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certain types of mental conditions and disorders. It can also be very useful in
improving real-life performance in a wide range of challenging situations.
Discovered and refined by psychologist Francine Shapiro, and described in her
1995 book Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, it is a powerful way
of getting the brain to learn much more quickly than usual, which makes possible
both rapid realization of essential truths about a situation or event, and rapid
recovery from the effects of acute psychological trauma, and slower but thorough
recovery form the effects of chronic psychological trauma.
Use of EMDR is revolutionizing treatment of both commonly seen mental health
problems (such as depression, anxiety, phobias, etc.) and some of the most
troubling and difficult-to-treat problems professionals deal with in clinical settings
(such as posttraumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, eating disorders, and
dissociative disorders).
EMDR is now the best researched and validated way of treating Posttraumatic
Stress Disorder. Research in other areas of EMDR-facilitated mental health
treatment is very much ongoing, and results of this research are expected to be
published in the near future. Meanwhile, reports from individual mental health
professionals about their success with EMDR have been most encouraging.
No single approach in mental health is always successful, or successful with all
sorts of disorders. Nevertheless, with EMDR treatment procedures the speed with
which results are often obtained, the breadth of disorders which respond to
treatment, and the depth of healing achieved all challenge customary assumptions
about what is possible in mental health treatment.
Many clinicians report that learning how to use EMDR has radically changed their
professional practice. Clients often report simply that its use has changed their
lives like nothing they've ever before encountered. I have personally experienced
both these effects.
It is important to appreciate the role of research in EMDR. From the beginning, it
has been central, and it still is. Psychotherapy treatment results need to have both
subjective and objective verifiability, and EMDR psychotherapy has both--to a high
degree. EMDR will challenge you--your thinking about the potential of
psychotherapy, your ideas about how the human mind functions, your expectations
about your own life and the lives of those around you.
Originally, EMDR was used to resolve the after-effects of psychological
trauma--assaults, natural disasters, traumatic grief, and other acutely painful
situations. It was seen to work with unusual speed, and to achieve a degree of
relief that was uncommon, to say the least. In recent years, however, it has been
seen that EMDR can do wonders with a wider range of psychological disturbances
than had originally been thought.
EMDR works with a wide range of problems. This surprising clinical finding,
validated increasingly by research, is part of what is forcing us to change our
thinking about mental health, as we work with EMDR in clinical settings. Put simply,
we have found that a psychotherapy that seems focused on trauma-resolution
actually helps with, and can heal, a wide range of problems not previously thought
to be trauma-related, such as substance abuse disorders, a variety of kinds of
depression, bi-polar disorder, some forms of schizophrenia, a wide range of
anxiety disorders, and so on. Many times we cannot know if use of EMDR will help
or not until we try it. Often it does. Our understanding of why this is so is currently
inadequate. But this is not particularly a problem. There is very little that happens in
psychotherapy that we can fully explain. It's simply far more important to
understand that EMDR can help than it is to know why or how.