Music. Welcome to Mr. and Mrs. Therapy, the podcast that empowers you to transform life's challenges into opportunities for personal growth and healthier relationships. We're your hosts, Tim and Ruth Olson, licensed marriage and family therapists and trauma experts. As experienced therapists with backgrounds in addressing trauma and mental health disorders, we believe there is hope and there certainly is healing.
We've spent our lives supporting people through the ups and downs, and we want to share these insights with you. Together, we'll unravel the layers of personal growth, healing from trauma, and building healthy relationships. Each week, we'll bring you engaging conversations, expert insights, and practical strategies to help you heal from the past, foster healthy communication, and develop enduring love.
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We're so glad that you're here with us today. Today we're going to start a new series on addressing some criticisms and concerns raised about EMDR. And if you've listened for any length of time, you know that Tim and I are both very passionate about EMDR because it's been such a blessing and it's impacted not only our clients, but our friends, our family, and our lives individually as well. And so we are very passionate about EMDR.
And so we want to make sure that we bring you the information that you need to help you understand EMDR and the impact it could have for you and your family as well. And so we're going to start this series today and just jump into today's episode. And so the first one is that EMDR stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. And so there's a challenge to the certainty of if the eye movements are really connected with the healing process that takes place with EMDR.
And so people who are critics say that the defining feature of EMDR may not actually be necessary. They would argue that it's effective primarily because it incorporates elements of traditional exposure therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy, not because the eye movements. And so when we're talking about eye movements, we're actually talking about bilateral stimulation.
Even though EMDR was started specifically using eye movements, bilateral stimulation could be the beeping sound that we use back and forth in your ears, or the buzzers that we sometimes utilize as well, which buzz bilaterally or back and forth on each hand. Or when we're working with clients online, we have them use bilateral stimulation by tapping their legs or their arms, that back and forth stimulation. And I even think Francine Shapiro, she's the lady who created EMDR.
She criticized her own naming of it later on and wish she didn't name it EMDR and wish she had named it something else. And even as we're talking right now, so something more like BDR might be a better explanation where it's bilateral desensitization and reprocessing. Because just like you're saying, Ruth, we don't even really use eye movements when we're in practice, especially because we do exclusively online stuff.
And so we have the clients tap or listen to a beeping sound, and then they still end up producing the same results. Now, one of the things that I want to jump into and talk about about this criticism about the eye movement or the bilateral stimulation not really being a part of it is that we know that, obviously, if you're just sitting there and you're doing exposure therapy, a lot of people will talk about their traumas a lot or have journaled a lot about it.
There's even people who I know who they have used their trauma as a part of a career path to be a motivational speaker or about life after trauma and how you can still live your life after you've experienced something awful and traumatic. But a lot of times these people, they still have deep emotional connections to this trauma. When they talk about it, they still get an emotional punch. And so even though they're as much as you can imagine, they are being exposed to the trauma in vivo.
And so they're being exposed to it as much as they possibly can. They're not really moving past that trauma. It still hurts and wounds them. It still has left some type of negative scar on them. And so actually, as Ruth and I were talking through this, I was kind of thinking, I was like, well, maybe that's true.
Maybe the bilateral stimulation isn't necessary. And maybe clients could just sit there and without assistance, they could just in their mind be thinking about it and then still get a similar result.
But then as we were talking about it more, I was like, no, I definitely see that that's not really true, that the bilateral stimulation really does seem to have some type of positive effect and that it's helping to trigger off some type of mechanism in your brain that's helping you to process and metabolize that trauma in a better way. But I would say that a fair criticism of this is that we really don't know exactly why EMDR does work.
They haven't done studies or been able to figure out what actually is getting triggered off in the brain that is helping it. And so I think the original idea is that EMDR kind of mimics REM sleep, and then that kind of helps your brain to process and metabolize it. I personally don't like that theory. It doesn't make a ton of sense to me.
I like more of the idea that the bilateral stimulation is adding a distractionary experience into it where your amygdala is fired off because you're addressing the trauma, but then the The bilateral stimulation kind of helps your prefrontal cortex because it's a non-threatening, just repetitive motion and action or sound that's happening and then allows those two parts of your brain to communicate better together.
But I do think it's a fair criticism that we don't know exactly what's happening or exactly why it works or exactly the mechanism that it's triggering off. But we do know at the end of the day that it is effective. Well, for sure. And I think sometimes that could be frustrating for clients when they ask, well, how does this work? Right? We're walking them through the process and we're working with them. And sometimes they can see changes and they want an explanation.
They want us to tell them, hey, what's happening? How does this work? And kind of like you said, Tim, we don't know exactly how it works, but I know that it works. And so let's look at a couple of the mechanisms behind bilateral stimulation in EMDR that could be the cause of it. And I know that you already mentioned a couple of them, but we'll do a little bit of a deeper dive on each one. So the first one, like you mentioned, is mimicking REM sleep.
