When the Past is Present—Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)

How an outlandish-sounding therapy, founded by a doctoral student on a walk in the park, became the gold standard for trauma recovery.

Amanda Stern
November 09, 2021

Forty-two years ago, in 1979, an NYU doctoral candidate named Francine Shapiro was studying the way external events influenced the behavior of characters in 19th-century English literature.

She had her future all planned out and felt confident that she’d have a long career as a literary critic and scholar. As she began her dissertation on the poetry of Thomas Hardy, her promising future became completely derailed when she was diagnosed with cancer.

The devastating diagnosis quickly shifted her priorities and her perspective. Instead of being interested in fictional characters and the impact of external events on their inner lives, she wondered about something more pressing: How do external stressors impact the living?

Do the environment, daily battles, and emotional injuries influence the mind and body?

In other words:

What had made her sick?

While literature was her main focus, Shapiro always had an abiding interest in psychology and recently had become interested in an emerging field called Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI), a subfield of psychosomatic medicine.

PNI is the study of the interaction between the nervous system and the immune system, and the relationship between mental processes and health.

The idea that there might be a connection between stress and disease fascinated her, and led her to wonder whether there was a psychological or physiological method that might balance or restore physical health.

She realized, upon her diagnosis, that searching for methods for health and healing was far more important to her than the study of 19th century literature, so she left New York to attend workshops and seminars on the mind and body and psychological methods, and switched disciplines, enrolling in a doctoral program in clinical psychology.

Photo of Francine Shapiro, EMDR Institute

By 1987, she was deep into her doctoral program in psychology. One afternoon, she was trying to shake off some disturbing thoughts that had been bothering her, but she couldn’t seem to loosen their grip, so she decided to take a walk in the park.

As someone studying to be a clinical psychologist, she had become accustomed to using her mind and body as a laboratory, a place to discover techniques and inventions.

As she walked, she noticed that her painful thoughts were dissipating.

When she went to retrieve them, she was stunned to discover they’d lost their power over her.

She hadn’t done anything but walk.

But then she noticed as she tested the no-longer-disturbing thoughts that her eyes were darting back and forth.

Could these two things be related, she wondered?

She tested it on herself by bringing forth another unsettling thought while consciously using these same saccadic eye movements, and boom: the disturbing memory lessened in intensity.

She began testing her method on friends. While some people could control their eye movements, others couldn’t, and so she used her hands and asked them to follow her fingers back and forth.

It worked.

When others stopped progressing at a certain point, she began to add in other techniques to advance healing.

Francine Shapiro had not only landed on what would become her dissertation topic, she would create a groundbreaking treatment that would become the gold standard for trauma recovery.

In 1990, the mental health community had just begun to diagnose people with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

PTSD is a psychiatric disorder that occurs in people who have experienced or witnessed events that were traumatic to them.

The disturbance remains long after the event has passed and the symptoms can be so paralyzing and detrimental that countless people have lost their jobs, spouses, children, and friends to the disorder.

PTSD victims relive past events as though they are happening in the present. While it was originally considered a burden exclusive to combat veterans, it turns out that any experience that a person considers traumatic can lead to PTSD.

Shapiro wondered whether her method might work on people who had been struggling with traumatic memories for years. She volunteered to test her methods on veterans at an outreach center and watched with astonishment as stuck memories that had haunted veterans for 20 years disappeared in moments.

What exactly was happening here?

Shapiro began closely examining the technique she’d invented and discovered a connection between rapid eye movement and memory. What we learn is stored physically in complex neural networks in the brain.

Everything we are not currently thinking about or remembering—from our earliest moments to the present moment—including sensations, perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and fears, gets stored in the unconscious mind.

These memories contain our feelings and interpretations about the world, and ourselves, and they are separate from our conscious mind, which remains entirely unaware of what’s going on in the unconscious.

Because we contain a storage space filled with physical memories, these memories can be retrieved at any time, even when we haven’t asked for them.

Memories that we can’t recall continue to impact our point of view, and inform our feelings about every situation—in essence, the showrunner of our entire life is our unconscious mind.

