EMDR: psychological therapy to overcome blocks and fears

One sunny afternoon in 1987, the psychologist Francine Shapiro I was walking through a park in the city of Los Gatos, California. Shapiro suffered from nystagmusa spasm of the motor muscles of the eyeball that produce movements involuntary of the eye in various senses (horizontal, vertical, oscillatory, rotary… ).

Casually, he observed that while having an episode of nystagmus, his disturbing thoughts faded away. When he thought about them again, he discovered that they no longer bothered him like before.

followed moving the eyes, this time deliberatelywhile choosing other anxiety-generating thoughts; the results were identical.

Shapiro realized that eye movements made thoughts lose much of their negative charge.

He tested it on friends and acquaintances and perfected a process he called EMD (Eye Movement Desensitization). In 1990 he expanded the concept to EMDR, Acronym for “Desensitization and Reprocessing through Eye Movements”.

It should be noted that it is not only about freeing thoughts from their burden of anxiety or letting worries fade away. The EMDR technique helps accept, digest and process difficult, harsh or traumatic experiencesin such a way that we can not only understand what happened then, but that the mishap, however hard it was, allows us to move on with our lives.

What is EMDR and how does it help with trauma?

When a person has a traumatic experience (whether it was being humiliated in front of your classmates by a teacher, being in a car accident, losing a loved one), this can get stuck in the nervous systemin your own neurological network, in exactly the same way that it happened, with the sights, tastes, smells, sounds, thoughts and emotions, as if this information were frozen somehow inside the body and of the mind.

Normally, the brain has a information processing system that keeps us balancedbut the experience of trauma can block the system and cause a whole series of symptoms, sometimes very disabling (significant phobias, recurring nightmares, self-imposed limitations).

The bilateral movements that are applied as part of EMDR therapy appear to exert a unblocking of the nervous system and allow the brain to process this information.

An observer will only see a therapist moving fingers to help the person move their eyes, alternately tapping your knees with one hand or letting him hear a music or special sounds, among other possibilities.

When starting the movements the neural network where the memory was trapped is stimulatedso that the necessary impulse is given to restore the natural processing mechanisms of the System.

Each series of movements continues to unlock disturbing information, until thoughts, feelings, images, and emotions lose their negative connotation and are spontaneously replaced for a more positive and helpful attitude.

It is believed that this type of stimulation triggers a mechanism similar to that produced during REM sleepwhich also serves to process the emotions experienced.

A very personal experience

The first time I learned about the technique, in 2004, it seemed to me a bit esoteric. However some colleagues psychologists who completed official training they began to use it in their consultations.

His first results surprised me. A woman who was being treated for anxiety problems For months, he had appeared at Carmen’s office saying: “I have managed to always avoid planes but now, inevitably, I have to cross the Atlantic. I have to take a plane tomorrow. Can you do something for me?”.

After reminding him that miracles were not performed in his office, the therapist decided to try EMDR. Next up was a phone call from an elated patient from San Francisco!

Javier decided to propose EMDR to a client he had been treating for three years. To his surprise, after 30 minutes of stimulation, the memory of the abuse suffered as a child arose (in a very explicit way) by a close relative.

Given these experiences, I decided to train myself and, since then, I use the technique in the most serious cases. I think I will always remember the first case I tried with her. Five sessions were enough to resolve the situation a person who suffered up to three anxiety attacks a day for more than twenty years. Yes, one of the effects of this technique is that the therapist can quickly run out of clients…

EMDR for emotional independence

In those first moments I tried the technique with some women who have been abused with fast and very positive results.

It is true that most sessions end up being very intense emotionally but the after effect can be surprising. The women treated not only integrated their experience well but also they felt liberated emotionally and very soon they began to take back the reins of their lives.

I remember Mari Luz, who wanted to form a stable couple with whom she could have children and, instead, had six years being a man’s lover married, determined to continue believing that he would leave his wife and together they would form the ideal couple. After a couple of months of conventional treatment, Mari Luz underwent an EMDR session that seemed to have had no effect.

