I ran across this quote in my travels today and it made me laugh so I thought I'd share it, even though EMDR, today's topic, is in fact quite literally about adjusting one's mind. EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing and is a rather peculiar technique which is very helpful for those with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and for people who struggle with stuck memories from highly traumatic events such as sexual abuse, rape, violent crime and the like.
The underlying theory behind EMDR (as I understand it) is that sometimes in situations of profound stress or trauma our minds don't process our memories correctly and instead of putting them into a memory file, store them in the wrong place in our brains so that they exist for us as current events on some level. What EMDR does is to prompt the brain to take the mis-stored memory and move it to the file in which it should originally have been stored.
Like EFT ( http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/1143... ), EMDR is sort of peculiar. With EFT you or the practitioner tap various locations on the body. With EMDR, the therapist, moves his or her fingers back and forth in front of your face and you follow them with your eyes while focusing on the traumatic situation you are trying to reprocess. You rate your emotional response to the situation at the start and finish on a scale of 1 to 10. EMDR may not be the therapy of choice for every agoraphobic but it was very helpful to me. When it works the results are often dramatic. Like all therapies, it doesn't necessarily work for everything or everyone.
The EMDR therapist who worked with me diagnosed me as having two levels of agoraphobia, one which stemmed from my childhood and one that was adult onset. We worked first with the childhood trauma. I don't have a lot of childhood memories. My sexual abuse memories are mostly body memories and my family memories are kind of non-existent by and large. We lived in the Bronx in New York until I was about six and one of my few memories is of seeing of three boys breaking a window and of seeing them see me seeing them break it. I think I was probably about 4 at the time. This was the memory we tackled first. What you do with EMDR is create the "scenario" that you want to work with (in this case the image of the boys breaking the window) and then come up with an affirmation. I think mine was "I feel safe and secure." You then rate the believability of the affirmation. It's been a while but I'm pretty sure "I feel safe and secure" got a "1" on the believability scale. The therapist then seats himself in front of you and begins slowly moving his fingers back and forth in front of your eyes asking you to follow his fingers as you think about the scenario. During the process he asks for feedback.
| Here's the follow-up discussion on this article: | View all related messages |
For a complete listing of article comments, questions, and other discussions related to Katherine E. Rabenau's Agoraphobia topic, please visit the Discussions page.