Take Control of your Life with EMDR Therapy

RUNNING ON AUTOMATIC
Why would a beautiful, intelligent woman keep picking the wrong men, and
then when they try to break up with her, throw herself on the floor
clutching their legs, begging them not to leave?
Ben is a successful businessman. Why is he hit with anxiety whenever he has
to make a presentation?
Stacey has been trying one therapist after another for years to discover why
she has an almost constant feeling of dread, fears of abandonment and an eating
disorder. Strangest of all, she has repeated images of the color red and a candle.
It makes no sense to her, but it has been going on for as long as she can
remember.
Interestingly, there is a simple explanation for their problems that involves
how the brain itself functions. In this book, we will explore both the reasons for
suffering and what we can do about it.
WHY WE SUFFER
The truth is we all suffer at one time or another. Situations arise all the time that
affect us negatively. But when we continue to have pain long after the
experience itself has passed, it is because the hardwiring of our brains influences
our minds. Let’s try the following experiment so you can see for yourself. I’ll
give a single sentence and you just notice the first thing that pops into your
mind:
"Roses are red"
The odds are that the first thing to come up was: Violets are blue. For people
born in the United States, it’s basically the equivalent of a knee-jerk response.
This is an important concept, since mental responses are based on physical
reactions. Your brain is programmed to respond in the same way as the rest of
your body. Regardless of age or gender, when your knee is hit in a certain way
your leg will jerk. Similarly, regardless of intention, your mind also reacts
automatically. For instance, when is the last time you heard that rhyme? You
probably learned it in childhood. So, if you don’t live with young children, it
was likely many, many years ago. But it came up automatically nonetheless.
These types of automatic responses can be wonderful and useful, and show the
power of our minds, but they don’t always serve us.
Take a look at the sentences themselves. Your response to “Roses are red”
wasn’t a critical evaluation of its meaning. Your mind just moved along with a
response as if it was true. But roses aren’t always red. They are also yellow,
pink, purple and most any color you can think of. However, that unexamined
sentence looks just fine at first glance. And how about the second one: Violets
are blue. Are they really? No, actually they are purple. But the line will come up
whether it’s true or not. Now, probably the sentence didn’t cause you any kind of
distress. But that same type of automatic response also causes a wide range of
problems that disrupt happiness, families and communities. The same
mind/brain processes that allow us to recognize a rhyme, or sing along with a
tune we haven’t heard in 20 years, are the ones that can also drown us in the
misery of anxiety, depression, heartache and at times physical pain.
The nursery rhyme has even more to offer. Remember the line that comes
after “Violets are blue”? “Sugar is sweet and so are you.” Lovely sentiment, and
it also comes to mind automatically. But as we all know, while sugar is surely
sweet, people are lots more complicated. Everyone is a mixture of sweet, sour
and every flavor and variation under the sun. At some point, everyone is angry,
sad, jealous, bitter, hurt, insecure, happy or sweet. And when we are, we act
accordingly. One moment we cherish the one we are with and cover them with
kisses. A day later we may explode and yell at them in frustration. So, basically,
some of what we’ve learned growing up is true, but just as with all the other
experiences we’ve had through childhood, other things are not. Often as
youngsters we can’t tell the difference, and what we take to be real—such as
believing we are inferior because we are bullied or rejected, or thinking we are
responsible for our parents’ divorce—are really just misperceptions.
Nevertheless, these experiences can have effects that come up automatically
throughout the rest of our lives, outside our conscious control.
Every experience we’ve had in our lives has become a building block in our
inner world, governing our reactions to everything and every person we
encounter. When we “learn” something, the experience is physically stored
within networks of brain cells called “neurons.” These networks actually form
our unconscious mind, determining how our brain interprets the world around us
and governing how we feel from moment to moment. These memories include
experiences that took place years ago, and our conscious mind is often unaware
that they have any impact on us at all. But since the memories are physically
stored in the brain, they can pop up outside our control in response to “Roses are
red,” just as they color our view of every new situation we encounter. They can
cause us to feel unattractive when we’re not. Depressed when everyone else
around us is happy. And they can leave us feeling heartsick if someone leaves us
—even if we know consciously that the person is terrible for us and continuing
the relationship would be a big mistake. Basically, many of the feelings and
actions that undermine our happiness are symptoms that stem from this memory
system that forms the unconscious.
