Francine Shapiro on the Evolution of EMDR Therapy

Francine Shapiro: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, or EMDR, is a form of therapy that focuses on memory and the brain. Every different form of therapy has a different model, a different way of conceptualizing cases and different procedures. For instance, in cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), pathology is based on inappropriate beliefs and behaviors. In psychodynamic therapy, it’s intra-psychic conflicts. In EMDR therapy, pathology is based on unprocessed memories that are stored intact—so if someone has some irrational beliefs or negative behavior, that’s not the cause but rather the symptom.

For example, let’s say we’re humiliated or bullied in grade school, and instead of the brain digesting it and making sense of it and letting it go, it actually gets stored in the brain with the emotions and the physical sensations and the beliefs that were there at the time. One of the functions of the information processing system of the brain is to make sense of the world, so if something happens 30 years later as an adult that is similar in any way, it has to link up with the memory networks to be made of sense of. In other words, if I’ve never seen a cup before, I don’t know what it is or what to do with it. The perceptions that we have about something in the present link up with the memory networks, and if it connects with that unprocessed memory, it gets triggered, and the emotions, physical sensations, and beliefs—“I’m terrible, I’m not good enough, I can’t succeed”—get triggered as well.

People may have no idea why they continually feel anxiety in social situations or when they talk to somebody at work, because the situation is linking them to an unprocessed memory, and those feelings are coming up automatically. We really are at the mercy of our memory networks, and if an experience hasn’t been processed, we’re just buffeted hither and yon by all of these negative emotions and feelings. With EMDR therapy, we identify what those earlier experiences are and we process them. We bring that information processing system back online. And what happens during an EMDR therapy session is that very rapid associations and connections or insights are made, and the emotions, physical sensations, beliefs—all of those shift to a level of learning and resilience, so we simply aren’t triggered that way any longer.

FS: People who have been trained as psychodynamic therapists say that EMDR lets them use what they know. They use EMDR therapy to help identify the earlier memories that cause maladaptive defenses and intra-psychic conflicts, and it helps people process those memories and experiences. It’s the same with those who practice cognitive behavioral therapy. EMDR therapy is used to process the memories that are causing dysfunctional behavior and irrational cognitions.

It’s a remarkably efficient treatment. There are three studies that have indicated that for single trauma victims there’s an 84 to 100% remission of PTSD within about five hours of treatment.

FS: A study with EMDR therapy in combat veterans found that after only 12 sessions, 78% no longer had PTSD. Of course, the amount of treatment time it takes depends upon the number of memories that have to be processed, but you don’t have to process each and every event because memory is connected. Instead, you choose one that represents a whole group, and then you have a generalization effect. It rapidly shifts.

FS: Well, it can.

FS: EMDR therapy is an eight-phase approach. During the first phase, the clinician takes an appropriate history of the client, finding out what the current problems and symptoms are, how long they’ve been going on, what the systems issues and the relationship issues are, etc. Then we begin to identify what earlier memories are causing many of these problems.

If you’re coming in with relationship issues like, “I always overreact to criticism,” we try to see what’s causing the overreaction. What earlier memories might there be that are pushing it? Does the sound of your husband’s voice remind you of your father’s voice before he hit you? We have specific techniques to identify these problematic memories.

The second phase involves preparation. We teach a variety of self-control techniques so that people learn to shift from negative feelings to positive ones. These techniques can be very useful for everyone, but ultimately we’re trying to lessen the need for them. That is, if I’m always buffeted by these unprocessed memories, and I’m constantly needing to shift out of negative feelings into positive feelings, what I really want to do is process these memories so I’m not getting triggered by them any longer. A preparation technique will allow the person to feel in control so that when we start the processing, if a disturbance comes up, and they feel like they want to stop, we just stop. We use the technique to shift back into feeling good, and then when they’re ready, we go back and continue the processing.

The amount of preparation depends on how debilitated the client is to be begin with. Some people have never had good experiences—they had a terrible childhood, were beaten, ignored, neglected; they didn’t have anyone in their life that they could turn to or count on. These folks can be extremely debilitated emotionally, so we may need to spend more time preparing them. For most people it doesn’t take very long at all, maybe a session or so.

FS: For an individual trauma, it might take two or three sessions. And you simply want the client to be in the best possible state, not only during the processing but also in between sessions.

FS: Exactly. It’s not homework, as you would get with cognitive behavioral therapies for trauma. But let’s say it’s going to take three sessions to finish an individual trauma—you can do that morning and afternoon, or you can do it three consecutive days. In other words, the treatment can be done in days or weeks, rather than months or years. And because all of the therapy is done with the clinician, they don’t have to go out and confront negative feelings and experiences on their own in order to try to make things change.

