EMDR (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing) is one of the most researched trauma therapies, included in UK and World Health Organization guidance for post-traumatic stress disorder. It can offer shamanic work a staged way of making a person safe before any painful memory is touched, a clear account of how the past stays alive in us, and a way of working with images and body sensations, not only words.
What is EMDR? #
EMDR began with a chance discovery. In 1987 the American psychologist Francine Shapiro was walking in a park when she noticed that some disturbing thoughts had lost their “charge”, and that her eyes had been moving rapidly back and forth, diagonally, as they did. She began to use the eye movements deliberately, and then with others.1
In EMDR a person brings a disturbing memory to mind, with its image, feelings, body sensations and the negative belief that goes with it, whilst the therapist guides their eyes from side to side, or uses another form of left and right stimulation such as tapping. The full treatment has eight phases: history taking, preparation, assessment, desensitisation, installation of a positive belief, a scan of the body, closure and re-evaluation.2
Its theory, which Shapiro called Adaptive Information Processing, is that much suffering comes from memories that are “unprocessed”, stored in a way that still holds the emotions, physical sensations and beliefs of the time they happened. For someone with post-traumatic stress, in her words, “the past is present”.3
Does EMDR work, and do the eye movements matter? #
EMDR is widely accepted as a treatment for post-traumatic stress. The World Health Organization included it in its 2013 guidelines for conditions related to stress, and in the UK the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence recommends it for adults with PTSD after trauma not related to combat, alongside trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy.4
What has been argued over for decades is the eye movements. In 2001 the psychologists Paul Davidson and Kevin Parker pooled thirty-four studies and found EMDR no more effective than other exposure therapies, concluding that the evidence suggests the eye movements “are unnecessary”.5 In 2013 Christopher Lee and Pim Cuijpers pooled a different set of studies and found that adding eye movements had an effect in therapy studies that was “moderate and significant”, and a large one in laboratory studies of distressing memories.6 See What can shamanism offer EMDR? for a shamanic angle on the question.
Why does EMDR make a person safe before working on a memory? #
Because processing a trauma before a person is ready can overwhelm them again. Preparation is a whole phase of EMDR. Before any memory is worked on, the person builds resources such as a Safe or Calm Place, a remembered place carrying no bad associations, and a Container, an imagined place where disturbing material can be held until it is time to work on it.7 Shapiro’s self-help book tells readers not to go on with memory work if they cannot find such a place, or if they may have a complex disorder, and to see a therapist instead.8
Shamanic work starts from the same place. The Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer is a place of absolute safety and healing, and it always feels deeply safe; feeling unsafe or even uneasy in a journey is a sure sign that the middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer is bleeding in.9 People have to face particular issues at their own pace and in their own time, and when a practitioner barges past a client’s resistance, to the client it may at best feel disrespectful and invasive, and at worst downright abusive.10 EMDR has worked out, phase by phase, a way of honouring the same thing. See Is shamanic journeying safe?
How does the past stay alive in us? #
EMDR and shamanism both say it does, and both have a way of working with it. In EMDR, an unprocessed memory is stored apart from the rest of our memories, unable to link up with anything more helpful, so that it stays as it was. Shapiro describes such memories as “frozen in time”, which is why time does not heal all wounds.11
In shamanism, when an old event still stirs us up, energy of ours that was left behind in it is still caught up there. The shamanic word for the work of gathering back that energy, and letting the past go, is recapitulationRecapitulation. The practice of gathering ourselves back from earlier events, ‘dying to the past’, so that unresolved history no longer runs us. More about this, and there are many techniques for it. EMDR offers shamanic practitioners a detailed, tested account of how this looks from the side of memory and the nervous system. See What is recapitulation?
Does healing have to be talked through? #
No, and EMDR shows one way round words. It works with the image of a memory, the feelings and the body sensations as well as the beliefs that came with it, and includes a scan of the body for any disturbance that is left.12 Early wounds in particular are embodied and somatic, and are hard to reach through talking therapies alone. They usually need therapies that use imagery or that focus on sensation and movement, and shamanic journeying, which is largely non-verbal and can be very somatic, visceral and embodied, is one of them.13 EMDR belongs with those ways of working, and shamanic work and EMDR can sit alongside each other.
Can EMDR replace shamanic work, or shamanic work replace EMDR? #
Neither. Psychotherapy and shamanism each do things the other cannot, and neither is a good substitute for the other.14 EMDR is a professional therapy; Shapiro herself keeps the full processing of traumatic memories for therapists trained in it.15 Shamanism adds things EMDR does not attempt, such as finding the parts of us that have left and bringing them home. See What can shamanism offer EMDR? and What are PTSD and complex PTSD, and can shamanic work help?
