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Psychotherapy with Don Elium, MA MFT/EMDR/BSFF/iSt

Part I

"My personal growth was going about 10 miles per hour. With EMDR I am traveling 80!" says a psychotherapy client after several EMDR sessions. EMDR, Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing developed by Francine Shapiro, Ph.D., can rapidly resolve feelings-that won't-go-away and restore that person to a positive life direction.  After fifteen years of research and development, Dr. Shapiro trains psychotherapists and healing clinicians in the use of this profound tool for deep personal healing and change.

Feelings-that-won't-go-away
Child abuse, death of a spouse or child, car accident, losing a job, divorce, abandonment of a child, and falling from a roof are examples of events known to cause overwhelming and intense emotion. Because the person is unable to feel and live through all the emotions at one time, the unconscious mind stores some of them to deal with later, when one's basic survival is restored and one emerges from the shock of the event or events. The "unfelt emotions can become locked in the nervous system and over time they began to find a way out through symptoms like tearing up over a basically small problem, becoming far more angry at a person than their behavior called for, overwhelming or debilitating sadness on holidays or anniversaries of close ones who have died, or rage long after an event has passed.

The clinical term for these continued reactions to long past events is called "post traumatic stress.  This term emerged from the experiences of many Vietnam veterans upon their return to their lives back home, such as flashbacks, nightmares and terrors, lack of concentration, and inability to become close emotionally to others. In World War II the experiences were labeled "shell shock.   After the Korean Conflict it was called "battle fatigue."  After much research in to these extreme reactions, it has been found that post traumatic stress reactions also apply to disruptive and unexpected critical life events, family tragedies, emotionally and/or physically abusive childhoods, domestic violence, common divorce, or any event that produces intense feelings that are too great to resolve at all at one time. As one client puts it, "It's a feeling that wells up in me. One minute I am loving my husband deeply, and the next minute I can't stand him and see him as this horrible person I hate and he has hardly said anything!" Post-traumatic stress causes quick and unexplainable reactions to present moment situations that don't appear to merit them.

Who Has Post Traumatic Stress?
Many people today have some form of post traumatic stress (PTS.) Many pre-modern tribal cultures took much care to allow tribal members, especially warriors, adequate time for the natural release of emotions following any traumatic event. Their survival depended on strong leaders and people able to be totally clear in the moment of danger, and not having past hurt, pain, and revenge feelings imposing on that present moment. Unresolved feelings of grief and anger would distract and make them falter at important times of risk and threaten the survival of the tribe. Rituals, dancing, and carefully orchestrated ceremonies to evoke deep emotion bring this deeply repressed hurt and pain into the present to be released and resolved. A potent scenario from the novel Hanta Yo depicts a conflict between the tribal chief and his people. The chief had recently lost his wife and children, wiped out by an enemy war party. Only when he had fully grieved many days in special shelter would his people allow him to take his place again as leader. Without this grieving process, they knew their chief would carry revenge and could risk the safety of everyone.

In modern society, most employees are given one day off if a close relative dies. They are expected back to work as soon as possible–sometimes the same day. We have forgotten the wisdom of honoring the natural emotional process that needs help after traumas. We therefore routinely lock trauma after trauma into our nervous systems and find ourselves over and under-reacting to present moment events. We have virtually no way of releasing and dealing with the intense feelings that haunt marriages, parent-child relations, and boss-employee battles.

Although our bookstores are packed with the psychological knowledge to deal with everything from divorce to painful childhoods, we all struggle to make permanent changes in our irrational reactions to those closest to us. We know volumes about testing and describing personality differences and compatibilities, yet we all have tremendous problems in relating to one another. Why is this immense intellectual knowledge and understanding so impotent in our world today? The problem lies less in the differences between us and more in our inability to adapt to these differences due to post traumatic stress.

How Does Post Traumatic Stress Effects People?
My first series of EMDR sessions focused on my post traumatic stress reaction to an Oakland, CA mugging that occurred ten years prior. I did not classify this event as a possible cause of post traumatic stress until did EMDR on it. Denial is common with those who have experienced traumatic events. After the assault and robbery, I talked about it in my therapy and expressed strong anger, hurt, and rage. I thought that was the end of it, except later I noticed a tension whenever I saw young men who were dressed as my muggers, or when I drove by the street where it happened. Over the next ten years, I labeled my reactions as normal, something I'll just have to live with, and literally learned to live with my adrenaline rushes and lingering fears whenever I walked at night, even in safe well-it areas. Ten years later, during my first EMDR sessions, I felt the intense terror I had repressed during the mugging pass through me. I felt great relief. After the third session, I noticed that when I turned off the light before I went to bed, I was not afraid.

