Francine Shapiro created EMDR through her own experience. Many clients are curious what EMDR is, and how it is used to treat trauma. It is not always indicated or appropriate! I use a combination of EMDR and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, because we trauma memory has often bypassed the executive functioning parts of our brains and lives in the body in certain ways. The body reveals the ways in which trauma is held.
In a recent training with Ana Gomez, she said that the body is the mirror to the trauma. She used the analogy of Medusa. When Jason and the Argonauts encounter Medusa, they cannot look directly at her, and Jason only defeats her by using a mirror. In short, looking right at her would have turned him into stone, but looking at her through the mirror, he actually had a chance of confronting her and fighting her.
In the same ways, the body mirrors the trauma memory that is held, and sometimes going straight to just the memory can be too difficult and terrifying to confront, head on. Exposure therapy and just talking about it over and over is very damaging and causes trauma-reenactment, it causes the client to re-experience the trauma–a re-victimization, which is what we absolutely do not want to do together in therapy!
In this article about EMDR, Francine Shapiro, the therapist who created EMDR based on her own experience, explains the different applications. Check it out if you’re curious about it.
An Expert Answers on EMDR – Francine Shapiro