Re:Lytle Study - Not Just the Abstract

Sandra

"5. A curiosity to me is the use of a breathing focus task. Although it was included as a measurement method to sample
self reported intrusive thoughts, I believe it may have introduced a confounding factor into the treatment conditions.
Participants reclined, thought about their stressful event, closed their eyes, and were instructed to imagine and think
about this event for 2 min, after which they attended to their breathing for 10 minutes. At one minute intervals, they
recorded their mental content. This may be an exposure method. This confounding treatment (or potentially reactive
assessment method) occurred across all conditions. There was a main effect observed using ANOVA on repeated
measures of the breathing focus tasks. "

I am not a researcher and therefore have limited comments I can make on any studies. This part of your post stood out for me. As an EMDR client I wonder why any breathing was used and have not met this aspect in the work I have done with EMDR sessions. To me it would really impact how things develop. Now that, through therapy, I have been able to change my own breathing patterns etc I can see using breathing to calm myself when a memory comes up. I do that now actually. It is not part of EMDR though. If I had been asked to do this in the beginning of my therapy I would have had a very negative response and it would have been quite problematic. If I am to do more EMDR, which is likely, and I have to spend 10 minutes breathing then to me it is the breathing that is the focus and not the EMDR.

It would have been valuable if the study, which I agree has a questionable sample size, had used breathing for one group and not for another.

Anyway, from what I know about EMDR, Research methods and stats etc, this 10 minutes of breathing really throws off this study.

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