EMDR or Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing.
This is a most powerful and almost, on occasions, according to my clients, a seemingly “miraculous” technique to clear the ill-effect of disturbing events in a person’s history. A cutting-edge therapy, it has grown slowly but surely since circa 1990 when it was devised by the American psychologist called Francine Shapiro. Initially she found it to be an effective process for the desensitising people from the disturbing emotional and physiological effect of traumatic experiences. This included single incident trauma such as a horrible car crash or multiple incident traumas such as those suffered by service personnel with combat stress returning from war zones. As time went on, she found that it could also be used to reprocess and reframe people’s other painful life experiences as well.
In recent years it has been shown to be just as effective in the healing of other difficulties such as anxiety, phobias, depression, abuse, relationship problems, anger issues, addictions and so on although its effectiveness in these areas have not been so well researched. There is however, plenty of empirical evidence to demonstrate its power to heal and change the lives of people who have suffered from these issues.
There is an 8-stage, 3-pronged protocol that a therapist will follow but this may not be obvious to the client. It ensures that the client feels safe and stable to re-process the distressing and traumatic memories. Briefly, these stages are a thorough history taking, relationship and resource building preparation, target assessment, desensitisation, installation, body scan, closure and re-evaluation.
The Eye Movement element of the therapy name is unfortunately misleading. Although it started out in this way it was discovered that any form of bi-lateral stimulation of the brain such as alternating pulsations in the palm of the hand or alternating sounds in the ears for example, were just as effective in healing the disturbing memory. Sometimes the therapist will use special equipment to stimulate an improved left-right brain connection and sometimes will use hand movements in front of the client’s eyes or tap their knees. This process is coupled with the client recalling certain elements of the trauma.
EMDR is not suitable for everyone of course. Sometimes, if other disturbing or traumatic memories have been activated and need clearing, it is more helpful to integrate it into longer psychotherapeutic discussions for a while. But often EMDR stands alone as a complete therapy in its own right, where the usual discussions take place at the history-taking phase. Note that, even if it is used and contained within a broader, open-ended psychotherapeutic process, the 8-stage process still needs to be completed.
It can also be used to heal adults who are still troubled by the effects of childhood abuse and it can also be very effective tool to help traumatised and abused children and teenagers. Obviously, the latter example is complex and long term as opposed to single incident traumas and like any therapy may take many, many months or years to clear the issues fully, but in general for single traumas, if no past issues have been activated, the work is remarkably speedy, maybe lasting only 6-10 sessions in the best-case scenario and depending on the person.
As a great deal of research has been done to demonstrate its clinical efficacy for post-traumatic-stress and trauma, it is recommended by WHO (World Health Organisation) and is a treatment of choice quoted in the UK’s NHS NICE guidelines in addition to Trauma Focussed CBT.
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