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.
This podcast is your guide to transforming adversity into triumph, healing wounds and past trauma, gaining wisdom and insight, and creating meaningful, fulfilling connections. So if you're here to heal, to better understand yourself or or your relationships, you're in the right place. So sit back, get comfortable. Bring your trauma and your drama. And let's start healing. Welcome to Mr. and Mrs. Therapy. Music.
Hey everyone, welcome back to Mr. and Mrs. Therapy podcast. We're so glad that you're here with us today. So right now we have been in a series where we are just addressing criticisms and concerns that people have about EMDR. And today we're going to address the criticism that EMDR is simply a placebo effect.
But before we jump into today's episode, if you find any of our episodes helpful to you, and you think of someone that it may also benefit, we would love if you would just forward this episode to that person. And we are thankful for each one of you who have been listening in.
All right, let's jump into today's episode. So today we're addressing that thought that suggests the benefits of EMDR could partly be attributed to the placebo effect, where clients improve because they believe they're going to improve rather than due to the therapeutic technique itself. And actually, this is so interesting. This is something that I first heard probably about five or six years ago.
And it was actually a teen client who had brought it up to me, the idea that not just EMDR therapy, but therapy in general was a placebo effect, that people got better just because they thought they were going to get better when they went through therapy.
Now, if you're not super familiar with what the placebo effect is, basically what the placebo effect is that if you get a treatment that you think will help you, you actually will get some benefit, even if that treatment itself doesn't actually do anything. And so a good example of this is they have a new medication that they think will help cure cancer or something like that. And this is just a general example. But then they give one group this new medication that they think will cure cancer.
And then they give this other group a sugar pill. Both groups believe they're getting the pill that's supposed to cure cancer. Now, the placebo effect is that the people who are not actually getting a treatment actually do get some benefit from the belief that the treatment works. Now, for the medication to actually be considered successful, it does have to beat that placebo effect, meaning that the outcomes have to be better than the sugar pill.
And if it's not, then it's said that the new treatment that they came up with is actually not effective. It's not helpful. And so when somebody is talking about the placebo effect, just be aware, it's not that there's no effect from a placebo effect, but it's that that benefit you're getting is literally from your belief, not from the treatment that you're receiving.
And so if EMDR really is just a placebo effect, what we should find is that EMDR shouldn't perform any better than people who are getting placebo-type treatments. And there is extensive research and supporting evidence that shows EMDR truly does work. But one of the funny things is that people come into sessions with us and most of the time they really want EMDR to work and they want to heal from whatever trauma.
A lot of times they've tried a lot of different other treatments and then they're here and really are desperate and need it to work. But the funny thing is that kind of goes against this placebo effect. But we have a lot of clients who come in and they really want it to work, but they're really skeptical and they think that this won't work.
Well, actually, those are some of my favorite clients who come in because I definitely can relate to them because I was not on board the EMDR train as soon as you were, Ruth.
But because I had a lot of my own skepticisms and it didn't make sense to me how this would work and I didn't believe that it would work but I went in and I had a great experience and then it shifted to where oh I actually I see the benefits of it and I see that you can really fix a lot of problems and issues with this and so one of the things I always tell my clients when they come in and they're skeptical I say listen your belief is not required you do not have
to come into this process believing that it will work for it to work at the end of the day and so that does challenge just very basically the idea of the placebo effect. There's plenty of people who come in not believing that it's going to help or are very skeptical that it will help, but then end up having great benefits from it at the end of the day.
And I agree, those are some really fun clients to work with because when they do see the outcome, it blows their mind and it's life-changing for them. But like I mentioned earlier, there are research studies where EMDR is extensively researched and in numerous randomized controlled trials or RCTs, which are a really gold standard in clinical research, have shown that EMDR is effective in treating PTSD and other trauma related disorders.
