The Secrets of EMDR Therapy and How It Can Help You

the fundamental idea behind psychotherapy is that we tend to grow mentally unwell because we haven't been able to think with sufficient clarity about the difficulties in our past typically in our distant childhoods damaging incidents have been locked away and continue to have an outsized impact on us but we have no way of going back over them in order to liberate ourselves from their distorting influences at the dawn of therapy sigmund freud noticed that many patients when asked about their childhoods provided accounts that were too neat too intellectual too distanced from the emotion contained in the events to be of any use in order to encourage more real feeling he made a radical innovation he asked if his patients might lie on a couch shut their eyes and enter a dreamy state that he called free association he soon found that these patients recovered far faster than those who insisted on sitting in chairs as a result there are now couches in therapy rooms around the world and the past has for many of us been a lot easier to access then in the early 1990s an american psychologist called francine shapiro became fascinated as freud had been with the damage done in therapy by our tendencies to intellectualize the past rather than relive it not coincidentally shapiro was at work on a phd in english literature which drew her attention to a key difference between the methods of the non-fiction essay and those of the novel in the former an author provides neat summaries of positions and emotions they might tell us that their mother was often sad and their father frightening but novelists do something very different they provide us with scenes they don't state they show they take us to a particular moment and let us experience it vividly through our senses with this distinction in mind shapiro wondered if patients in therapy could become more like novelists of their childhoods rather than just their non-fiction narrators and it was here that she stumbled on a remarkable phenomenon when we are asked to perform a repetitive movement like tapping gently on our knees or our chests from left to right or look at a finger moving from side to side a few inches from our eyes then our ordinary practical day-to-day mentality often seeds to a more trance-like speculative state of consciousness something similar can occur when we are on a long train journey in a quiet carriage and follow a line of telephone poles flashing past us in this state if we are asked to think back to a scene in our past we may remember an emotional texture that would previously have eluded us we become more like novelists than essayists this special state became the bedrock of what shapiro termed emdr therapy eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy the emdr therapist entirely loyal to freud's basic insight about the need to bring traumatic scenes back to conscious awareness invites patients to return to key scenes that make them who they now are often scenes of great difficulty their first night at boarding school the day their mother told them about the divorce the moment they were humiliated by a stranger they are helped to linger in the past to experience it in all its dimensions the patient might cry in a way they haven't in years if ever but the idea is not to abandon a younger self in one of the most difficult moments of their lives it's to help them find a way out of their pain so an emdr therapist might after a time back in a foundational scene ask the patient what they might want to tell their younger self they might want to comfort them to encourage them to be angry to help them stop taking all the blame before initiating a session of time travel the emdr therapist will also ask a patient to identify both someone who gives them support and someone who is wise these two characters will then be asked to enter an early traumatic scene to give it a new more redemptive ending a current loving partner might be asked to comfort a child self winnicott the buddha or plato might say a few words to an angry father or weeping mother in this way emdr honors the traditional ambitions of therapy it renders conscious feelings that have been shut away and it liberates us from the influence of the past through a deeper understanding of its secrets but it has the added advantage of allowing us to reconnect with our histories via sensorily rich scenes rather than analytical summaries in this way the world can become less oppressive and fear laden as our formative moments are unearthed understood and properly laid to rest psychotherapy is a set of 20 beautiful cards each containing a short essay on a key concept in psychotherapy creating a pack that offers a perfect introduction to the subject you

Channel: The School of Life

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Keywords: the school of life, schooloflife, education, relationships, alain de botton, philosophy, talk, self, improvement, big questions, love, wellness, mindfullness, psychology, how, to, hack, sigmund freud, psycotherapy, emdr therapy, mental health, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, explained, therapy for my soul, therapy session, emdr self administered, emdr therapy session, what is emdr?, ptsd therapy

Id: HNdMHuwvF_M

Length: 5min 16sec (316 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 30 2020