The fascinating thing about these stored memories is that they don’t differentiate between now and then. All moments are now, which is why negative memories from our past can get “triggered” by something in our present, and we’ll unconsciously experience the current situation as dangerous—even when it’s perfectly safe.

But the treatment was not without controversy or critics. From the start, both she and the process were mocked. Critics in the psychology and scientific communities called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, or EMDR, bogus pseudoscience.

While she won some psychologists over, those in the scientific community were committed to their stance that EMDR was no more than exposure therapy with added flair—as though the eye movements lacked value and were simply ornamental.*

Dr. McNally, a trauma expert at Harvard and an early and fervent critic, wrote in a 1999 article for the Journal of Anxiety Disorders that EMDR was strikingly similar to Mesmerism–a precursor to hypnosis–but he has since changed his mind due to new evidence that shows EMDR as valid and reliable.

The method is now recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a first-choice treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (WHO, 2013).

Credit: Learn Upon

When, in our present-day life, we react or behave in ways that are out of proportion to the situation at hand, and the reaction can be traced back to an early memory that continues to hold the emotions, charge, and belief we had at the time the memory was formed, psychologists consider these memories to be “unprocessed.”

When we are battery-operated by painful memories, we suffer needlessly. We feel inadequate when we’re immensely capable; we feel like a failure when we’re succeeding; we feel devastated by minor conflict.

These experiences are symptomatic of agonizing unprocessed memories in our unconscious mind.

The brain has a system called the Information Processing System whose main role is to process and digest disturbing experiences so learning can take place.

EMDR targets these unprocessed negative memories with the goal of metabolizing the pain attached to the memory, discarding the bad “nutrients” and digesting what’s useful.

The brain has a system called the Information Processing System whose main role is to process and digest disturbing experiences so learning can take place.

This is the function of Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep and why getting enough sleep is vital. During REM sleep, it’s believed that the brain processes all information and learning that took place that day; your dreams are like a daily diary in scenes and images.

After your brain has finished processing the new information, it turns into a memory and is ready to be introduced to all the old memories that contain useful information that the new memory can learn from.

Think of it like catching a friend up on the previous seasons of a TV show they haven’t yet seen. The new memory learns which old memories are useful, and which to discard, and that information gets stored in the brain to be used as a guide when it’s needed.

This explains how we’re able to handle being confronted by hard and scary things—we rely on all the useful, processed memories of how we successfully handled similar situations in the past.

The entire process accounts for how we grow and learn from past events.

Unprocessed memories are the source of our pain— processed memories are the basis for our mental health.

When negative events go unprocessed, either because they are so upsetting they overwhelm the entire system, or because the system was interrupted during processing, the memory of the situation does not get introduced to all the old memories, and remains unintegrated, separate, and unresolved.

The memory gets stored exactly as it was experienced, and the sensations and feelings that were attached to the original event do not get digested and understood.

It can’t adapt or be more useful because it lives in isolation, without access to the library of stored memories that act as a springboard for growth. Rather than learning from the experience, it lives in the brain like a bully who refuses to change, grow up, or evolve, constantly waiting to be triggered so it can act out.

The memory gets trapped at the age the Big or Little T trauma occurred. This is why, as adults, instead of remaining calm, we can suddenly explode, or why the appearance of certain people can make us so uncomfortable, and we can feel like children.

These abrupt reactions are unprocessed memories from childhood, stuck in time, keeping our past forever present.

It’s for these reasons that “time doesn’t heal all wounds” and why you can be stunted by feelings that are decades old. Unprocessed memories are frozen and without the proper attention, they can wreak havoc on your personal life, emotional life, and physical wellbeing.

Original image of Dr. Francine Shapiro by Edwina White

There is a fallacy among us that we can only be traumatized by big, overwhelming, violent events. In therapeutic circles, significant events are known as “Big T” traumas, but every one of us suffers from “small t” traumas of everyday life like the breakup of a relationship, the loss of a job, an argument you witnessed, the nightly news, the sustained slights in childhood, etc.,

When we endure traumas, the event becomes encoded with a critique we have about ourselves based on the event that caused the suffering. This is called a negative cognition.

