A social worker from Kentucky who corresponds with this blog on a regular basis recently shared her unique journey with us. She started her career as a case worker in the Veterans Administration helping vets find housing and manage addictive behaviors. After only a year on the job, she felt the need to continue her education and got her degree in psychotherapy while working full time at the VA. She began to specialize in cases of PTSD and eventually was introduced to a unique therapy known as Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.
EMDR
Under ordinary, non-traumatic circumstances, we spontaneously engage in cognitive and emotional activities that help us process experiences and newly formed memories. We integrate relevant, adaptive information held elsewhere within our memory networks as we try to make sense of challenging situations and emotions. As memories are processed and resolved, the past is moved fully into the past. We carry on with life with less distress and, hopefully, with the added value of lessons learned.
However, under traumatic circumstances, as we are flooded with terror, shame, or a sense of powerlessness, high levels of psychophysiological dysregulation can lead to an information processing system malfunction. Under these extreme conditions, memories get "locked" in the nervous system, frozen in time, along with their associated emotions, physical sensations, images, and beliefs.
In the late 1980s, Francine Shapiro, PhD, the creator of EMDR proposed that psychological problems (other than those caused by organic deficits such as genetics, injury, or toxicity) are due to a failure to adequately process memories of traumatic or adverse life experiences.
She discovered that mentally focusing on a traumatic memory while moving your eyes back and forth leads to a reduction of that memory’s emotional intensity and vividness. Over time she realized that this eye movement also facilitated the full “reprocessing” or restructuring of thoughts and emotions related to traumatic memories, leading to the transformation of one’s sense of self.
PTSD
"It only took me about 6 months back at the beginning here at the VA to realize that most of my clients were suffering from some form of PTSD. That's when I decided I needed more education and got a degree in psychotherapy. All the years hence have proven me prescient. Today, I deal almost exclusively with PTSD patients."
Held in isolation, away from other critical information, traumatic memories fail to get processed and resolved. Instead, they remain primed and vulnerable to being triggered by internal or external trauma-related cues such as sounds, sensations, and emotions. Days, weeks, or even years later, when these memories get reactivated, people find themselves unexpectedly hijacked by the past.
PTSD/EMDR
The brain’s information processing system is like the body’s immune system, in that it is programmed to immediately mobilize toward healing in response to illness or injury. When a traumatic memory is “stuck” and not processing on its own, EMDR can access it and jumpstart the brain’s stalled processing, eventually moving the memory to a state of “adaptive resolution.”
Anecdotal Evidence
"I realize that my experience using EMDR to treat many cases of PTSD is not a scientific study. But solely in the spirit of 'sharing' I am eager to report that most of my clients who utilized EMDR to treat their case of PTSD saw significant reduction in symptoms over a short period of time. EMDR is a treatment, not a cure. But with that caveat, I highly recommend to all psychotherapists that they seek training in the EMDR technique if they have a significant number of clients exhibiting symptoms of PTSD.