FS: Then we move into processing. We identify a memory that has been causing the symptoms and then we identify different aspects of it—the image, the negative thoughts associated with it, where they’re feeling it in their body, what the emotion is, etc. And once we access the memory in a certain way, we start the processing, which involves stimulating the brain’s own information processing system that allows the different connections to be made.

One of the procedures in the processing involves a form of dual attention stimulation—meaning the client follows the clinician’s fingers with their eyes as they move rapidly back or forth, or it can be tones or taps. It seems to stimulate the brain’s information processing system, and the client then has different, rapidly moving associations. They may have new thoughts about the memory, or other memories may emerge, or new insights can come up. It allows the brain to do the digesting by making all of the appropriate links that it hadn’t been able to make before.

FS: It’s been demonstrated in about 16 randomized controlled trials now that the eye movement also rapidly causes the vividness to shift and emotion to decrease. So they may start out with a disturbance, but it very rapidly decreases and shifts to that new understanding—from “that’s how my father used to look at me” to “that was wrong of him” to “It wasn’t my fault” to “it was his fault.” It’s getting liberated from how they felt as a child so that they can see the present more clearly.

FS: Of course there might be a need for couples counseling, but in many instances, these overreactions are caused by early childhood events stored as unprocessed memories.

FS: Right, exactly.

FS: Very often the therapist can stay completely out of the way and foster and support the client nonverbally. We’re conveying acceptance because we do accept it. We are conveying unconditional regard because that’s part of the therapy process, so the clients don’t have to be afraid of their own emotions. They don’t have to be afraid, and they can reveal as much as they want.

With other forms of therapy, you have to describe the memories in detail. With EMDR therapy, that’s not necessary. The client says as much or as little as they want to. As a matter of fact, in many instances, you can do it content free, and the client just gives you enough information to know that it’s changed. So rape victims, molestation victims, who may feel so much shame and guilt that they don’t want to talk about it initially—they don’t have to. You don’t have to force the client to do or say anything that they don’t want to.

FS: There are specific procedures about when you continue the associations and when you return to the target, but the beauty of it is to allow that internal, intrinsic healing mechanism to take over and to make the appropriate associations and not take a clinical stance that you know more than the client, that you are the one that has to give the answers. In most instances, the connections are all there for the client and when they’re not, we have specific EMDR therapy procedures to kick start it again. It’s not about clinicians imposing themselves on the client, but rather allowing the appropriate healing to take place.

FS: Assessment is the third phase, where you’re identifying the memory and the different components of it, and then you move into a phase that we call Desensitization, which is allowing the insights and connections to be made until they’re a zero on the Subjective Units of Disturbance Scale (SUDS). It could start off at an eight or nine, but it’s down to a zero.

Then we move to a phase we call Installation, which has to do with concentrating on that desired positive belief the client wants and seeing if we can strengthen it so that it feels completely true to the client.

Then we move to the Body Scan phase, where we have the person think of that memory, think of the positive belief, and scan to see if there’s any disturbance in the body; and if there is, we process it. For instance, a molestation victim who is feeling good and powerful scans her body and notices that there is a strange sensation in her back, and we focus on that. It turns out that’s where she was held down when she was raped. So we process that.

At the end of the session, the Closure phase brings the clients back to the full state of equilibrium. We remind them of their self-control techniques and the in-between-session processing they can continue to do. We also suggest that if a disturbance comes up, to just write down what happened very briefly—“I walked into X situation and I got triggered”—so that they can be targets for next time.

Then the eighth phase at the next session is Reevaluation, where we bring back the memory and see how it feels. See if there’s anything else that needs to be addressed. For instance, I worked with a girl who had been molested by her grandfather, and by the end of the session she was saying, “He was really weak. I ran into the bathroom and he tried to get in, and I just kept telling him to go away, and he went away.”

At the next session when I saw her, she felt fine. She didn’t feel dirty. She didn’t feel shameful. She didn’t feel powerless. She had a good grip on it. But in asking her what else might be coming up, she said, “Well, I was thinking of my grandmother, that she didn’t believe me when I told her I was molested.” So that’s the new target. We identify what else needs to be processed, and that’s how the therapy continues.

We process the memory, evaluate, reevaluate, reassess, and see what else needs to be done until we've basically addressed all of the issues, and the client is feeling empowered. It’s not only that the major symptoms are gone, but they feel like a positive, healthy, resourceful human being and are now able to establish and maintain positive relationships in their life.

FS: PTSD has commonly been thought of as a response to major traumas—earthquakes, rape, molestation, combat, etc. But the research now is very clear that general life experiences can cause even more PTSD symptoms than major trauma. Childhood experiences, humiliations, divorce, conflicts in the home—these things can be a source of chronic PTSD.

