cheryl
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Staff member
Rewiring your life - Aeon
A radical therapy based on eye movements can desensitise painful memories, heal hurts and aid transformation at warp speed
Thirty years ago, in the summer of 1991, I traveled to Denver to visit my graduate school mentor, Andy Sweet. I had received my doctorate in clinical psychology in 1989, and Andy had taught me most of what I knew about working with people suffering from the effects of trauma. As we sat in his backyard, Andy said: ‘You need to trust me on this, Debbie. There’s this new therapy called eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing, EMDR for short, and it’s unique and potentially powerful.’ It looked and sounded wacky, but it was based on solid principles, and he was getting remarkable results. ‘I think that it’s going to change our field and bring relief to so many more trauma survivors. You should go and get trained in it … and you should run, not walk.’
So I did. I got trained in EMDR that year, studying with Francine Shapiro, its developer. She told us about her discovery four years earlier: she was walking in a park and found herself reflecting on some recent disturbing events in her life. As she thought about them, she became aware that her eyes were moving back and forth, left, right, left, right. And as her eyes moved, she was startled to realize that the negative emotional charge of her memories seemed to dissipate. She began to experiment, to explore the connection between ‘bilateral’ (left-right) eye movements and this ‘desensitization’ of anxiety.
Shapiro developed a treatment procedure that asked patients to focus on the worst part of a traumatic memory while simultaneously watching her fingers move back and forth, left and right. In 1989, two years before my visit with Andy, she published the first EMDR controlled research study demonstrating the effectiveness of her method in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in combat veterans and sexual assault survivors. Over time, clinical experimentation showed that other forms of bilateral stimulation (listening to tones alternating between each ear, or receiving alternating taps on the backs of one’s hands) basically worked as well.
A radical therapy based on eye movements can desensitise painful memories, heal hurts and aid transformation at warp speed
Thirty years ago, in the summer of 1991, I traveled to Denver to visit my graduate school mentor, Andy Sweet. I had received my doctorate in clinical psychology in 1989, and Andy had taught me most of what I knew about working with people suffering from the effects of trauma. As we sat in his backyard, Andy said: ‘You need to trust me on this, Debbie. There’s this new therapy called eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing, EMDR for short, and it’s unique and potentially powerful.’ It looked and sounded wacky, but it was based on solid principles, and he was getting remarkable results. ‘I think that it’s going to change our field and bring relief to so many more trauma survivors. You should go and get trained in it … and you should run, not walk.’
So I did. I got trained in EMDR that year, studying with Francine Shapiro, its developer. She told us about her discovery four years earlier: she was walking in a park and found herself reflecting on some recent disturbing events in her life. As she thought about them, she became aware that her eyes were moving back and forth, left, right, left, right. And as her eyes moved, she was startled to realize that the negative emotional charge of her memories seemed to dissipate. She began to experiment, to explore the connection between ‘bilateral’ (left-right) eye movements and this ‘desensitization’ of anxiety.
Shapiro developed a treatment procedure that asked patients to focus on the worst part of a traumatic memory while simultaneously watching her fingers move back and forth, left and right. In 1989, two years before my visit with Andy, she published the first EMDR controlled research study demonstrating the effectiveness of her method in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in combat veterans and sexual assault survivors. Over time, clinical experimentation showed that other forms of bilateral stimulation (listening to tones alternating between each ear, or receiving alternating taps on the backs of one’s hands) basically worked as well.