I I am Introduced to EMDR I went without extraordinary expectations. My friend Uri Bergmann, like me a psychotherapist but more experimental than I (he was into hypnosis and pain management), had learned of a new therapeutic method called EMDR--Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. He had been impressed with the results he had achieved with it, particularly in one case, and now he wanted to learn more. He asked if I would accompany him to the Loew's Hotel on New York's Lexington Avenue for a weekend Level I training session. I somewhat reluctantly agreed. The year was 1993. I was forty years old. My life was about to change forever. There were about eighty of us in a conference room--several, I found out later, from abroad--all of us staring with some wonder at the striking, five-foot-eleven, dynamic, fortyish woman named Francine Shapiro who talked with confidence and clarity about the new form of psychotherapy she had developed. I confess I didn't immediately grasp most of it. Her ideas were derived from cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy (put simplistically, what you feel comes from what you think), whereas I, trained as a psychoanalyst, believed in the influence of early life experiences in the formation of personality, conflict, and self. Her talk was highly technical, filled with words and phrases I would come to integrate only later, but I was impressed by her ardor and by the fluidity of both her words and her movements. Throughout the day, she seemed comfortable and self-assured teaching her new method. We broke for lunch. I remember telling Uri that I was neither impressed nor unimpressed. Clearly the woman was not a wacko, and while I found it difficult to imagine myself using the approach with my own patients, I did not put down his interest. "Stick around for the experiential this afternoon," he said, though it had not occurred to me to leave. After lunch Dr. Shapiro lectured for another hour. (Now I was growing restive.) We took a break, and finally the chairs in the room were rearranged, and manuals in hand, we broke into groups of three--"patient," "therapist," and "observer"--to begin what is known as the practicum, the hands-on session. Watching over us was a facilitator, someone already versed in EMDR practice, to guide our efforts and correct our mistakes. Though doing the practicum with a friend is discouraged, Uri and I fortunately managed to stay together, perhaps anticipating the assignment of the third member of our group, a man in need of considerable support, who was so patently nervous that his pencil for note-taking trembled visibly in his hands. Uri and I exchanged glances, concerned with how he would perform. Well, to begin with, he was by default the therapist, for although we were to switch roles after forty-five minutes, it fell out that for the first go-round I would be his patient and Uri the observer. Soon the facilitator arrived to give us our initial instructions. A sixtyish gentleman from Southern California with a laid-back teaching approach. I was feeling shaky. Just my luck, I thought. A vulnerable therapist and a laissez-faire facilitator. Too, the room was noisy and the chairs uncomfortable. Not exactly an ideal environment or an atmosphere conducive to optimal learning. And proof that we do not choose the spot for our epiphanies. The first step in EMDR therapy is to have the therapist guide the patient to selecting a target--some troubling aspect of the past or present that the patient wants to rework. A traumatic event--such as a severe accident or the death of a loved one--is a target; so is something ostensibly far less dramatic, like an upsetting memory or a recurrent dream that has replayed in the mind for many years. The target I chose is known in psychoanalytic terms as a screen memory, something that in and of itself does not seem particularly significant but that, like a dream, disguises deeper, more significant material lying underneath. In this memory, I must be age four or five. It is afternoon. My mother is in the hospital, though I don't know why, and I am being looked after not by Mrs. Kenneth, my usual baby-sitter, a kindly elderly women whom I have grown to love and trust, nor by my grandmother, to whom I am attached, but by a strange woman who wears a white uniform with white harlequin glasses and an expression of hostility and disapproval. The grassy area behind our three-story apartment building in Fresh Meadows, Queens, New York, slopes gently upward. She is at the top, and I am at the bottom, innocently wanting to go to a playground nearby. The strange woman is not only hostile to my request but somehow gives me the impression that I am being "bad" for feeling lonely. I am scared of her, vulnerable, and confused. I wish my mother were home. The memory had remained remarkably vivid in its details, and I described it without faltering. Uri looked at me with his usual analytic contemplation; meanwhile, the unkempt therapist was staring blankly at the manual, attempting to review the instructions. "What's the negative belief about you that goes with the memory?" he mechanically read aloud. As I'll explain more fully in Chapter 2, negative cognition refers to an irrational thought ("I'm worthless," or "I'm stupid") rather than a reality-based one ("It's in the past and I'm safe now"). "It's my fault," I replied. After the protocol was set (and we will discuss its details in Chapter 2), the therapist began by forgetting the most obvious features of the process. "Aren't you supposed to use hand movements?" Uri asked him. "Isn't the patient supposed to be following those movements with his eyes?" Yes. The therapist had forgotten. Now the facilitator arrived and demonstrated the correct technique. Between us, Uri and I worked out the hand movements; Uri had to patiently explain to the therapist what his next moves should be and encourage him to keep going. But whatever focus I had mustered was long gone. I remember feeling frustrated, disgusted, resentful, and annoyed. We began again. Once more I summoned up the target memory, but this time I followed the therapist's hand movement with my eyes. Left right . . . left right . . . left right . . . All of a sudden--bang!