EMDR FORUM ARCHIVE, 2000
EMDR and FAD THERAPIES
SKEPTIC · 02/10/04 at 1:54 PM ET
From the New England Journal of Skepticism: http://www.theness.com/articles/emdrandfadtherapies-nejs0401.html There have been many roto-rooting techniques, foist upon the public in the past, like L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics and the use of his “going down the time-track” ENGRAM dissolution techniques, to eliminate the brain traces of developmental incidents still distressingly residing somewhere in one’s neurons. And going back further still, there were those laboratory perception experiments, popular in the 1940s and 1950s, which alluded to some sort of pre-perceptual brain mechanism that actually operates to distort what we perceive (before we actually see something clearly) so as to satisfy specific physical cravings or personal desires. The constructs developed to explain such phenomena were never proven but were later employed to influence people’s market behavior and, in the case of Dianetic Counseling, to dramatically cure many illnesses or symptoms of distress. The appeal of such ideas often resided in how quickly such techniques might work, given client disappointment with traditional methods of influencing behavior. That’s the real problem beclouding any consideration of the effectiveness of EMDR or any other dramatic procedures. Nevertheless, if EMDR works, as its proponents claim, we really need to thoroughly and comprehensively investigate why it works, so that its utility as a therapeutic measure can be extended to help more people. From Shapiro Series Part 2: A trauma (any negative disturbance that overwhelms the system) causes the Adaptive Information Processing System to become imbalanced and processing becomes blocked. So the negative disturbance gets stored in implicit memory with the emotions and the physical sensations that were there at the time of the event. Now you go walking around with it and when somebody looks at you the same way that the boss did and you feel your insides going and you have absolutely no idea why, it's because that old experience is not processed. So what we're trying to do in EMDR is identify those "hot" unprocessed events so that they can be appropriately moved into adaptive resolution and storage. Is the Adaptive Information Processing System a conceptual theory or a scientific theory? If it is a scientific theory can you provide the empirical evidence that supports or disconfirms it? How was it tested?
Sandra,
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