And this theory just says that bilateral stimulation mimics the movements of rapid eye movement in sleep, which that's involved in processing emotional memories. And a lot of times during REM sleep, the brain sorts through and integrates memories and emotions. So by stimulating this process in a wakeful state, EMDR is believed to help the brain process and integrate traumatic memories, reducing their emotional impact.
And because there isn't any specific answer to how does this work, you know, it is a possibility that it is multiple things, that the things that we're going to address right now and talk about, that it could be a little bit of all of these kind of mixed together. And to go off of what you were saying, we don't know exactly the mechanism that is causing the healing from traumatic events.
But a good example of something that we trust in that we until very recently had no idea how it actually worked was anesthesia. So honestly, the scientific community didn't really know the effect that anesthesia was specifically having on the brain, whereas kind of shutting it off and that you then can go through surgery and then not experience that pain when that's happening and then help your body not to go into shock.
But it still was an effective thing. So there's lots of things that we might be using or doing in our daily life that we don't know exactly why they're operating the way that they are, but that we understand that they do have a helpful benefit behind it. And we're going to go a little bit more into this in another episode, but there definitely is research behind EMDR showing the effectiveness.
Most of the research is done on PTSD or post-traumatic stress disorder, because that was the original thing that Francine Shapiro, the creator of EMDR, had found that it was helpful in working through kind of just through her own life experience. But it's also effective with depression, anxiety, phobia, OCD, addiction, chronic pain, complex PTSD, dissociative disorder, can even be helpful for phantom limb pain.
There's lots and lots of different things where there's plenty of research behind that actually shows the effectiveness of EMDR towards helping people treat their mental health disorders. The next thing that bilateral stimulation is thought to do is play a crucial role in processing emotional responses and is particularly helpful during stressful or traumatic events. And when you engage that bilateral stimulation, it helps your amygdala to become less reactive.
This calming effect oftentimes is seen when people are going through the EMDR process and they're processing something very emotionally uncomfortable. And then you'll hear a client say something like, oh, you know what? Just a moment ago, that was really making me upset or anxious. And now I feel a lot calmer. And it's not necessarily that they feel completely calm, but that they have noticed that there was a dramatic reduction in the intensity.
And so the nice thing about this is that it can really help people who've gone through a traumatic event who get overwhelmed by it to be able to manage their emotional responses much better and then continue to confront it as opposed to, oh my gosh, this is just so big, it's so uncomfortable, it's so overwhelming, I just gotta get away from this. The third mechanism behind bilateral stimulation that we'll talk about is strengthening the corpus callosum.
So this hypothesis suggests that the bilateral stimulation strengthens the corpus callosum, which connects the brain's left and right hemispheres. And then by doing so, it enhances the communication between the two hemispheres, which that can lead to more effective integration of traumatic memories into the narrative memory. And that allows it to be stored as past events rather than immediate threats.
Because when you go through something traumatic, a lot of times your brain does kind of get stuck there. And instead of being able to store it away, you're now treating present events as if they're threats. And that's where a lot of times the hypervigilance comes in because you're still seeing it as an immediate threat, even though that event happened years and years ago. But because it's triggered and it reminds you of a similar situation. Then you're kind of on high alert.
So really, it allows your left and right hemisphere to connect and communicate and to recognize that, OK, this happened. I was in danger, but that is no longer the case in this moment. And I think that part can be particularly hard where your brain is hypervigilant. It will seek out anything that's even remotely similar to the traumatic event.
A good example of this is if you were a war veteran or you experienced violent crime with a gun, that when you hear a car backfire, it may all of a sudden cause you to have a flashback. But a car backfiring and a gun being shot are very different sounds. But it's similar enough that your brain says, oh, that's the same thing. And it could set you in this panic mode, even though there's nothing you should really be panicking about right now.
The next theory behind why bilateral stimulation helps is that it's believed that when people go through traumatic events, sense.
Disrupts the brain's natural information processing systems and so essentially what happens is when you go through that trauma it shuts down a part of your logical brain and then it gives more and more control over to your amygdala your emotional processing centers and so when that's the case your brain is not able to appropriately kind of think through and metabolize and work through that information because just like what
ruth was talking about in the last one it thinks that you are currently in danger and so it doesn't want to get taken out of that high alert state. But when you go through the bilateral stimulation, it can really help to engage the logical portion of your brain, where then it can start thinking through that situation thinking, you know what, I'm not actually in danger right now.