FS: It doesn’t even need to be accumulated. You can have individual childhood events, like an individual being pushed away, being left behind, being humiliated in grade school, having people laughing at them. Any of these things can get stored in the brain with terrible feelings and thoughts of, “I’m not good enough. I can’t succeed. I’m not powerful.” They get locked in and run the person for the next 30 years. So it’s important for people to have some compassion for themselves and not just dismiss their anxiety or their depression or their insecurity just because they don’t know where it came from. Many of us simply don’t remember because it’s a long past childhood event, and we don’t recognize that the problems we’re having in relationships or at work are influenced by these earlier events.

Also there’s a lot of research now showing the negative impact parents can have on the lifelong health of their children. There was a study done at Kaiser Permanente that clearly showed that adverse childhood experiences were the leading causes not only of mental health problems in adults, but of physical health problems as well—cancer, lung problems, etc. So I think we need to be more aware of how these experiences are being stored in our brain and constantly pummeling us with negative feelings that impact not only our minds but our bodies. These problems are transferred easily to children because research has clearly shown that mothers who have posttraumatic stress disorder are more likely to mistreat their children—not purposely, but they simply react more harshly.

Research has also shown that highly disturbing experiences within two years before childbirth can prevent the mom from bonding with her child, which has extremely negative effects. Maternal depression is one of those factors that Kaiser Permanente identified as causing these lifelong negative effects for adults because depressed mothers may not be able to bond with their children. It’s not only major traumas that are the problem—all kinds of experiences can have long-lasting detrimental effect on individuals.

FS: EMDR processing seems to link in to the same processes that occur during rapid eye movement sleep. REM sleep processes the events of the day in order to make sense of them, and it moves them from episodic memory to semantic memory, where you can remember what happened, but you no longer have those emotions and physical sensations locked into memory. Until that happens it’s stored in episodic memory, which seems to get triggered with PTSD.

People who have posttraumatic stress disorder often wake up in the middle of a nightmare. That’s the brain attempting to process the event, but it’s too disturbing, so they wake up in the middle of it. What EMDR therapy appears to do is to take the brain further than it’s able to go in its natural state. The eye movements tax working memory and stimulate REM processes, which allows the rapid shift in imagery, emotion, cognition and sensation.

FS: What we say is that it arrives at an adaptive resolution. What’s useful from the event is incorporated and the learning takes place. What’s useless is let go, so the negative emotions and physical sensations and beliefs are basically all gone. But it’s different than the concept of “extinction” employed in cognitive behavioral therapies, where the person is asked to describe the memory in detail as if they’re reliving it, making sure they don’t think of anything else but just stay there with that memory. It allows desensitization to occur, but the original memory that’s being targeted doesn’t change; rather a new one is created. The theory is that the person has been disturbed because of avoidance behavior—they haven’t allowed themselves to stay with it because they believe they’ll go crazy, they’ll die. And as their therapist causes them to tell the story over and over again, they realize they won’t die, and that creates a new memory that competes with the old one—but the old one is still there.

With EMDR therapy, there’s a short exposure where you ask the person to think about it, have the eye movement for about 30 seconds or so, and then you specifically elicit associations. They often move right to another memory. It appears that the original memory is transformed as these connections are made, and the new learning and the new insight is made, and then it’s stored in this changed form. They no longer feel terrible about themselves. The transformed memory is stored and the original form it began with no longer exists. We call that “reconsolidation,” not extinction. So with exposure therapy, the original memory is still there, but in EMDR therapy the original memory is no longer there in its old form. This may be responsible for certain differences that we’ve seen in treatment.

For instance, there was a study comparing exposure therapy and EMDR therapy for those who had complicated mourning—intense grief that wasn’t changing. When somebody dies suddenly, very often the person who is bereaved continues to have negative imagery, negative thoughts of the person dying, seeing them in pain, guilt about what they should’ve done, could’ve done, etc. When individuals were treated with EMDR therapy and with exposure therapy, the EMDR was more rapid with better outcomes. Interestingly, there was twice the positive recall of the deceased than after treatment with exposure therapy. The fact that the original memory was still intact might be the reason for that.

Another example is the EMDR therapy treatment of phantom limb pain, where accident victims and combat veterans, who lost limbs in a traumatic experience continue to feel pain in a limb that’s no longer there. What we’ve found from the articles that have been published so far is that by identifying the trauma in which the leg was damaged, for instance, and processing it with EMDR, at the end of the treatment, 80% of people either no longer had any pain or it was substantially reduced. No other form of therapy has reported elimination of chronic phantom limb pain.

