EMDR Forum Archive, 1999
To Brian: A final observation regarding the interaction
Shapiro · 2/21/00 at 3:48 pm ET
Brian, I've noted repeated posts of yours above, stating that the reason for my reaction to you was based upon your scientific position. I've decided to clarify the situation. I must admit I was tired from teaching a weeklong course when I responded to you. So perhaps I did overreact. Perhaps you are simply a sincere clinician with sincere questions. If so, I certainly apologize to you for misjudging you and not showing sufficient patience. Let’s review the history and see if we can come to some understanding of why I asked you to be more moderate in your statements and, more importantly, find some degree of closure: 1) The first post I found of yours on the list was a response to a client asking for advice on the use of EMDR with his phobia. In your reply you said that "overnight cures (touted by EMDR proponents) . . . are few and far between." This seems to be a slur on EMDR clinicians—intimating that they tout overnight cures: Which they do not. It also seems to say to the client that through their supposed claims EMDR clinicians mislead the public. This also seems to be a slur on clinicians you don’t even know. 2) The second part of the post stated to the client that "finger wagging won’t make your social phobia go away." This appeared disrespectful of the approach and advised the client that EMDR was simply bilateral stimulation. But it is not. It seems that you know this, because in other posts you claim the EMDR is "repackaged cognitive behavior therapy." Therefore saying EMDR was simply "finger wagging" in this post seems misleading to the client. 3) The next post I saw of yours told a client’s mother (who signed herself "Loving Mom") that her child had recovered from EMDR because of "placebo effect," akin to "faith healing." I must admit I saw red on this one. As a fellow clinician, how would you respond if someone had said this to your client? How would you respond if someone had said this to your mother? Saying you’re "happy she recovered," in my opinion, does not set the stage to tell her that her child recovered from "placebo" when repeated studies have found EMDR superior to alternate treatments. There are multiple comparative studies of EMDR that show robust effectiveness. Even the waitlist studies have effect sizes and outcomes much larger than can be attributable to placebo or non-specific effects. The jury might be out on the contribution of eye movements, but abundant studies show that EMDR works with PTSD. The only exceptions are ones where only one memory out of many in multiply traumatized vets were treated (e.g., Devilly et al., 1999; Jensen, 1994; Macklin et al., 2000) and in the other Devilly study you’ve been mentioning (and besides the problems I’ve already mentioned, they had no expert fidelity raters to boot). That’s out of at least 14 controlled studies on PTSD. The large majority of studies are robustly positive. Futher, in alternate posts you say EMDR is effective because of the cbt elements. So, clearly, "placebo" was not an appropriate word, and to my mind it was an extremely insensitive response to a mother rejoicing at the recovery of her child from the deep depression brought on by the death of a loved one. 4) Your next series of posts claimed that EMDR was simply ineffective and when Dr. Greenwald pointed out that EMDR had been placed on the empirically supported list by the researchers of an APA taskforce, you claimed that this level of support was not sufficient to claim EMDR was effective for PTSD. Yet in another post to a social phobia client you claimed that cbt techniques were "validated and effective" for social phobia. However, cbt treatments for social phobia were given exactly the same empirical status by the taskforce as EMDR for civilian PTSD . So I don’t get the reasoning. Why say that the cbt social phobia treatments are "fully validated as effective" but EMDR treatment for PTSD is "placebo" when they have exactly the same level of support? Isn’t this dismissive attitude also misleading clients? So, ultimately Brian, it wasn’t that you disagreed with me, but rather the backdrop of apparently misleading statements you made to clients. Each post seeming to contradict the other depending upon the dismissive point you wanted to make. So yes Brian, it seemed to me that you had a definite agenda and I got tired of posting repeated studies and repeated questions which you chose not to answer. I’ve been conversing with critics for years. I’ve never censored and I’ve never cut off anyone from this list. I’ve also never responded so angrily before. "SR" is quite right, and I’m not happy about that. But if you do want to have a constructive conversation with anyone about EMDR, I suggest that you at least consider the sequence of posts I’ve give above. It might help to clear the slate and move onto to something more useful. Nothing would please me more than a truly constructive discussion between EMDR and cbt theorists. Perhaps it can be accomplished in the future. What happens on this forum is up to the BOL editor. In various other posts you’ve attributed motivations to clinicians, clients, and to me. I would appreciate your not attributing motivations also to a disinterested observer.
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