And then logically, it allows your brain to then set the amygdala at ease, and then take that memory from being an active event that it needs to be focusing on, and then allowing that memory to then be stored away as a past event, not something that's current and ongoing. And this connects a lot with what I like is the idea about the amygdala and this idea about kick-starting the information processing centers.
This is kind of my pet theory behind it where it's like, okay, if we are doing this bilateral stimulation, it allows your prefrontal cortex, your logical processing centers to communicate with your amygdala. And then they have this dialogue back and forth where that's not something that normally happens in your regular everyday life. It's either your prefrontal cortex is running the show or your amygdala is running the show.
But then when you're going through this EMDR process, It kind of bridges the gap between them where they're normally mutually exclusive, but now they both can operate a little bit at the same time, and then they can figure out their disagreement between each other. And eventually the amygdala lets go of control and allows your logical processing centers, your prefrontal cortex, to start running the show.
One of the cornerstone pieces of EMDR is the AIP model, which is the Adaptive Information Processing model. And so I just want to read a quick quote from Francine Shapiro regarding that adaptive information processing. She says, EMDR therapy targets the unprocessed memories that contain the negative emotions, sensations, and beliefs.
By activating the brain's information processing system, or the AIP, the old memories can then be digested, meaning what's And so your mind really is a powerful thing. And God truly has created your mind in a way where if it's supported in the right way, you can find healing from trauma that you've carried for years and years and years. And I love that last part of what she says about the old memories being able to be digested and whatever is useful is learned and what's useless is discarded.
Because it's not that the memory as a whole is being thrown away and the lessons and everything along with it is being thrown away or erased or wiped from your memory. So it's not like men in black when you think about that and they wipe your memory clean. But you can still remember the event, but the level of disturbance is no longer there. And you take lessons learned and discard the rest. The things that have kept you in pain and kept you hurting over the years are desensitized and discarded.
And that's so incredible for me as a therapist and as a coach to be able to watch that and just see the insights that are happening in the EMDR process is really cool. I know a lot of times Tim and I will talk about that and just talk about the insights that come from these memories. And some people who have gone through really difficult things have pulled out lessons and different insights that really just blew me away and I wasn't even considering.
And I'm sure they weren't considering at the time of the trauma or even all these years after. But as they went through the EMDR process, they were able to keep what is so useful to them. And I think that's an important part too. Actually, it's interesting because I've had clients who get worried that when they go through EMDR, they can be fearful of EMDR because they have learned some very important or some very helpful trends started in their life after a traumatic event.
And then they get fearful that when they go through EMDR that they'll lose some of the benefit or some of the lessons that they learned through the trauma that they went through. I always like to tell my clients, when you have trauma, there's an unforeseen tax that you're getting levied against you when you don't resolve that trauma. Never once did I have a client who got some benefit from the trauma or had some helpful direction in their life that they started going after that,
that then they lost it. They never have lost it. They always then were able to then leave the pain, but then keep any gain that came across from that. Now, some of you may be thinking that sounds crazy that I might've gotten some kind of benefit from trauma and not Not everybody does, and not every experience does that come with. But a lot of people who have gained something from that are fearful of it.
So, for example, if somebody made fun of you for being scrawny and then you became a bodybuilder afterwards, going through and correcting the trauma of being made fun of isn't then going to make you all of a sudden give up bodybuilding or stop working on your physical health. It will allow you to then actually enjoy those gains more as opposed to doing it from a neurotic sense of, I have to do this in order to then try to correct that negative feeling or belief that I had.
And so that's all the time that we have for today. So to recap, what we talked about today is that we have seen that bilateral stimulation really is very effective towards helping people recover from trauma.
And I think it's something that's easy to see from your own life or observing other people that just talking or journaling a lot about it doesn't really help people resolve the trauma, but that there's some effective mechanism behind doing the bilateral stimulation that really can help people to lay to rest the negative feelings from the traumatic event in a way that those other two methods really just don't seem to fully help people to reconcile through.
And it's interesting because this is something that Ruth and I run into frequently where people say, well, I think I worked through this and I've resolved it. And so I don't really think I need EMDR on it. But then when we talk more deeply about the subject with them, those emotions still come out.
And then when we take them through the process of EMDR and we use that that bilateral stimulation, we do see that they are able to then fully metabolize and process through it, and that that negative experience no longer does have any emotional hold. And so just like I was saying earlier, even though we don't know exactly why anesthesia is effective, or we didn't used to know why it was, we still knew it had a beneficial effect.
And same thing with EMDR, we don't know exactly what mechanism that bilateral stimulation affects in the brain. And here are some of the theories that we have behind why it's effective. But ultimately, at the end of the day, it is effective in helping people to recover from traumatic experiences. All right, guys, thank you so much for listening. And remember, your mind is a powerful thing. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of Mr. and Mrs.
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