One last example. In a treatment of psychotic people who had suffered trauma, when treated with EMDR therapy that targeted the trauma, not only were the PTSD symptoms eliminated, but a majority of those who had started out with auditory hallucinations reported that they were completely gone at the end of treatment, which was only about six sessions. That had never been reported with CBT. So there’s a lot more to explore over the next decade or so.

FS: I think ultimately that’s where the field is going, but the field of neurophysiology is still in its infancy, so as of yet no one has ever seen a memory network. But there are more than a dozen studies showing how the brain functions both before and after EMDR therapy, and you can see many differences including growth of the hippocampus as well as changes in cortical and limbic activation after EMDR therapy. Why and how that happens will probably take another decade or so to discover, since imaging will need to become much more sensitive.

FS: Yes. We have a very exciting decade to look forward to.

FS: I think we’re in the latter stage now. Those critics you’re talking about were responding to research from 15 years ago. At this point, there are more than 25 randomized controlled trials that have demonstrated the positive effects of eye movements, and a recent meta-analysis has shown there’s a significant effect. In fact, one of EMDR’s original vehement critics has completely turned around and stated that it’s clear that the eye movements have been demonstrated to be effective. Critics who make derogatory statements are very much out of date.

The same is true about the research on EMDR’s effectiveness. There are now more than two dozen randomized controlled trials that have demonstrated the positive effects of EMDR therapy with all of the bells and whistles of good research, including standardized measures, interviews, etc. The World Health Organization (WHO) has even stated that trauma focused cognitive behavior therapy and EMDR therapy are the only psychotherapies recommended for the treatment of PTSD across the lifespan. That is for children, adolescents, and adults.

FS: That’s one of the reasons I wrote the self-help book, Getting Past Your Past—to bring attention to the many things that can be causing our negative reactions and symptoms in the present and explain what to do about it. There are so many events in life and so many things about our relationships that can cause anxiety, depression, insecurity and PTSD. It is explainable and it’s treatable.

We have a nonprofit organization that came into being after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. We got a call from a FBI agent, who said, “Can you please do something because the mental health professionals are dropping like flies.” There were no empirically validated treatments for trauma back then. We sent out clinicians to do free treatment for the frontline providers and victims, and the program evaluation showed that it had the same positive effects—about an 85% success rate within three sessions—as a randomized controlled study that was published that year. Since that time our Trauma Recovery/EMDR Humanitarian Assistance Programs, has been providing free treatment for victims of natural and manmade disasters throughout the world and low cost programs for inner city areas in the U.S.

FS: There are hundreds. We have responded to all the major disasters in the US such as Katrina, Sandy, the Boston Marathon Bombing and Newtown shootings. Trauma Recovery Networks have been established in about 30 cities throughout the country. And we’ve also sent teams out after the tsunamis and earthquakes around the world. EMDR Asia came into being a couple of years ago, so now they’re able to do the humanitarian work on the continent themselves.

But there are so many more that need help. People who have been hurt can hurt others. Child molesters, for instance, are often viewed as intractable. Many people don’t want to have anything to do with them. We basically keep them ostracized from society.

FS: But a director of a program incorporated six sessions of EMDR therapy for those molesters who seemed the most incorrigible. They themselves had been molested in childhood—which is often the case with those who molest children—and when their own molest was targeted and processed, they came in contact with how they felt at the time. They recognized that they hadn’t wanted it and empathy emerged for their own victims. They no longer felt sexually attracted to children. It was measured by something called a penile plethysmograph, which measured their arousal, and 90% no longer exhibited deviant arousal towards children. So we’re attempting to conduct more research in this area.

The bottom line is that we’re looking at the potential that no one needs to be left behind. We can take people that seem intractable and transform them into positive human beings so they’re no longer hurting others. We want to make sure that we’re able to get the treatment to all who need it, so that we stop the pain for future generations.

FS: It’s extremely important that clinicians who are interested in being trained go to a program certified by the EMDR International Association in the U.S or the EMDR Europe Association in Europe. There are people out there offering programs that are not up to snuff. Certified trainings are six days plus consultation. There are international standards that have been developed to make sure that clinicians know what they’re doing before they treat any clients. Non-profit agencies can arrange for low cost trainings from the Trauma Recovery/EMDR Humanitarian Assistance Programs.

FS: I’m hoping that interviews such as this will really allow people to get a better understanding of EMDR therapy and its potential for healing. The unimaginable amount of suffering that’s going on out there does not have to continue. People can truly heal in a comparatively short period of time and move to a state of happiness, strength and resilience, with healthy relationships.

FS: Thank you.