I was amazed. I was to aware that I have been afraid before. I only noticed it because what I had come to know as normal for ten years was not there anymore. Other benefits included the cessation of a recurring nightmare and no unrealistic fear nor rushes of adrenaline when seeing young men that dressed like the robbers of that night. After seven sessions I could recall the entire event without the former numbness and fear. It became a memory of an unfortunate event that was over; and no longer one whose symptoms continued to intrude on me day and night. Many clients report similar results after psychotherapy with EMDR. It is important to note that not all post traumatic stress events can be concluded in several sessions, though some can. The severity of the symptoms, the degree of trauma, as well as the age when the trauma occurred, affects the length of therapy required. EMDR does, however, often speed up the therapy's pace from what many therapists and clients have grown accustomed. Clients who have struggled for years with unresolved grief of a loved one, bouts of anxiety, panic, depression, nightmares, and recurring emotional outbursts have noticed that, after EMDR, their automatic, fear induced behaviors gone. After one client sat down from speaking her mind in a business meeting, she realized her panic attack was not there during the meeting as before. For the first time ever, she not only spoke at the meeting, but addressed a long-standing problem that had bothered her. In short, the post-traumatic stress emotion that was locked into her nervous system, causing the symptom, such as generalized fear, was no longer there. Clients who are successful with EMDR often notice their changes after they realize they are without the symptom. They have new responses they do not require the use of their will power to force a symptom away. It is no longer there. People respond more to their environment and react less to the ghost-like fears that haunt them from the past.

Natural Versus "White Knuckle Change"
Many approaches to personal growth use affirmations and the engagement of will power. I have often used these methods and found them helpful, but difficult to maintain. These methods alone produced what I call "white knuckle change. I had to hang on tight to my thought and will power to keep the change happening. With EMDR, the changes fall into place naturally. I "find myself responding to others in appropriate ways. When someone hurts me I say "Stop!î When I am sad I feel it. When I need to confront someone, I do it. Personal boundaries start to appear where they belong.

Therefore, psychotherapy with EMDR allows us to stay with the present moment by releasing the locked emotion that keeps us out of touch. Instead of fighting phantoms that are projections of our past, it restores our ability to respond naturally to the present moment versus "white knuckling it with dysfunctional behavior or battling it with positive thinking and will power. The self is allowed to blossom and act without interference from past trauma.

How Does It Work?
Research is now in progress to understand why EMDR is so effective with emotionally-event-based trauma. Several theories abound, but none are conclusive. One popular theory holds that EMDR taps into an already existing healing mechanism in the brain that is also activated by REM (Rapid Eye Movement) dream sleep. When a person is dreaming, his or her eyes move rapidly as the dream works to manage and process the anxieties of past experiences. People who do not sleep for days suffer more the mental instability that come from the lack of REM sleep than from physical exhaustion. Their unresolved anxieties and emotions affect their mental stability. EMDR may be tapping into the REM phenomenon while awake, and healthfully restoring feelings that are locked into the nervous system.

When trauma is locked into the nervous system, a negative judgment holds it in place. The negative judgment about my mugging was, "I don't know how to stand up for myself. I knew this was correct, because when I thought this phrase in connection with the mugging, I felt extremely nervous. Upon completion of the psychotherapy with EMDR I could think "I don’t know how to stand up for myself without such a reaction. My new self-judgment became "I know how and when to stand up for myself and others. Before, when I said this phrase, I did not believe it. After completion, I was amazed to find the phrase felt naturally true. I found that since I have a new sense of personal boundaries and discernment in situations where I need to act for my best interests and the interest of the ones whom I care about.

Dr. Shapiro uses the metaphor of the digestion of food to explain this healing reflex of the brain and nervous system. Food is broken down to liquid—some for growth, some for fat, and some for waste. The body's metabolic system knows exactly what to do with every molecule of food that is consumed. When it is done the food is no longer there. The nervous system is similar in that it knows what to do with every feeling a person has, as long as it not locked up in the nervous system by trauma. I locked feeling is like a piece of food that resists digestion and sits in the stomach causing discomfort and irritation. EMDR unlocks that feeling and releases it to the already existing network of nervous system, that knows exactly how to process every aspect of the feeling until it is used up. a person is then able to be more alive and fresh in the present.

Therefore, psychotherapy with EMDR works in at least two areas: releasing the locked trauma into the nervous system for "digestion,î and the replacing of the negative judgment of oneself with a realistic and carefully crafted positive one that draws on the human instinct of surviving and thriving. (This ends part one, to read Part II, click the following link:  EMDR Article Part II)

Don Elium, MA, MFT is a Licensed Marriage & Family, Therapist (MFC28381) in private practice in the San Francisco Bay Area, Walnut Creek, CA. He is a university psychology instructor, consultant to corporations regarding post-traumatic stress and employee relations, as well as critical incident therapist for bank and other robbery and violently assaulted victims. He has worked extensively with adults who were abused as children or in adult abusive relationships. He is trained by EMDR creator Francine Shapiro, Ph.D., and is a facilitator with her organization in training other therapists in the use of EMDR. He uses EMDR along with BSFF-Be Set Free Fast/iSt: integrative States therapy.

For more information about Richard Ross, visit
http://www.emotionalfreedom.com
or call him at (505) 828-3527

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