On EMDR (Part 4/4)

Let us now turn to the other authors: Of course, Dr. Shapiro is key since she is the inventor of this method. One of her techniques is to have the patient hold a memory of a painful event and then watch the hands of the therapist move in front of her, and then to think of a different solution to the event, something more desirable. Therein lies the rub: first, for real traumas it is rare that a patient can easily remember them. In fact the more painful the more repressed and the less likely it can be retrieved. My patients may take many months of reliving before they can even approach incest, for example. The pain is ineffable, and no one begins to resolve and integrate it before many, many months of reliving. But assuming they can remember it. Part of the solution for Shapiro and her cohorts is to help the patient imagine other solutions; in short, to produce imaginary resolutions. We must keep that in mind because it will remain imaginary. It hearkens back to the technique of directed imagination therapy or directed daydreaming.

I cite Ellen Curran’s work: (Guided Imagery. Beyond Words Publishing. Hillsboro, Ore. 2001) “Healing imagery is a way to use one’s imagination in a focused way to help the mind and body to self-heal.” (introduction) She claims it makes one more open to the unconscious mind, “making it possible for the inner self to be heard and therefore to be healed.” These are wonderful, liberal thoughts, but lack a bit in the science department. We have treated many imaginative artists who have no real access to their feelings other than what they paint. Using their imagination doesn’t given them access to deep inner feelings because no act of will, a cortical function, can offer access to feelings. Access works from the bottom up, not the reverse; it operates in terms of evolution. It means to descend down below the cortical control mechanism to enter into a different brain; that is the meaning of access. We have developed the techniques over thirty years to accomplish that.

If we imagine a solution we get symbolic resolution, not a real one; and we do not get radical changes in vital signs that we do with real resolution. We see this in our therapy when patients in mock primal therapy (the practice by untrained individuals) come to us from past lives therapy (an oxymoron, if there ever were one) and trip off into wildly imaginative ideas. Here they come close to a real event, the birth trauma, which we have researched and measured, and then skip over it and fall into fantasyland. The cortex rushes to the rescue as the person is inundated with heavy imprints. In every case, the valence of pain is so high as to make the real experience impossible. It does not offer access to feelings; quite the opposite. It is a sign to us of lack of access and of a disturbed personality. That is why we proceed slowly in small pieces of the feeling at a time. We begin in the present with feelings that can be integrated and then ride the key feeling down to the past in ordered fashion until months later we arrive at the key underlying sensation/feelings. Take hopelessness. The person has lost her job and feels hopeless, but more than that, deeply depressed. We allow that present context with its load of feeling to occur and then take the patient back slowly to the next level down where a deeper part of the same feeling resides.

Curran states that imagery is thought. Thought is thought, a cortical function. Imagery is subcortical, often limbic. Dreams are full of imagination but they happen when thoughts have been put to bed for a while. Now this whole idea of changing images and/or thoughts runs through a wide gamut of therapies, including Behavior Therapy, Ego Psychology, Rational-Emotive Therapy, and many others. They believe that you must change your ideas to change your behavior; or, vice versa, change your behavior to change your ideas. Thus, you go into an elevator where you are phobic and imagine very relaxing images—you are floating on a cloud, for example. It is as true in hypnosis and in EMDR. You can imagine being relaxed but the imprinted memory is anything but, so that the frontal cortex, is playing mind games on the rest of the brain and body. It is fooling itself, thus cannot be a real, permanent solution. The cortex, with its unlimited ability at self-deception, deceiving itself away from real feelings lying below, is an expert at this game. But is that cure or healing? It is repression and anti-healing. If you are tense due to a lifetime of neglect, does imagining that you are floating on a cloud change that? It is another quick fix, and like all quick fixes, it must be temporary, at best.
You can imagine telling off someone at work who is bothering you. Or you can imagine floating in a pool while thinking of a troubling event. When you stop imagining who are you? The same old fearful human being, the person who is terrified of women because he lived with a mother who was a monster. No hand wave is going to erase that.