Canyon Ranch (Arizona)
Your heart races, palms sweat and your breathing becomes rapid. Your eyes dart around for the nearest exit. This nightmare continues for another half hour as you wait on the runway for your plane to take off.
Sound familiar? You're not alone. People suffer from a multitude of fears that can disrupt their lives. There is help, though. From post-traumatic stress disorder to fear of flying, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy offers help.
The beginning
California psychologist Francine Shapiro discovered EMDR in the late 1980s. One day, as she recalled a traumatic incident, her eyes began darting back and forth rapidly. Afterward, she noticed that the anxiety and stress she typically experienced when she thought about the painful incident were gone. She went on to try this simple therapy with others, and found that it helped them, too.
EMDR was originally developed as a treatment for trauma, specifically post-traumatic stress disorder. Over the years, practitioners have expanded the uses of EMDR, and currently use it to treat phobias, anxiety, disturbing memories and self-defeating beliefs, as well. It can also be used to enhance performance and to ease some disease symptoms.
Based on the observation that specific experiences from the past can continue to trigger emotion in the present, EMDR works by desensitizing you to the intensity of the memory and helps you reprocess the event's influence over your life.
The eyes have it
Psychologists are quick to point out that not everyone who experiences a trauma suffers from PTSD: In fact, most of us are able to process most of life's traumas successfully. Sometimes, though, memories of painful experiences get "stuck," resulting in unresolved memories. These memories stay in the hippocampus, the area of the brain where incoming sensation is transferred to memory. The hippocampus' close relationship to the amygdala, the fear center, contributes to the tendency to link traumatic events to anxiety severe enough to disrupt rational thought.
EMDR's methods seem unconventional at first, but it works. Therapy typically begins with the patient identifying a distressing memory or situation, with the therapist assisting in identifying the "negative cognition" - the painful thoughts and emotions - that, over time, have become attached to the memory.
At the same time, the patient focuses on following the therapist's hand as it waves rapidly. These swift, lateral eye movements free up memory, and allowing negative beliefs to be converted to positive ones, often with minimal guidance from the therapist.
EMDR is not just remembering, it's a reworking of the attitudes and beliefs built around a memory or thought. Once we desensitize, we have to reverse the negative thought patterns. That's where the reprocessing part comes in.
Why does it work?
No one knows for sure, but the eye movements may stimulate communication between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. One clue is that the eye movement patterns during treatment are similar to those that occur during rapid eye movement sleep. REM sleep is associated with dreaming, the process through which the brain stores memories and works through the day's events.
There seems to be something about bilateral stimulation that activates the brain's hemispheres. The right hemisphere is where the trauma resides, whereas the sense of self, language and rational thought reside in the left. By integrating the right and left hemispheres EMDR helps activate healing. After a session or course of EMDR, the brain is able to "handle" the memory.
Regardless of how the process actually works, before-and-after neuroimages of patients have shown that after EMDR, there is less activity in the amygdala - less emotion - when the target memory is evoked.
And that can be a huge relief.
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