And these studies consistently demonstrate that EMDR outperforms placebo treatments, as well as control groups that receive no treatment or non-specific supportive therapy. So if EMDR were simply a placebo, we wouldn't see these significant and consistent outcomes across studies. And so one of the studies that points towards this was a study done in 2014.
Now, this was a meta-analysis. If you're not familiar with meta-analysis, basically what that That is that they take a bunch of other studies that other people have done and they combine all these different studies into one giant study and analysis. And in that 2014 study, that's where they found that EMDR was as effective or possibly even more effective than cognitive behavioral therapy and definitely beating out the placebo effect.
So many studies have found that this is true. So this isn't just a one-off study that EMDR is more effective than the placebo effect, but that many, many studies have found that this is the case. Now, they've also done direct comparisons with placebos, where they have tested EMDR and the outcomes of EMDR, in particular with PTSD, and they have faced it off with placebo or quote-unquote sham treatments.
And in each one of these studies, it has a significantly greater impact at reducing those symptoms of PTSD. And because it's beating out the placebo effect by so much, you definitely cannot attribute the benefits gained from EMDR to just the simple placebo effect. Another way to address the placebo effect is looking at neurobiological evidence. So neuroimaging studies that provide evidence that EMDR triggers specific brain changes that aren't observed in placebo treatments.
And I love this. There's actually a very cool side-by-side that the Amen Clinics did of a woman with PTSD.
And after I think only like four sessions of EMDR and you can see on that scan the differences in her brain and not specifically for that image but just in general when they're looking at neuroimaging these changes include activation and connectivity between the amygdala and hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex which are all brain regions involved in emotional regulation, memory processing, and fear response.
A research shows that after successful EMDR therapy, patients exhibit changes in brain function consistent with the processing and integration of traumatic memories. And that's really what we're looking for and we're wanting is that AIP model where those frozen or traumatic memories that are processed and stored maladaptively are able to be processed in a healthy way and in a way that supports their functioning.
So if EMDR were merely a placebo, we wouldn't expect to see such neurobiological changes occurring alongside the symptom relief that clients are experiencing. And the last thing we're going to be doing to challenge the idea that EMDR is a placebo effect is the long-term outcomes. If something is a placebo effect, generally you get what's called short-term gain. So you get a little bit of gain for a small amount of time, but then that gain tends to evaporate. It tends to go away.
But with EMDR, what they have found is that there are long-term benefits when you go through EMDR treatment. And I like to tell my clients, if we go in there and we really root out everything, this should never be a problem for you again. It's not something that you need to come in and get reworked every three to five years. It's something that if you work through and you finish that problem, that problem should be done for you.
Meaning you can think about it, you can talk about it 5, 10, 15, 20 years down the line and not have a reliving negative emotional experience from that. And so studies have found that these benefits really do persist for a long time. They are not a short-term gain that you're getting. It's not a quick patch job. It really is going in and reprogramming how your brain interacts with these negative thoughts, feelings, and traumas that you've experienced.
And so that is our final piece of evidence that we're going to be discussing today that really helps challenge the idea that EMDR is a placebo effect. It's not just in your mind you believe you're getting better and so you get better. It really is having a positive effect that shifts GIFSIN alters how those negative experiences affect you and fix how your brain relates to those traumas. 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. Therapy. We hope that you enjoyed today's episode and found it helpful. If so, would you take 30 seconds and share it with a friend? Also, we'd love for you to leave us a review on Apple Podcast. It lights us up to know that this podcast is helping you. If you have any questions or a topic you'd like discussed in future episodes, visit our Facebook group. Just click the link in the description below.
Although we are mental health providers, this podcast is for informational purposes only and is not intended to provide diagnosis or treatment. If you are struggling with persistent mental health issues, chronic marital issues, or feeling hopeless or suicidal, you are not alone. Help is available. Please seek professional help or call the National Suicide Hotline at 988. Thank you again for joining us on Mr. and Mrs. Therapy. Remember, there's always hope and there's always help. Music.