EMDR FORUM ARCHIVE, 2000
question about eye movements
J.W. · 09/04/03 at 2:24 PM ET
I had terrible insomnia after going off a number of medications that were sleep-inducing (although that was not the reason they were prescribed). The worst of the insomnia lasted nearly two years (I was getting 1-2 hours of sleep on most nights, and never more than four). One of the therapists I interviewed a number of months ago taught me the following tool, and I am wondering about its relationship to EMDR (there may be none, in which case, please feel free to delete this post). The tool works like this: You close your eyes and visualize a wall of safety deposit boxes with all the doors open. When the first thought pops into your mind, you visualize putting the thought in a box, closing it, and locking it. The next thought that arises goes in the next box and so on. As you lock each box, you tell yourself, "I can't think about that right now - it's time for me to sleep." The therapist claimed that with enough practice one gets to the point where one can simply close one's eyes, visualize all the doors clicking shut, and fall asleep almost immediately. This has not worked for me quite the way he described (I am unable to visualize an entire wall, so I just keep working one box over and over - fortunately it seems to have magical powers, in that it never gets full :-), but it has still proven, with practice, to be a very useful tool, and I am no longer desperately sleep deprived (meditation seems to have helped my mind figure out how to stay asleep for longer periods, something this tool did not help with). Here's where eye movements come in: I find that the only way this tool works is if I consciously and fairly exaggeratedly make my eyes follow the path of pulling out the drawer, opening it, closing it, shoving it back into the wall, closing the door, and then watching the key turn in the lock. (Initially, I found that the only way I could get this tool to work was if I imagined dropping the key into deep water and followed its zigzag path as it floated to the bottom, or followed the trajectory of the key as I imagined throwing it far away. These kinds of broader sweeps of the eye are no longer necessary for me to be able to fall asleep.) The tool does not yet work when the guinea pig in my brains is hell bent on running its little legs off on the wheel, but it does work pretty well most nights (I've been doing this for almost seven months now). It seems that what these eye movements do for me is enable me to separate from what I don't want to be thinking about and get where I really want to be (asleep). Does anyone have any thoughts on how this might/might not relate to what happens in EMDR? - J.W.
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