EMDR therapist recounts story of woman who recovered from PTSD symptoms using EMDR and provides EMDR analysis as an effective treatment.

A New Therapy That Relieves PTSD Symptoms Through Eye Movement

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) took me by surprise in the fall of 1994, when a person we'll call Ann told me how she had recovered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms in one two-hour session. While in a foreign country, she had seen several violent acts that she could not forget. For two years after returning to the States, Arm had tried to escape the flashbacks and frightening dreams.

Then someone told her about a therapist who practiced a new therapy (EMDR) that might help her free herself from the crippling effects of the trauma. Ann took her advice by seeing this therapist for one two-hour interview that liberated her from the PTSD symptoms.

Obviously, I was incredulous but could not easily discount her experience. Ann went on to explain how the nonhypnotic therapy proceeded. Apparently her visual memory of the traumas was so strong, the therapist had to use alternating left-right sounds instead of eye movements to process the memories. Through most of the two hours, Ann remembered and abreacted until the memories had no further power to torment her. She left the session completely free from the symptoms of PTSD.

My first reaction was to not take her very seriously, even to think that Ann's experience was an aberration explainable by the high motivation and faith she had in this therapist. In short, I "blew it off" until I learned that Ann was a very reliable person and an excellent student. I could not take her experience lightly. So when I learned the first EMDR training session was to be offered in January of 1995 in Chicago, I registered, hoping I would either be convinced or dismiss the matter completely.

What is EMDR?

What is this EMDR that changed Ann so dramatically? EMDR uses right brain/left brain stimulation (visually, tactically, and/or audibly) while counselees focus on a distressing memory, with the result of desensitizing the memory until it has little or no effect on them. It's unfortunate that eye movement became a part of the name, since sound and touch will also facilitate desensitization and re-processing.

Francine Shapiro serendipitously discovered the effect of eye movement when she would walk in a park while at the same time thinking about troublesome issues. Her emotional pain decreased, a phenomenon that puzzled her so much that she began to investigate why this happened. Shapiro hypothesized that the increased eye movements, occurring naturally in a scenic setting, had something to do with the reduction in emotional pain associated with her issues.

Armed with this clue, she experimented with eye movement in therapy, discovering that her clients needed some guidance to get their eyes to move during the therapy session. Shapiro started using her hand to help guide their eyes while they focused on painful memories. Similar to her experience in the park, they began to recover.

Shapiro designed a EMDR study with a treatment and control group, but when she learned that the treatment group was getting better and the control group was not, she treated both groups out of concern for their pain.1 Compassion has guided Shapiro's decisions about the dissemination of information and training of EMDR therapists.

Like Freud, Shapiro has chosen to control how and when the EMDR protocols will be given. Though she set up her own institute rather than turning her findings over to the academy for confirmation through research, Shapiro has consistently welcomed research findings. But because of the personal nature of therapy, psychological research is difficult at best, if not impossible. There are several reasons why this is particularly true of EMDR research.

Why Research on EMDR is Difficult

First, EMDR is not a therapy system but a method or procedure that fits within many existing therapy models. Effects of treatment (as in any system of therapy) are dependent on many factors. Among these is the therapeutic relationship. EMDR works best within an empathic relationship. Current methods of research require strict control of extraneous variables that might confound the results of the study. This restraint, unfortunately, removes rapport which is a key ingredient for success with EMDR (and most other methods and models). Katy Butler raises the same question: "How do you dissect something as seamless and subtle and multifaceted as good therapy without killing it, like a bug on a pin?"²

Spontaneity is a second reason for the difficulty of experimentally examining EMDR. Putting therapist and counselee under experimental scrutiny creates a "be spontaneous" paradox that hinders accurate findings.³ In short, people are not able to respond spontaneously on command, because if they could it would no longer be spontaneous, and if they don't they are not obeying the command. Experimental controls create a paradoxical "no win" situation that reduces therapeutic efficiency.

A third reason involves the credentials of the researcher and the unfortunate gap between research and clinical practice. Researchers learn and practice EMDR protocols in order to test the method fairly. Typically researchers are not clinicians, and even if they are, practicing a method like EMDR without adequate training and experience is clinically unethical and/or academically useless. Clinical experience with EMDR convinces people of its efficacy. But is this replicable in the lab? At the Uni;versity of Florida in 1993, Charles Figley and Joyce Carbonell attempted to discover the effectiveness of EMDR along with three other avant-garde approaches to PTSD (and less severe emotional disorders).⁴ They designed a different experimental approach that involved bringing successful practitioners to the University for a week-long inquiry by observation of actual therapy, measurement of before-and-after indices of symptoms, and discussion of possible commonalities among the methods.

As expected, tight research protocols were absent or violated by sincere attempts on the part of the clinicians to actually help their subjects. Each method, however, brought some relief to the subjects chosen by Figley and Carbonell. But any commonality an-tong the methods remained elusive.