Let’s take the first case from page 1:
Why would a beautiful, intelligent woman keep picking the wrong men, and
then when they try to break up with her, throw herself on the floor clutching
their legs, begging them not to leave?
Justine has no problems getting boyfriends. Her problem is keeping them.
Now 25 years old, she generally picks men with an “edge” who are emotionally
unavailable. Then every time she gets into a relationship, she begins acting
clingy and her boyfriend eventually breaks up with her. When this happens, she
begins to cry hysterically, falling to her knees and putting her arms around the
man’s legs, pleading with him not to leave her. In therapy, the cause of this was
tracked back to something that happened on a Sunday evening when she was 6
years old. Justine was living with her parents in a two-story house. On that night
there was a severe thunderstorm, causing her to become very frightened.
Upstairs in her bedroom, she began crying and yelling for her mommy and
daddy to come to her. However, they were in the kitchen on the first floor. The
storm drowned out her screams, and they didn’t hear her. They never came to
her rescue and she eventually cried herself to sleep.
How could something as common as this be responsible for her problems?
All of us have experienced loud storms sometime in childhood, but only some of
us will remain negatively affected by it. We’ll go into the detailed reasons for
this in later chapters. For now, it’s sufficient to know that when negative
reactions and behaviors in the present can be tracked directly back to an earlier
memory, we define those memories as “unprocessed”—meaning that they are
stored in the brain in a way that still holds the emotions, physical sensations and
beliefs that were experienced earlier in life. That stormy night Justine was
intensely frightened as a child, and had the belief that she was in danger. Her
parents didn’t come when she cried for them, which also gave her the feeling
that she would be abandoned if she really needed them. This memory, stored in
her brain with the intense fear she experienced at 6 years old, is stimulated
whenever a boyfriend breaks up with her. At this point, she no longer functions
as a mature and successful 25-year-old, but instead as a frightened little girl left
a lone in the dark. We can see the connection, given that the storm and a breakup
are both associated with aloneness and abandonment. As such, she
unconsciously experiences the breakup as “being in danger.”
We experience these types of connections all the time. It’s generally the
reason for all of the characteristics we love or hate in ourselves and the people
around us. It’s simply part of the way the brain functions in order to make sense
of the world. But identifying the memory connections is just the first step in
changing how we think, act or feel. It’s not just understanding where something
comes from, but also knowing what to do about it that’s important. In the course
of this book we will be exploring how to identify the memories that underlie
personal and relationship problems; what we can do to help manage them on our
own; and how to recognize when further professional help would be useful.
We’ll also explore the workings of the mind—the intricate connections that
form our consciousness—through stories contributed by some of the more than
70,000 clinicians worldwide who practice a form of therapy known as Eye
Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). Millions of people have
been helped by the therapy over the past 20 years, and many of them are giving
detailed reports in this book in order to help “demystify” the change process. As
research has shown, major changes can take place within even one EMDR
reprocessing session. The clients’ reports allow us a “window into the brain,”
since the connections they made answer so many questions about why we react
to the world in different ways.
EMDR therapy targets the unprocessed memories that contain the negative
emotions, sensations and beliefs. By activating the brain’s information
processing system (which will be explained in Chapter 2), the old memories can
then be “digested.” Meaning what is useful is learned, what’s useless is
discarded, and the memory is now stored in a way that is no longer damaging.
For instance, Justine’s clinician focused on the thunderstorm along with the
feeling she had of being alone and in danger. Once the memory of the
thunderstorm was processed, the childhood sensations of terror disappeared and
were replaced by the feeling of safety, and the belief that as an adult she could
take care of herself. Along with that, the boyfriend problem resolved as her new
sense of self resulted in her making different romantic choices. Of course there
would be more memories that might have to be dealt with if Justine’s parents
had been generally abusive or neglectful. But regardless of the number of
memories involved, basically we are entering into the person’s “unconscious”
mind with this form of therapy, in a way that can allow insights, connections and
change to occur rapidly within the reprocessing sessions.
WHAT IS THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND?
