EMDR/Trauma/Effective Therapy

The following reference will lead you to a paper by Judith Lewis Herman, MD, who is recognized for her work with trauma, faculty at the Cambridge Hospital, Harvard Medical School. (EMDR, if I remember correctly, was originally used as treatment for PTSD.) She is credited for using the term "Complex Post Truamatic Stress Disorder." In her book Trauma and Recovery, she maintains that servere repeated trauma, that which is normally considered a cause of PTSD such as war and captivity, actually create a more complicated set of emotional responses. Additionally, these responses aren't limited to that which is traditionally considered unique to PTSD. Many repeated and horrible abuses, like that of child abuse, cause Complex PTSD which in the past has been called various things: hysteria, shell shock, PTSD, and host of other personality disorders.

She maintains in order to recover from this a therapist must engage a patient in a relationship with people, including that of the therapist. In the link to which I refer you below, she discusses what she believes to be the common thread in therapy, all therapies including EMDR, which heals. She notes that any therapy, regardless of the dogma connected to the model heals due to a certain set of common qualities in the therapy yet to be fully explained by science, including that of EMDR. I guess you could conclude that absent those qualities that any therapy will be ineffective regardless of the model.

Here's how to find the paper:

--www.harvard.edu
--click on search at the top of the Web page
--in the Google search option type "Judith Lewis Herman"
--click on "The Craft and Science in the...
--(For exact title see above "Wow--Link")

Do you feel that EMDR can be effective without a skillful therapist? Is it the technique alone that heals, and the therapist, regardless of skill or talent, merely applies a set of strictly defined rules to the technique in order to render healing effectively every single time? If this is the case, shouldn't EMDR be more widely taught, a sort of psychological first aid generally known by all people as a first line of defense against emotional injury, and certainly as a psychological physical therapy treatment on old emotional traumas on self, friends, and family?

Or is Herman correct? The common thread that heals in all therapy is the skill of the therapist and relationship with the patient as the patient learns to reconnect with relationships in the world? It's not the differences in therapy that makes one better than the other. Instead, it's a common quality held by very skillful therapists that heals regardless of the model to which he or she adheres.

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