For example: Imagine if your emotional needs went ignored for your entire childhood. The negative cognition that you attach to that trauma might be “I’m invisible” or “I don’t matter” or “I’m insignificant.”

Whatever the negative belief or persistent problem that is finding you “acting out” or stuck, or depressed, is not the cause of your suffering; it’s a symptom of an unprocessed memory.

Unprocessed memories are the source of our pain—processed memories are the basis for our mental health.

“There are generally about 10 to 20 unprocessed memories that are responsible for most of the pain and suffering in most of our lives.” -Francine Shapiro

EMDR is used to process the memories that are wreaking havoc on our lives. It does this by linking the REM method used to metabolize the events of the day during sleep to episodic memories from our life.

EMDR takes the original episodic memory that is causing pain and manually integrates it, so it can make the necessary connections to transform it into a useful long-term memory, where it gets stored in its changed form.

When you go to an EMDR session, the therapist will help you identify the past experiences that are contributing to your current issue and what is needed for the future.

The wonderful part about EMDR therapy is that you do not need to talk about the disturbing event in detail. Before you begin the process, you will be asked to conjure a safe place in your mind.

Perhaps it's a place you’ve been before in your life, or even in a recurring dream. You might be asked to imagine that all the people you love and trust have come together for you, drowning you with their love. This will be the place you can come to when you become overwhelmed by the process.

When you begin, you will be guided to focus on the problems you are currently experiencing and their associated early memories, or “Touchstone Memories.” Then, you’ll be asked what the most disturbing part was, and to find an image that represents the worst part of the event: the way a person looked or sounded.

If there is no image, you can just think of the worst part, and rate your discomfort on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the most distressing. The next step is to identify the negative cognition that got paired with the event, and, as you hold the image and negative cognition in your mind, you’ll be able to see what physical sensations arise in the body.

The Mighty

At this point, you’ll be asked to imagine the scene playing out as it did, and either the clinician will do bilateral movements with their hand, or you might watch a moving horizontal beam of light for about 30 seconds.

Then you’ll be asked what came up. The process will repeat a couple more times, presenting you with specific questions, and leading you to either play out the scene as you remember it or fill it in with what you wish had happened. When the cycle is completed, you’ll be asked where you land on the 1 to10 scale.

The goal is to get as close to 1 as you can. One of the unique and revolutionary traits of EMDR is that, unlike talk therapy in which a client can stay for decades, this kind of therapy can resolve problems quickly.

Oftentimes people can feel relief after the first session, but a standard recommendation is for at least eight visits.

What I have learned as an adult is that we are all powered by our childhood wounds. Those of us with less wounding seem to fare better than those of us with more. EMDR proposes a solution, and the miracle is that it actually works.

The next time we encounter a situation where we are overreacting, or we come up against yet another moment where we always overreact, let’s take a minute and ask ourselves to recall when we first had this feeling and what it made us believe about ourselves.

When we begin making the connections between the origin of particular emotional states, we can become better equipped at separating ourselves from the negative cognition.

We’ll begin to see that our present-day overreactions happen because we are responding to the world from the perspective of a child. These are the moments that Francine Shapiro would say, “The past is present.”

Her legacy is to help all wounds heal so that we can experience life as we’re living it, and not from the perspective of our childhood selves. We owe it to her, and to ourselves, to learn more about this method.

What about you?

Have you ever done EMDR therapy?

Did it work for you?

Have you ever changed your mind about something that initially struck you as preposterous but was deeply meaningful and moved you forward?

Tell me in the comments.

As for me, I’m either a complete sucker, or the most hopeful person alive, because I’ll try ANYTHING if there’s even a minor suggestion that it will be helpful. If the words “cure” “miracle” “magic” or “healing” appear anywhere on or even NEAR the label, I will add the hell out of it to my cart.

I have friends who vowed they’d never ever try ayahuasca; mocked it, feared it, thought it was pretentious or elitist, and who now go upstate once a month to drink it and go on “journeys.”

People are strange and curious birds.

Until next week I am…