What is EMDR psychological therapy about and how could it benefit you?

Traumas cause the mind to work too hard. The brain tries to block out parts of an accident: the spray from the shattered glass when one car crashed into another, the smell of smoke… Sometimespeople with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) restrict their lives and avoid streets, smells or songs that make them think about what they have experienced. But the memories make themselves present: in nightmares, flashbacks, and intrusive thoughts.

Since PTSD was included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental DisordersIn the 1980s, therapists have found a number of therapies that help people deal with traumatic memories.

Over the past decade, a seemingly unconventional treatment has become part of established therapies. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy, better known as EMDR, might seem far-fetched to an observer. This practice consists of convincing people to process traumatic memories while simultaneously interacting with images, sounds, or sensations that activate both sides of the brain.

Maybe patients move their eyes from side to side following the therapist’s finger or fixate on alternately appearing bursts of light on the sides of a screen. The idea is that the patient’s brain becomes grounded in the present moment while she reminisces about the past.

In recent years, EMDR has garnered a lot of attention, thanks in part to increased demand for trauma treatment during the pandemic and celebrities sharing their experiences. Prince Harry filmed an EMDR session for a documentary series with Oprah.

Sandra Bullock mentioned that she turned to EMDR after a stalker broke into her home in 2014. The actress of The Good Place Jameela Jamil wrote on Instagram in 2019 that EMDR “saved her life.”

Perhaps patients who seek EMDR do so from another source: The Body Keeps the Score (‘The Body Keeps the Score’), the influential book about trauma that has spent more than 200 weeks on the bestseller list of The New York Times.

Bessel van der Kolk, the book’s author, promotes treatment as one of the most effective ways to combat PTSD symptoms. “Actually, it is no longer an innovative treatment. It is something very well established”he pointed.

What is EMDR?

In 1987, when facing his own disturbing memories, psychologist Francine Shapiro developed EMDR by first experimenting with herself, moving her eyes from side to side when walking through the park. Then, little by little, she began to take the treatment to other people.

Therapists apply EMDR in eight phases that typically take six to twelve sessions, although that number varies from person to person. Each session lasts between 60 and 90 minutes, approximately. First, the therapist asks about the patient’s current challenges in order to gather information related to his or her history. and then come up with a treatment plan, explained Deborah Korn, a therapist and co-author of Every Memory Deserves Respect.

The patient may need to “go back in their mind” to something prior to their current symptoms, Korn said, and analyze a recent emotional outburst or panic attack in order to isolate the triggers that caused them. The goal is to identify a traumatic memory that the patient can overcome in later phases of EMDR.

“Most people don’t come in saying, ‘I want to deal with my traumatic memories from ages 5 to 11,’” Korn explained. “Rather they say: ‘I am very unhappy.'”

Then the patient and the therapist devise coping strategies, such as breathing exercises or meditation that help combat dissociationwhich the patient can use if he becomes distressed during the sessions or between one session and another.

Once those strategies are determined, almost always after one or two sessions, the therapist asks the patient to recall the most difficult aspect of the traumatic event. It could be a sight, sound, or smell that intrudes on your thoughts most often; For some patients, the most vivid trauma-related memory occurred just before the event occurred, said Sanne Houben, a researcher at Maastricht University who studies EMDR.

Patients focus on the sensations and emotions they are experiencing while thinking about that aspect while performing various activities, such as moving their eyes, patting themselves, or listening to a distant ringing that alternates from one ear to the other. Typically, each series of these bilateral stimuli lasts between 30 and 60 seconds.

The therapist periodically asks the patient what he is noticing or feeling and encourages him to view that memory from a present-day perspective. “If you say, ‘It was my fault,’ the therapist may ask you how old you were and if you really believe you could protect yourself as a child,” said Vaile Wright, senior director of Healthcare Innovation at the American Psychological Association. . “It’s not just about sitting still and thinking about the memory.”

How does EMDR work?

Making the patient relive the past on purpose is not unique to EMDR; Most PTSD therapies, such as cognitive processing therapy and prolonged exposure therapy, encourage patients to “actively go into the trauma,” said Shaili Jain, a PTSD specialist at Stanford University. Reliving trauma can activate the body’s response to stress: cortisol levels skyrocket and heart rate speeds up. But, Over time, the process may gradually desensitize you to your memories, habituating your body to the stress and anxiety you experience when faced with something that reminds you of that trauma.

“The fight-or-flight reaction goes down quite a bit, so you’re back in control of your life,” Jain said. “Instead of spreading triggers.” With EMDR, in theory, the added component of bilateral stimulation anchors the patient in the present moment while coping with the trauma.

“We use the phrase: ‘One foot in the present and the other in the past’”said Marianne Silva, a clinical social worker and EMDR practitioner with the New England Department of Veterans Affairs Health Care System.

Bilateral stimulation needs to be persuasive enough to divert patients’ attention, but not so overwhelming that they focus entirely on it. For example, multiplication tables would require too much effort, explained Richard McNally, a professor of psychology at Harvard University.

Is EMDR effective?

Today, therapists generally view EMDR as It is an effective treatment to treat traumas. The World Health Organization and the American Psychological Association have recommended it for people with PTSD.and have published guidelines for the application of the treatment.

In England, the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence, a rigorous authority in the field of psychology, lists EMDR as a tool for adults coping with trauma and for children who have not responded to cognitive behavioral therapy Trauma focused.

However, scientists debate whether EMDR is more effective than other methods of treating trauma. Pim Cuijpers, professor of clinical psychology at the Free University of Amsterdam, analyzed nearly 80 studies on EMDR and found that while the research pointed to positive effects of the treatment, “the quality of the research is actually very poor,” he said.

Cuijpers mentioned that many psychological treatments lack rigorous studies, but the evidence for EMDR was especially weak; the sample sizes were very small and there was potential bias on the part of the therapists conducting the research.

He also stated that although EMDR is very likely to be effective, it is not advisable to unconditionally endorse the evidence behind the treatment. Also, there are few studies showing that EMDR works in the long term, said Henry Otgaar, a researcher and professor of forensic psychology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands.

However, there are patients and therapists who swear by this treatment, plus enough “hard data” to back it up, Jain commented. According to Wright, patients report fewer PTSD symptoms, as well as fewer flashbacks and intrusive thoughts after the sessions.