When most people think of the unconscious, they think of psychoanalysis and
movies that involve a Freudian view of psychic conflicts, and symbolic dreams
and gestures. From the psychoanalytic perspective it generally takes years of talk
therapy and “working through” to gain insight and mastery over forces that are
hidden from view. This form of therapy can have great value. But Freud
published first in 1900, and many things have changed since then. In the past
century there have been new advances in neurobiological technologies that have
expanded our understanding of what these “forces” actually are. The
examination of the unconscious we are dealing with in this book is one that is
based on the workings of the brain itself. Through an understanding of how
experiences lay the physical groundwork for our emotional and physical
reactions, we can determine how our “stuck” points and knee-jerk mental
responses came about and what to do about them.
For instance, let’s take the second case:
Ben is a successful businessman. Why is he hit with anxiety whenever he has
to make a presentation? Here’s how he described it:
“As long as I can remember, I’ve had anxiety about doing any performance
in front of a group of people. My palms sweat, my voice becomes unpredictable,
my heart beats fast and I have thoughts like, ‘I’m an idiot. I can’t do this.
Everyone will hate me.’ It sometimes felt as though my life was at risk. Sounds
ridiculous, but it was so true. As I went through school, there were many times
in the normal course of events when I had to make public presentations. In my
professional career the same thing happened. I always made it through these
events, but not happily. In fact, I suffered before and after every event, and
tediously went over every detail with my loved ones, which, as you might
imagine, did not delight them. No matter what I tried, nothing seemed to fix this
problem. I tried many types of therapy. Sometimes it seemed a little better, but it
always came roaring back.”
Ben entered into EMDR therapy and used a variety of procedures that we’ll
learn in this book to identify the source of his problem and change his reactions.
Here’s what he discovered: “It turns out the cause was something that happened
to me when I was no more than 3½ years old. I was walking with my grandfather
on his farm in western North Carolina. My memory here is as if I was looking
up, like a very small child. I don’t remember chattering away to my grandfather,
but if family stories can be trusted, I probably was. We met a strange man on the
road. He was old, bent, angry looking, with very hairy nostrils. He said to my
grandfather in his mountain drawl, ‘Well, howdy, if I had a youn-gun’ talked as
much as that un, I’d drown him in the creek.’ I slipped behind my grandfather’s
denim-covered leg, peered up the man’s nostrils and shut up. I knew that
unwanted kittens were in fact ‘drowned in the creek.’ It did not seem safe to
chatter in front of strangers.”
So, this child’s moment of terror set the groundwork for his problem. The
memory became stored in his brain and set him up for failure: “I did my first
book report in third grade in front of my beloved Ms. Kneenor, a young, pretty,
first-year teacher. I loved Ms. Kneenor, and was very proud of the fact that my
book report was three pages long. I had worked very hard on it. I had also
developed a slight stutter, which lasted all of about six months before leaving as
mysteriously as it began. My parents had handled this pretty well, and I wasn’t
aware of being self-conscious about it. I had daydreams of Ms. K praising me
and telling the class what a great report I had done. Instead, Ms. K stayed in the
back of the room in out-of-control laughter during my whole report. As I
shuffled through my report, the stutter getting worse as I went, I thought, ‘I’m an
idiot.’ Then two years later I was recruited at the last minute to do a part in a
school play. I was in the middle of the first act when I forgot my lines. I stood in
the middle of the stage stock-still. I thought, ‘Everyone will hate me. I have
ruined the play. I’m an idiot.’”
Notice that Ben had these same thoughts going through his mind 40 years
later when he needed to make a presentation at work: “I’m an idiot. I can’t do
this. Everyone will hate me.” He had no idea before EMDR therapy why he was
feeling and thinking that way. He did not have a visual image of his
grandfather’s farm, or the book report, or the school play—he just had the
feelings and thoughts that went along with it. This was an automatic response to
an external “trigger,” just as much as “Roses are red” causes “Violets are blue.”
Nothing exists in a vacuum. Reactions that seem irrational are often exactly
that. But irrational doesn’t mean that there is no reason for them. It means that
the responses come from a part of our brain that is not governed by the rational
mind. The automatic reactions that control our emotions come from neural
associations within our memory networks that are independent of our higher
reasoning power. That’s why you can watch in amazement as you do something
you know you’ll regret later, or get drawn to the wrong people, or feel hurt by
someone you have no respect for, or yell at a loved one with little reason, or feel
powerless to shake a depression brought on by something that seems
inconsequential. It’s irrational but understandable and, more important, it’s
fixable. While genetics play an important role, in general, the basis of the
suffering is the way our memories of past experiences are stored in the brain,
and this can be changed. Happily, appropriately stored memories are also the
basis of joy and mental health. Later on, we’ll explore more about how the brain
and memories work.
WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER
We are all on a continuum of suffering and happiness, of sickness and health, of
families who contributed to our problems and those who were supportive and
loving. Likewise, the kinds of experiences we have encountered range from the
usual ones of childhood humiliations, failures, rejection and arguments to the
major events needed to diagnose posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), such as
major accidents, physical, sexual or emotional abuse, combat, or natural
disasters. In addition, for someone to be diagnosed with PTSD, they have to
have symptoms such as intrusive thoughts, sleep disturbances such as
nightmares or recurrent dreams, anxiety, “hyperarousal” where they are
extremely alert for danger and may jump at loud noises, or “numbing” where
they feel shut down and disconnected. They also try to stay away from reminders
of the event, but thoughts of it keep popping up anyway.
People with PTSD clearly have the negative experience stored in their brain
in a way that is highly disturbing. So when a combat veteran with PTSD thinks
back to an event that happened in Iraq or Afghanistan three years ago, he can
feel it in his body, with the thoughts and images that were there at the time of the
event. The veteran who came back from the Vietnam War can think of
something that happened more than 30 years ago, and the same thing happens. A
Marine who has gone through many tours of duty and witnessed many casualties
can be haunted by one particular death. When he thinks about it he can feel the
same helplessness, pain, sorrow and anger he felt at the time. And he responds to
the world around him with those emotions.
Likewise, if someone who was raped a year ago or molested 50 years ago
has PTSD, the past is present. When they think of the incident, it can feel as
though it’s happening all over again, or they can be fearful and anxious when
around certain people or places. But regardless of how long ago something
happened, and regardless of how long symptoms have been there, it doesn’t need
to be permanent. The research is clear on that. Also important, although a major
trauma such as robbery or violence is needed to give a formal diagnosis of
PTSD, a number of recent studies have demonstrated that everyday life
experiences, such as relationship problems or unemployment, can produce just
as many, and sometimes even more, symptoms of PTSD.
This has important implications for all of us. It shows that there is no clear
separation between kinds of events, nor is there a clear separation between
symptoms. Similar to those who suffer from PTSD, we all have had the
experience of feeling anxious, fearful, jumpy or shut off from others, thoughts
we can’t get out of our heads, guilt, or disturbing dreams. Sometimes those
reactions are based on a current situation and we need to think about it and get
the information needed to handle it. For others, the symptoms go away when the
situation changes. But for many of us, these feelings occur often or for no
apparent reason. These are generally signs that there are underlying unprocessed
memories causing them. These memories can be identified and treated. So it’s
useful to remember that whatever the persistent negative emotion, belief or
behavior that has been bothering you, it’s not the cause of suffering—it’s the
symptom. The likely cause is the memory that’s pushing it. Our memories are the
basis of both negative symptoms and of mental health. The key difference is the
way the memories are stored in the brain. If they are unprocessed, they can cause
us to overreact or act in a way that hurts us or those around us. If they are
“processed,” we are able to react in ways that serve our loved ones and ourselves
well.
WHY ME?
Those of us who were raised by parents who were unsupportive or abusive have
an idea of the kinds of experiences that might be causing some of our problems.
Others have read stories of really disturbed families and messed-up childhoods,
and believe “That’s not me. I had a good family so it makes no sense for me to
feel the way I do.” However, sometimes even with the most supportive family
members who believe they are doing the best for us, we can find ourselves
locked in a web of symptoms and pain that we don’t understand. And sometimes
the search for answers in therapy can lead us astray, because the clinician does
not have a clear idea about how memory works.
For instance, let’s take a look at our third example:
Why does Stacey have an almost constant feeling of dread, fears of
abandonment and an eating disorder? Strangest of all, she has repeated images
of the color red and a candle. It makes no sense to her, but it has been going on
for as long as she can remember.
Stacey tried one therapist after another for years. There are more than 100
different kinds of therapy, and each therapist brings a personal perspective,
which also changes the way the treatment is applied. Sometimes it’s difficult for
people to find the right treatment—or the right therapist. Also, clinical situations
can be complicated, because sometimes a childhood event is so disturbing that it
can completely overwhelm the brain’s natural ability to process it, and it’s either
not stored at all or becomes completely cut off so the person can’t remember it.
