Emdr Therapy Quotes

In contrast, EMDR, as well as the treatments discussed in subsequent chapters—internal family systems, yoga, neurofeedback, psychomotor therapy, and theater—focus not only on regulating the intense memories activated by trauma but also on restoring a sense of agency, engagement, and commitment through ownership of body and mind.

Changing the memories that form the way we see ourselves also changes the way we view others. Therefore, our relationships, job performance, what we are willing to do or are able to resist, all move in a positive direction.

As with any field, if something does not fit into the current understanding of how things work, it raises eyebrows, hackles or both.

The dominant theory is that the original memory is accessed, connections changed and then stored with these new modifications in a neurobiological process called “reconsolidation.

In The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk writes about a form of therapy called EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It’s a strange process reminiscent of hypnosis, where a patient revisits past traumas while moving their eyes left and right. It seemed too simple, almost hokey, but van der Kolk passionately sang its praises. He told the story of a patient who came out of a single forty-five-minute session of EMDR, looked at him, and said that “he’d found dealing with me so unpleasant that he would never refer a patient to me. Otherwise, he remarked, the EMDR session had resolved the matter of his father’s abuse.” Resolved! Here was a form of therapy, van der Kolk said, that could help “even if the patient and the therapist do not have a trusting relationship.” Then again, he said that EMDR was far more effective for adult-onset trauma, and it cured only 9 percent of childhood trauma survivors.

I’d like our therapy to be penicillin. And I know that it’s insulin.

Frustration and hurt are easy. Why is anger so hard?

EMDR was developed by psychologist Francine Shapiro in 1987. She discovered that when she was walking through the woods, her upsetting thoughts dissipated when she moved her eyes back and forth, scanning the path around her. She then conducted studies where she waved a finger in front of patients’ faces, directing their gazes left and right, while asking them to revisit their most harrowing traumas. She reported that subjects who received EMDR therapy had “significant decreases in ratings of subjective distress and significant increases in ratings of confidence in a positive belief.” EMDR therapy is referred to as “processing,” and in EMDR circles, specialists stress that processing does not mean talking. Talking gives us knowledge about why we are the way we are, but that knowledge isn’t enough. Processing, on the other hand, allows us to truly come to terms with our trauma and resolve it—to rewrite the memories in our brains with a healthier narrative. This seemed abstract to me, and I didn’t really know what it meant. But it sure sounded good.

EMDR is a powerful treatment for stuck traumatic memories, but it doesn’t necessarily resolve the effects of the betrayal and abandonment that accompany physical or sexual abuse in childhood. Eight weeks of therapy of any kind is rarely sufficient to resolve the legacy of long-standing trauma.

EMDR was developed by psychologist Francine Shapiro in 1987. She discovered that when she was walking through the woods, her upsetting thoughts dissipated when she moved her eyes back and forth, scanning the path around her. She then conducted studies where she waved a finger in front of patients’ faces, directing their gazes left and right, while asking them to revisit their most harrowing traumas. She reported that subjects who received EMDR therapy had “significant decreases in ratings of subjective distress and significant increases in ratings of confidence in a positive belief.”[1]

I also discovered that other forms of side-to-side movement besides the eyes could be effective. Therapists could also use taps alternating from hand to hand or tones played from one ear to the other.

At this point, there is enough research for me to believe that both are true. So, if I had to do it over again, I’d simply call it “Reprocessing Therapy.” But now Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing—more commonly called EMDR—is known worldwide, so it’s too late for a name change.

However, today more than 20 scientifically controlled studies of EMDR have proven its effectiveness in the treatment of traumatic and other disturbing life experiences.

begin a daily use of the self-control techniques you’ve already learned. Remember to practice the Safe/Calm Place technique every day to strengthen it, so when you feel disturbed you can bring back the positive feelings. If you didn’t find your mind moving into something negative, use the bilateral thigh tapping or Butterfly Hug to increase the positive emotions and sensations. You can also use the Breathing Shift technique to calm yourself when you’re feeling stressed, and the Cartoon Character technique to deal with negative self-talk. Or use the Water Hose or Wet Eraser to help deal with nagging negative images. All these tools can help you to remember that you can be in control of your body and mind. As you explore your own unconscious processes, you’ll find that understanding why things are happening can help even more.

During REM sleep, the brain allows the appropriate neural connections to make needed associations. The memory is processed and shifted to a more adaptive, usable form. That’s why you can go to bed worried about something but wake up feeling better or with a solution.

Sadly, disturbing experiences, whether major traumas or other kinds of upsetting events, can overwhelm the system. When that happens, the intense emotional and physical disturbance caused by the situation prevents the information processing system from making the internal connections needed to take it to a resolution. Instead, the memory of the situation becomes stored in the brain as you experienced it. What you saw and felt, the image, the emotions, the physical sensations and the thoughts become encoded in memory in their original, unprocessed form.

So, how you respond to the people in your life, and how they respond to you, is based just as much on past experiences as it is on whatever either of you does or says in the present.

For all of us, unprocessed memories are generally the basis of negative responses, attitudes and behaviors. Processed memories, on the other hand, are the basis of adaptive positive responses, attitudes and behaviors.

Nothing exists in a vacuum. Reactions that seem irrational are often exactly that. But irrational doesn’t mean that there is no reason for them. It means that the responses come from a part of our brain that is not governed by the rational mind. The automatic reactions that control our emotions come from neural associations within our memory networks that are independent of our higher reasoning power.

