Eye Movement, Desensitization and Reprocessing, developed by Francine Shapiro in the late 1980s, is an extremely powerful and effective brief therapy, which uses eye movements to reprocess traumatic events.
EMDR can be applied to a wide range of emotional problems, including the most severe disturbances: post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), phobias, excessive grief, and memories of sexual abuse or assault – even decades after the original events. EMDR helps process even the most painful and extreme human emotions very quickly and effectively. EMDR is a powerful therapeutic tool because it is a means to process any unresolved incident from the past.
Often, there is some revisiting of the original events with this therapy, but any pain and distress experienced is short-lived, and once it's gone it's gone for good. The body finds ways to make the incident, however terrible, something with which you can be at peace.
How does it work?
Things happen every day that make us feel bad. But only certain events retain this power long after the incident itself. Usually, difficult experiences produce bad feelings for only a short time. Then naturally, and without any efforts, you feel better again. If the experience is processed completely, you can't get the original bad feelings back.
But sometimes an experience gets stuck in the body. In adult life this can happen if you are a victim of an accident or crime, from divorce, bereavement and so on. Children are especially vulnerable to trauma.
When a traumatic experience becomes stuck in your neurology, anything that reminds you of it (even if only unconsciously) takes you directly back to the feelings associated with the original event. You may not even have any conscious recollection of the original event itself, but you experience the pain of it all over again. You might function happily for years before something happens in your life, or you reach a particular age, and everything falls apart. The trauma had lied dormant and has now been activated.
By using eye movements, EMDR enables those stuck feelings and experiences to be reprocessed naturally and quickly, enabling you to feel normal again and to update limiting beliefs often associated with the traumatic event.
Shapiro herself doesn't explain how eye movements reprocess traumatic experiences. However, from NLP we know that moving the eyes in different positions gives access to different mental processing. Looking up, for example, is associated with visualizing, and looking to the left is associated with memory recall (see under NLP.) In Kinesiology an effective correction involves tracking eye movement across the centre of our vision, to involve both hemispheres of the brain. (The trauma may also relate to the direction of the actual gaze at the time the trauma occurred.) So by focusing on the problem while moving the eyes, and expressing the thoughts, feelings and emotions that arise, the brain is able to gain access to and process events that had become frozen within the unconscious body.
EMDR in practice
EMDR is a remarkable treatment because it so quickly and completely reprocesses even the most terrible experiences from the past. The treatment itself is nothing like as painful as is usually anticipated, and is faster than seems reasonable to hope for.
Even though in the hands of a competent therapist EMDR is entirely safe, because there is some re-experiencing of the original events, it is important that the client feels very safe and has a high level of trust in the therapist. The therapist's interventions in this process are minimal. The therapist accompanies the client and provides safety, support and reassurance, but it is the client's journey and the therapist is merely the guide.
The process involves identifying the experience in the present that makes you feel bad. You will identify the somatic feelings, the emotions and any negative beliefs associated with it. Your eyes are then taken through a set of movements. You may experience feelings in your body, emotions, pictures, memories, words. You may re-experience the original events in accelerated form. You will probably revisit several different times and events. It may take a number of sets of eye movements until your body has completely reprocessed all the experiences associated with the problem.
It is important to stress that it is only inappropriate emotions that are dissolved. For example, chronic, debilitating grief from the loss of a loved one years ago is inappropriate and so is readily processed with EMDR. Natural feelings of sadness and loss which are perfectly appropriate will remain with you.
In place of any negative beliefs you formed as a result of the experience, we put in place positive beliefs that you would like to hold, and apply eye-movement sets to those beliefs until they are strongly held. All the inappropriate, painful feelings are resolved, the negative beliefs deriving from the experiences are relinquished, and what was once a trauma is now simply a memory that no longer has power over you.