That was one of Stacey’s problems. After years of therapy with little change in
symptoms, she arrived at a therapist who tried a variety of avenues and also got
no results. Since Stacey had no idea where the problems came from, and had
abandonment issues, intimacy problems, eating difficulties, panic and anxiety,
her clinician said to her, “It really sounds like you have been sexually abused.”
In addition, because she had recurrent images of the color red and a candle, he
suggested that maybe it was ritual abuse because those images would fit right
into satanic worship ceremonies. As you can imagine, that made her anxiety
even worse. So for two years, they probed her life story, trying without success
to find memories of ritual abuse.
Since she was still suffering, Stacey tried another therapist where she learned
about EMDR. Because she didn’t have recall of anything she consciously felt
was connected to the feelings of dread, anxiety, fears of abandonment and her
eating disorder, the therapist targeted the symptoms that could most directly lead
to the underlying memory: the image of the color red and a candle. After the
appropriate preparation, during the memory processing procedures, images from
her childhood emerged and she saw herself at about 5 years old. It was her
birthday. Her daddy gave her a scented candle for her room and then they went
off in the car to her birthday luncheon. As they are driving along singing
together, a car runs a stoplight and crashes into them, killing her father. So if her
father died next to her on the way to her birthday luncheon, the symptoms
become explainable. As you can see, from this you could easily develop eating
problems, abandonment issues and persistent anxiety.
But sometimes memories can be misleading, because they can simply be
images that conform to the feelings we have. For instance, children can believe
that something bad happened to them because they heard a story or saw
something on television. Think of all the children who develop nightmares after
watching frightening movies. Was Stacey really in the car when her father was
killed? Stacey knew that her father had died in a car accident but she’d had no
memory of being with him. You don’t know unless you get confirmation. She
called up her mother and asked, “Mom, is it true? Was I with Dad when he
died?” Her mother said, “Well, yes dear, you were, but we thought you didn’t
want to talk about it because you never mentioned it.” So even though Stacey
had a very loving mother who wanted to protect her and no direct memory of her
father’s death, she had years of symptoms that seemed totally irrational. Now
they made sense. And more important, they disappeared after the memory was
processed.
It’s important to remember that we don’t have to undergo a major trauma
such as a father’s death or a car accident to develop symptoms that last for years.
For instance, Janice came in for therapy with a very long history of taking too
many antacids. At this point it was life threatening because she was taking them
so often that they were practically ripping up her stomach. She also had no
memory of why it had started; she only knew that she was horrified of getting
sick to her stomach. The clinician used the EMDR procedures you’ll be learning
to find the source of these feelings. What Janice then remembered was being in
grade school when the girl next to her in class vomited. Trying to stop herself,
the girl put her hand over her mouth and the vomit went sideways into Janice’s
hair. Janice went running out of the room feeling panicky, humiliated and
unclean. This was the memory at the bottom of the antacid abuse. After
processing the memory, she no longer felt the need for them.
So if there is a symptom, the message is that there is usually some
experience that caused or is contributing to it. Something happened, whether we
consciously remember it or not. Although we have come to rely heavily on pills
for feelings of well-being, many times they only mask the symptoms. The cause
of these problems is not typically an innate neurological difficulty or purely
biochemical. Of course our genetic makeup plays an important role and can
cause us to react strongly to certain experiences. Sometimes we can inherit
predispositions to a variety of vulnerable states, such as depression or anxiety.
However, even in these cases, certain types of life experiences are generally
needed to cause distress. Basically, our genetic makeup combines with our
experiences in ways that can make life go on “automatic pilot.”
The other message is that just because the symptoms are long lasting or
severe, it doesn’t necessarily mean there was a major trauma. Even seemingly
minor events from an adult perspective can be the cause. The bottom line is that
from the vantage point of a child, it felt traumatic at the time and the memory
was locked into the brain. These experiences may have happened long ago, and
we may not recognize how much they actually affected us. But the negative
emotions, behaviors, beliefs and sensations that cause chronic problems
generally can be tracked back to these unprocessed memories. In that way the
past stays present. This book will provide techniques that can help you make
sense of symptoms and identify their cause. We’ll also demonstrate ways in
which your thoughts, feelings and reactions can be transformed, lowering
distress and increasing confidence and comfort.
Extract from one of my text books on my Psychology Diploma Course. Self help techniques from EMDR Therapy - Francine Shapiro PHD