For all of us, unprocessed memories are generally the basis of negative responses, attitudes and behaviors. Processed memories, on the other hand, are the basis of adaptive positive responses, attitudes and behaviors. When clinicians say “personality,” we mean our usual ways of responding to people and events. In addition to genetic factors, each characteristic or personality trait is based on a group of memory networks that cause us to behave or feel in a certain way. These memory networks are created throughout our lives and reflect who we were, where we were, what was happening, when the network was created. That’s why we can seem to be very different at work than we are at home. We can have different typical responses because we may have had a very chaotic home life when we were children, but we were very successful in school.

The experiences we encountered became encoded in our memory networks and are the basis of how we perceive the world as adults. And even the most supportive families can still leave children with unprocessed memories.

Clinicians have only one obligation: to do whatever they can to help their patients get better. Because of this, clinical practice has always been a hotbed for experimentation. Some experiments fail, some succeed, and some, like EMDR, dialectical behavior therapy, and internal family systems therapy, go on to change the way therapy is practiced. Validating all these treatments takes decades and is hampered by the fact that research support generally goes to methods that have already been proven to work. I am much comforted by considering the history of penicillin: Almost four decades passed between the discovery of its antibiotic properties by Alexander Fleming in 1928 and the final elucidation of its mechanisms in 1965.

Unprocessed memories not only can intensify our sensations and emotional responses, they can also prevent us from feeling.

everyday life experiences, such as relationship problems or unemployment, can produce just as many, and sometimes even more, symptoms of PTSD.

EMDR therapy targets the unprocessed memories that contain the negative emotions, sensations and beliefs. By activating the brain’s information processing system (which will be explained in Chapter 2), the old memories can then be “digested.” Meaning what is useful is learned, what’s useless is discarded, and the memory is now stored in a way that is no longer damaging.

I’m a huge SWANS and Lynch fan and an independently licensed therapist certified in EMDR. Let me just say that therapy is definitely not for everyone. It’s hard work and creates insight that not everyone wants and healing that not everyone is ready to experience. That being said, I’m certain I’ve saved hundreds of lives through the years—not because I have a huge ego, but because patients have told me so. People must learn to trust their own self. The inner voice is the only real truth.

Austin Trauma Therapy Center offers inclusive therapy for all people! We offer: EMDR, DBT, Depression, Anxiety, PTSD treatment, etc. We provide child, adolescent, adult, couples, and family counseling services.

Unlike more conventional talk therapy, where you constantly revisit and discuss a traumatic event, EMDR allows you to process the trauma in fewer sessions, gently move past it so the brain will no longer be reacting in a fight-or-flight response.

During EMDR, both the protocol and the bilateral stimulation contribute to the simultaneous activation of previously disconnected elements of neural, mental, and interpersonal processes. This simultaneous activation then primes the system to achieve new levels of integration.

Research has shown that about five hours of EMDR treatment eliminates PTSD in 84 to 100 percent of civilians with a single trauma experience, including rape, accident, or disaster.

On a scale of one to ten, how strong is the emotion attached to the memories we’ve been working on?” Curtis Rouanzoin asks one day. The procedure I’ve been going through with him is called EMDR, or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, which looks at the way trauma is stored in the brain and attempts to properly process it. “If it used to be a ten, now it’s an eight,” I tell him. Lindsay Joy Greene is trained in a therapy called SE, or somatic experiencing, and she’s been locating trauma trapped not in my brain, but in my body, and releasing the stored energy. One day she asks, “On a scale of one to ten, how much anger do you feel when you recall the memories we’ve been discussing?” “If it used to be an eight, now it’s a seven,” I tell her. Olga Stevko practices her own variant of NLP, or neuro-linguistic programming. Where the experientials with Lorraine were about debugging my operating system, her process is about rewriting the original code. For example, she tells me that inside my mother’s words, “Never grow up to make anyone as miserable as your father makes me,” was a hidden command: Never grow up. As she helps me grow up, it brings my trauma down to a six. Greg Cason specializes in cognitive behavioral therapy, which takes it to a five. And I don’t know what to call Barbara McNally’s method and her bottomless quiver of techniques, but they work, they’re original, and they bring the emotion associated with those memories to a four. And I do so much more: I beat pillows with baseball bats. I tap on energy meridians. I make shadow maps of my dark side. I try psychodrama. Not all of it works, but none of it hurts.

Interestingly, in the first solid scientific study using EMDR in combat veterans with PTSD, EMDR was expected to do so poorly that it was included as the control condition for comparison with biofeedback-assisted relaxation therapy. To the researchers’ surprise, twelve sessions of EMDR turned out to be the more effective treatment.

Maar voor diegenen onder ons die door het leven verwond zijn en wier littekens nog niet zijn geheeld, kan het pijnlijk en angstwekkend zijn om zich naar hun binnenste te keren. In zo'n geval is de toegang tot onze innerlijke bron van coherentie geblokkeerd. Zoiets gebeurt meestal als gevolg van een trauma waarbij de emoties zo overweldigend waren dat het emotionele brein en dus het hart niet meer functioneren zoals daarvoor. Dan zijn ze geen kompas meer, maar als een vlag in een wervelwind. Dan is er een andere manier om evenwicht te hervinden, een even verbazingwekkende als effectieve methode, die zijn oorsprong vindt in het mechanisme van de droom: de neuro-emotionele integratie door oogbewegingen.

Past Your Past: Take Control of Your Life with Self-Help Techniques from EMDR Therapy. Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2012. Shapiro, Francine, and Margot Silk Forrest. EMDR: The Breakthrough “Eye Movement” Therapy for Overcoming Anxiety, Stress, and Trauma. New York: Basic Books, 2004.

Yes, our spiritual health impacts our mental and psychological well-being. But if all mental illness were caused by a lack of faith or a demon, would that mean that medications like Zoloft are a substitute for belief or that therapies like EMDR are equivalent to an exorcism? Because Zoloft and EMDR are very effective.

When we recognize that we are being held back in life, the question for each of us is “What do I do about it?