which delivers a gentle vibration alternately to each hand, like a pager on "vibrate.") This generates minute electric currents which do what dreaming does, only more powerfully: accessing the unprocessed data and (finally) straining out the traumatic feelings and responses so that the data turns into an ordinary memory with no further power to create unwanted feelings and behaviors. In addition, you can program in powerful statements and affirmations of the difference between "then" and "now"; in the future, every time that data file is opened the new, powerful state is accessed rather than the old, traumatized and powerless one.

In an EMDR session, you will be asked to bring up or imagine a target picture or image that represents the core of the issue you are working on. As you attend to that picture for a few moments, you will notice feelings, thoughts, perhaps images or body sensations, which will gradually or swiftly change or reduce until the same picture which was causing extreme distress is now neutral. This process may take anywhere from a minute to an hour or more, with breaks every couple of minutes to check progress. Your job is only to witness what comes up, and note how the feelings and sensations change and disappear.