EMDR Forum Archive, 1999
Re: new article on EMDR
Sandra Paulsen, Ph.D. · 2/17/00 at 12:14 am ET
Well, on my first post to this list I posted the following in the wrong place, and so move it here, where I intended it. I just reviewed the discussion on this subject and wanted to be heard too. You see, I was trained in the University of Hawaii's clinical psych program that strongly emphasized cognitive behavioral approaches. My dissertation and first years of practice and many conference papers were all from a cognitive behavioral perspective. I specialized in the treatment of anxiety disorders and trauma using cognitive behavioral methods, a la Meichenbaum, Beck and Foa. I used exposure and cognitive restructuring to treat PTSD and had a large clinical practice at the Pacific Institute of Behavioral Medicine in Honolulu in the early 1990's (until I left to move to California). Before that, there was the internship at the Veterans Administration in Honolulu, including the Vietnam Vet Center. I was also a staff psychologist and then Acting Chief psychologist at the Queens Medical Center in Honolulu, which had an anxiety disorders specialty treatment program when I was there. In short, the cognitive behavioral treatment of PTSD was arduous and painful for both patient and clinician, and the results were slow and modest, if we could get patients to sit still long enough to complete the exposure treatment. Then I learned how to use EMDR and everything changed. The results were so much more expeditious and straightforward, elegant and fruitful, that it shook my theoretical foundations to the core. Suddenly, I was causing relatively rapid cures (though for complex PTSD the path is slower, but still faster than with other methods). Regarding cognitive behavioral theorists/ researchers /clinicians who refuse to see the truth when it stares them in the face: It continues to amaze me that people can look right at a gorilla that falls out of a tree and say, 1) it isn't happening, or 2) let's measure the gorilla with a micrometer, and quibble about the millimeters. Look -- the treatment effects are dramatic, and the sooner people stop spreading misinformation to scare people away needlessly, the better the world's traumatized patients will be, because they'll be getting the most appropriate, organic, and cost-effective treatment. A final note -- there is a lot of undiagnosed dissociation out there, which requires a special protocol, available in the literature. Any EMDR's with bad outcomes that I have heard about have been when clinicians used this power tool without appropriate training, and broke open dissociative defenses without having a strategy in place to assist the patient through it. So to clinicians and patients alike -- EMDR's effects are real and potent, much more so than CBT alone. To the skeptics I say --- go try it yourself on some baggage you carry around. It's effect is greater than your skepticism.
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