EMDR appears to be a safe therapy with no negative side effects. Even so, despite its increasing use, mental health professionals are debating the effectiveness of. Critics point out that most EMDR studies have involved only a small number. Can moving your eyes back and forth help ease anxiety? Like other psychotherapies, EMDR was a creation of chance.
One day in 1987, Francine Shapiro, a California psychologist in private practice, went out for a walk in the woods. I had been worried about a series of disturbing thoughts. However, he found that his anxiety rose after moving his eyes back and forth while observing his surroundings. Intrigued, Shapiro tried variants of this procedure with her clients and found that they were feeling better too.
Numerous controlled studies show that EMDR produces more improvement than the absence of treatment, at least to relieve symptoms of PTSD in civilians, such as those triggered by rape. Evidence related to the effectiveness of EMDR for other anxiety disorders is promising, but preliminary. The effects of EMDR are more marked on self-reported measures of anxiety; its impact on physiological measures related to anxiety (such as heart rate) is less clear. When scientists compared EMDR to imaginary exposure, they found little or no difference.
Nor have they found that EMDR works faster than imaginary exposure. Most researchers have taken these findings to mean that EMDR results are derived from exposure, as this treatment requires clients to view traumatic images repeatedly. Finally, researchers have found scant evidence that EMDR's eye movements are contributing anything to its effectiveness. When researchers compared EMDR to a “fixed eye movement” condition, in which clients keep their eyes fixed forward, they have found no difference between the conditions.
In light of these findings, the panoply of hypotheses invoked for EMDR eye movements seems to be “explanations in search of a phenomenon”. Yes, but does EMDR really work? According to more than 20 controlled studies exploring the effects of EMDR, yes, EMDR works. Studies show that EMDR therapy effectively eliminates or decreases the symptoms of many mental health problems in the majority of those who received it. Clients reported improvement in related symptoms such as anxiety.
The answer seems to be yes, with one caveat. EMDR is generally recommended for people living with overwhelming traumatic memories and symptoms of PTSD. You may find it particularly helpful if you're having difficulty sharing the trauma you've experienced with others, including therapists. However, because there is no evidence that EMDR causes brain changes that resemble those that occur during REM sleep, the analogy between EMDR eye movements and EMDR eye movements may be more superficial than real.
EMDR showed little or no advantage over the control procedure in self-report, physiological or behavioral measures, the last of which consisted of evaluating the client's willingness to address feared stimuli. In addition, in some American cities, psychotherapists are proud to include their EMDR certifications in their Yellow Pages ads. In my practice, clients may choose to use only EMDR as their primary source of treatment or integrate EMDR into their regular psychotherapy sessions. Any other claims made by EMDR professionals are not based on any convincing research or psychological science for that matter.
For example, a team of American psychologists recently trained 40 European therapists to administer EMDR to victims of war trauma in Bosnia (Cavaliere 199) .In addition, other research has reported that removing the reprocessing component of EMDR had no impact on treatment outcome. In EMDR, the person receiving treatment remembers distressing experiences while performing bilateral stimulation, such as side-to-side eye movements or physical stimulation, such as tapping both sides of the body. Shapiro first described his findings, was misquoted as saying that EMDR (then called EMD) could cure traumatic memory in one session. A wide range of patients suffering from debilitating medical conditions may also benefit from EMDR therapy.
Along with their therapists, EMDR clients also learn to replace negative thoughts (such as “I'll never get this job”) with more positive thoughts (such as “I can get this job if I try hard enough). Although originally developed to treat trauma and PTSD, EMDR can also help relieve symptoms of other mental health problems, especially those related to past trauma. Different treatment outcomes and procedural differences between EMDR therapy and CBT indicate potentially diverse underlying neurobiological mechanisms. .
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