--a sensation appeared out of nowhere. I felt something wrapped around my neck! The grip was tightening, and I gasped for air. I was choking! Quite literally, although I was sitting straight in my chair, I felt my back pinned against a wall. Adrenaline pumped through my system, and my chest was heaving. I was panting as though I had been running for miles. ("Your nostrils were flaring like a racehorse," Uri later told me.) Except for the terror, the rest was confusion. What or who was choking me? Was this a birth memory of the umbilical cord that almost strangled me? Suddenly I saw a blurry face with expressionless eyes. Was it my sister or the bully next door with hands around my throat? I felt as if I were facing death! The scene was as vivid as a flashback in a movie; both the sights and the physical sensations were palpable. I was able to be both inside the memory and outside it, participant and observer. For anyone, it would have been a remarkable experience. For me, an experienced therapist, it was mind-blowing. As the image began to fade, I heard music, faint at first but then growing clearer: Jackson Browne's "Doctor My Eyes." Doctor, my eyes Cannot see the sky. Is this the prize For having learned how not to cry? When the flashback ended, it was immediately followed by another, then another, then another. Five memories in all, each equally vivid, equally powerful. I'm walking into the high school cafeteria. Two tough kids, far bigger than I, grab me without warning, push me back against a pole, and hold my arms behind it. They say nothing, they are laughing as they try to terrorize me, but I am trapped and helpless. The worst part is that other schoolmates pass by, either not caring or pretending not to see what's happening. It reminds me of not being protected from the bullies I encountered in kindergarten or first grade. Finally I am able to wriggle my arms free and break away. I run over to my usual table and sit down. My friends notice nothing. I am alone. As the memory fades, I quickly jump to another. I'm in the park with a friend, both of us nine years old. My family has just moved into the neighborhood. (We have moved from Fresh Meadows, a predominantly Jewish middle-class enclave, to Elmhurst, more blue collar, where Jews are a rarity.) Once again, I'm menaced by older, bigger boys who demand to know if I've been baptized. I don't answer, out of defiance more than fear. They hold my friend and me, pinning our arms behind us, and splash filthy puddle water on our heads and faces. I look at one of them squarely in the eye and ask why they have to do this to us. He is briefly taken aback by my trying to reason with him, but moments later they continue splashing us with dirty water. Some adults are in the park and ignore the incident, pretending nothing is happening. The scene ends and abruptly the next begins. I'm in my early twenties, traveling by bus along a winding road in Martinique. It's an old, top-heavy bus, and the driver swerves back and forth, right and left, to avoid a wildly driven car. The bus goes out of control. There is absolute silence for what feels like ten seconds, all of us knowing what is about to happen. The bus turns over into a ditch. It is now filled with screams, though not my own. During the split second when my head is catapulted to the metal ceiling, the words That's it flash through my mind. I believe I have experienced the final moments of my life. As the image fades into the darkness, the next one pops up. I'm nineteen, a camp counselor in Maine. I decide to try snorkeling, so I put on borrowed gear and jump off a dock into the lake water. After enjoying the underwater sights, I surface, believing the tube of the snorkel is out of the water. As I draw in a deep breath, I suck water into my lungs and am immediately seized by exhaustion. Panic grips me. I am suffocating. I grab the water with my weakening arms; twenty feet separate me from safety. The last few feet are the hardest. Somehow I pull myself up onto the dock and collapse, trying to catch my breath. When at last I can stand, I stagger to the beach, where I lie facedown for what must be half an hour, my head buzzing with the thought that I almost drowned. No one knows nor will ever know unless I tell them. Alone again. "Time's up," the facilitator interrupted. "We have to switch roles for the next pairing." I was stunned as I slowly returned to the real world. Uri was looking at me, his expression poker-faced. My therapist, drenched in sweat, was both overwhelmed and amazed. He had been swept along on an unexpected ride through a series of my traumatic memories. The pencil had dropped from his hands, and the manual sat upside down in his lap. Uri reminded us of the last step: the return to the original target. And then--a miracle! I was barely able to recall the original scene, let alone evoke the emotions it had originally produced. It was as though the nurse baby-sitter never existed; the grief and terror had vanished. The screen was stripped away, and the vivid flashbacks and traumatic memories I'd been carrying for years emerged from the shadows and were freed. Once the memories that were strung along the associated memory pathways had been processed through, the original target unfroze and its emotional power was swept away. Uri stepped in to handle the final eye movements for me. I saw myself releasing my own hands from my neck. For the first time I realized that throughout my life, I myself had been choking off my life forces, my emotions, creativity, and self-love. As I finished, I heard Bob Marley singing these lines from "Redemption Song": Emancipate yourself from mental slavery None but ourselves can free our mind. An hour later, Uri and I left the hotel. We walked in silence, too overwhelmed to speak of what I had undergone. I knew that I had experienced something profound, something transcendent. My first exposure to EMDR had rocked my world, and my mind was racing wildly, jumping from patient to patient, wondering how each of them might respond to this new therapy. I was staggered by the implications of what lay ahead. Excerpted from Emotional Healing at Warp Speed: The Power EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) by David Grand All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.