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On the Strange and Astonishing Therapy That Became the Gold Standard for Healing Trauma
For all of us, unprocessed memories are generally the basis of negative responses, attitudes and behaviors. Processed memories, on the other hand, are the basis of adaptive positive responses, attitudes and behaviors.
Forty-two years ago, in 1979, an NYU doctoral candidate named Francine Shapiro was studying how external events influenced characters' behavior 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 derailed entirely 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 primary focus, Shapiro always had an abiding interest in psychology and had recently become interested in an emerging field called Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI), a subfield of psychosomatic medicine.
PNI is the study of the interaction between the nervous and immune systems 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 had been darting back and forth while watching the birds and squirrels.
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, 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, but she would also 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 initially considered a burden exclusive to combat veterans, it turns out that any experience that a person finds 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?
Below, I walk you through how EMDR actually works, what happens in a session, introduce you to the book that teaches you how to do EMDR on yourself, and what I’ve learned about what powers trauma in adult life.
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