This is another discovery that I had forgotten about until I ran into a friend with whom I used to work at a mental health clinic. I asked him about how work was going and then I remembered he had taken this process course for his work as a Mental Health Professional (MHP).
He said he took some time off to finish getting his certification. I asked if this process really worked. YES! And it takes less time to heal. It takes maybe 3 to 6 months, depending on the client, he may be healed in 12 to 26 sessions.
This may take a lot less time, instead of years. The Client needs to be ready to do what is asked of him or her. Easy and almost painless.
I was chosen to be part of this mental health team and partner up with my friend. This was before we became friends. This was how I met my new friend.
As a team, we were assigned to work with a client who had lost her partner to cancer. A very educated lady, who had taken her sick leave and all her vacation to be with her partner, but later had to leave her position to support her partner until the partner’s death. ]
This devastated Mary, our client.
As trauma does, it leaves you in shambles and it changes the cells and nervous system, affects the brain cells, and basically the body as a whole.
My friend and all those involved with her treatment plan, including our client, Mary, started the process of healing her. Utilizing EMDR treatment.
The reprocessing involves “reflecting on specific experiences of past trauma in your life. It is a form of therapy that helps people like Mary to heal from trauma or other distressing life experiences, during her lifetime.
These are the experiences causing you the most stress, grief, or other emotional reaction. This formal process takes time and requires the services of a trained therapist, and certified specifically for the EMDR therapy program treatment. Most people gain remarkable, life-changing success in 12 to 20 sessions.
Mary was mainly interested in finding a job to pay some of her basic bills, which started to pile up. This was causing her more non-relieving stress. Mary wanted a job.
It is widely assumed that severe emotional pain requires a long time to heal. However, EMDR therapy, shows that the mind can in fact be healed from psychological trauma much as the body recovers from physical trauma. We used the EMDR to re-wire the healing process to give Mary the focus needed for a job.
Repeated studies show that by using EMDR therapy people can experience the benefits of psychotherapy that once took years to make a difference.
EMDR therapy helps children and adults of all ages. My friend said, the therapists use EMDR with a wide range of challenges, including, but not limited to, sexual assault, pain, panic attacks, violence, abuse and anxiety, and PTSD.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a psychotherapy treatment that was originally designed to alleviate the distress associated with traumatic memories (Shapiro, 1989a, 1989b). Shapiro’s (2001) Adaptive Information Processing model, EMDR therapy facilitates the accessing and processing of traumatic memories and other adverse life experiences to bring these to an adaptive resolution.
After successful treatment with EMDR therapy, affective distress is relieved. Negative beliefs are reformulated, and physiological arousal is reduced.
This is so amazing for the sufferer. Mary started showing some positive results. Her treatment plan would have to be changed, as some of her skills started coming back to her.
During EMDR therapy Mary paid attention to emotionally disturbing material in brief sequential doses while simultaneously focusing on an external stimulus. For example, talking to people about her working skills. Mary was good in using computer technology and knowledge of her feelings, to express herself upon reporting using technics learned, texting, and/or e-mailing her feelings and experiences of some of the positive results that she had received by EMDR therapy.
Her therapist (my friend), directed lateral eye movements in the most commonly used external stimulus, and a variety of other stimuli including hand-tapping and audio stimulation are often used.
Our team and our EMDR therapist met to facilitate and access the traumatic memory network, so that information processing is enhanced, with new associations forged between the traumatic memory and more adaptive memories or information. This was to check if Mary would be able to safely excess her information.
These new associations are thought to result in complete information processing, new learning, elimination of emotional distress, and development of cognitive insights.
EMDR therapy uses a three-pronged protocol: (1) the past events that have laid the groundwork for dysfunction are processed, forging new associative links with adaptive information.
(2) the current circumstances that elicit distress are targeted, and internal and external triggers are desensitized. This part of the process was successful with Mary with some assistance of some help from our other teams.
(3) imaginal templates of future events are incorporated, to assist our client in acquiring the skills needed for adaptive functioning. Mary was required to make reports, and send us information on her feelings, and some other parts of the process by using tools our therapist suggested, without speaking in detail or doing homework used with other therapies.
Which, as I understand it, EMDR has been so well researched, that it is now recommended as an effective treatment for trauma.
In the Practice Guidelines of the American Psychiatric Association, and those of the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs.
Dr. Shapiro is a Senior Research Fellow Emeritus at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, Executive Director of the EMDR Institute in Watsonville, CA, and founder and President Emeritus of the non-profit organization that coordinates disaster response and low fee training worldwide.
We are so fortunate, to have these healers in our midst. You may find some of these EMDR therapists in most of the local Mental Health, or Behavioral Health clinical facilities.
We could use this discovery by Francine Shapiro Ph.D. I understand it has been around since 1988.
For more information, visit: https://www.emdr.com/
I hope this is helpful, information. Many Blessings to all.