Emotional Healing at Warp Speed: The Power Emdr (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) - David Grand - Hardcover - 1ST

I I am Introduced to EMDR I went without extraordinary expectations. My friend Uri Bergmann, like me a psychotherapist but more experimental than I (he was into hypnosis and pain management), had learned of a new therapeutic method called EMDR--Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. He had been impressed with the results he had achieved with it, particularly in one case, and now he wanted to learn more. He asked if I would accompany him to the Loew's Hotel on New York's Lexington Avenue for a weekend Level I training session. I somewhat reluctantly agreed. The year was 1993. I was forty years old. My life was about to change forever. There were about eighty of us in a conference room--several, I found out later, from abroad--all of us staring with some wonder at the striking, five-foot-eleven, dynamic, fortyish woman named Francine Shapiro who talked with confidence and clarity about the new form of psychotherapy she had developed. I confess I didn't immediately grasp most of it. Her ideas were derived from cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy (put simplistically, what you feel comes from what you think), whereas I, trained as a psychoanalyst, believed in the influence of early life experiences in the formation of personality, conflict, and self. Her talk was highly technical, filled with words and phrases I would come to integrate only later, but I was impressed by her ardor and by the fluidity of both her words and her movements. Throughout the day, she seemed comfortable and self-assured teaching her new method. We broke for lunch. I remember telling Uri that I was neither impressed nor unimpressed. Clearly the woman was not a wacko, and while I found it difficult to imagine myself using the approach with my own patients, I did not put down his interest. "Stick around for the experiential this afternoon," he said, though it had not occurred to me to leave. After lunch Dr. Shapiro lectured for another hour. (Now I was growing restive.) We took a break, and finally the chairs in the room were rearranged, and manuals in hand, we broke into groups of three--"patient," "therapist," and "observer"--to begin what is known as the practicum, the hands-on session. Watching over us was a facilitator, someone already versed in EMDR practice, to guide our efforts and correct our mistakes. Though doing the practicum with a friend is discouraged, Uri and I fortunately managed to stay together, perhaps anticipating the assignment of the third member of our group, a man in need of considerable support, who was so patently nervous that his pencil for note-taking trembled visibly in his hands. Uri and I exchanged glances, concerned with how he would perform. Well, to begin with, he was by default the therapist, for although we were to switch roles after forty-five minutes, it fell out that for the first go-round I would be his patient and Uri the observer. Soon the facilitator arrived to give us our initial instructions. A sixtyish gentleman from Southern California with a laid-back teaching approach. I was feeling shaky. Just my luck, I thought. A vulnerable therapist and a laissez-faire facilitator. Too, the room was noisy and the chairs uncomfortable. Not exactly an ideal environment or an atmosphere conducive to optimal learning. And proof that we do not choose the spot for our epiphanies. The first step in EMDR therapy is to have the therapist guide the patient to selecting a target--some troubling aspect of the past or present that the patient wants to rework. A traumatic event--such as a severe accident or the death of a loved one--is a target; so is something ostensibly far less dramatic, like an upsetting memory or a recurrent dream that has replayed in the mind for many years. The target I chose is known in psychoanalytic terms as a screen memory, something that in and of itself does not seem particularlyGrand, David is the author of 'Emotional Healing at Warp Speed: The Power Emdr (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) - David Grand - Hardcover - 1ST' with ISBN 9780609607466 and ISBN 0609607464.