Mari Luz received a follow-up phone call from her therapist two days later. She said that I had not felt tired after the session (a common effect) no other adverse reactions (headaches, dizziness); he stated that he did not feel that the session had done anything for him. Before hanging up he added, “By the way, I have decided to leave this manI’ve already told you, and to celebrate, I’m redecorating my house.”

A tool to overcome blockages

EMDR is often effective for process traumatic events from the past, abuse, grief and even for some psychosomatic problems. It is very fast in cases where there is a clear traumatic event, such as a traffic accident, and also in cases of major phobias or fears.

It is not necessary to have a great trauma to benefit from this technique: we all have dark corners and experiences that are interfering or influencing us negatively. Fear, distrust, fear of suffering or pain often make reject everything that is believed to affect emotionally.

Somehow, EMDR helps to establish clarity within oneself and to clear obstacles that prevent us from leading a fuller life.

EMDR is located in the polar opposite to verbal therapies and it also differs from the corporeal ones. Professionals find it useful, for example, in the case of customers who remain silenteither because they do not know what is happening to them or cannot interpret their bodily sensations or for other reasons (sometimes adolescents are an example of this).

To those who have a great tendency to avoid situations For painful patients, this technique allows them to gradually work on critical aspects of the experience while excluding others.

EMDR stimulates processes of free association of ideas and gives quick access to memories and images from the past, making it possible to associate current painful life experiences with life episodes from the past that have been successfully resolved. That seems one of the keys that help that feeling of integration and globality What does it feel like after a treatment?

EMDR in psychology

Few people are startled when a book falls to the ground. But the experience will be very different for a woman who heard a book fall while being raped. Her body will shake as she thinks: “Oh, it’s happening again!”

It happens like this because the amygdala of traumatized people continues to select everything reminiscent of the trauma as relevant and ignore many other signs which are also important but not life threatening.

It is also possible that the hippocampus of these people is damaged by traumatic experience and misfiled the information. Neurologists have shown that, in people who have been exposed to prolonged trauma, the hippocampus shrinksreducing and preventing many levels of brain function.

A lawyer told me: “Every time I my boss speaks to me with a slightly higher tone and firm, it’s as if time stopped and I stayed immobile waiting to receive a blow“. It had been almost a year since Julia had separated from the man who had mistreated for years.

This reaction illustrates how the limbic system filters information receiving. sensory impulses reach the thalamus and go to the amygdala, where this information is judged similar to one of the multiple attacks received. The amygdala decides: “you’re going to get hit again”, cortisol and adrenaline are releasedand Julia is seized by fear again.

The information is also sent to prefrontal cortex where consciousness residesalbeit at a slower rate. A few microseconds later, when the scream reaches the cortex, it reacts and mistakenly thinks: “this man is an abuser.”

How Bilateral Stimulation Works

It’s known that the brain is a bilateral organism and that the two hemispheres are quite different from each other.

The left organizes information and processes it sequentially; knows order, space and time (this happened yesterday, this ten years ago). Organize information into symbols to divide stimuli into categorical elements and combine them into new images. It is the rational, social hemisphere that solves problems.

Emotions are managed in the right hemisphere.. These are important when integrating and planning, and also when one is going to Interact with other people on an emotional level.

A huge area in the middle of both hemispheres called corpus callosum connects them with billions of fibers in such a way that, under normal conditions, the left brain knows what the right brain is doing and vice versa.

In children who have suffered traumatic experienceshowever, it has been seen that they have a thicker corpus callosum, which causes the transfer of information between one part of the brain and another to be less. This means that when they are emotionally upset, their right brain is activated and when they are using their left brain, thought and affective and emotional aspects do not go hand in hand.

It seems that the bilateral stimulation of EMDR makes the two cerebral hemispheres work together, contributing to the desensitization and reprocessing effect.