Trauma-based Etiology Would Have Best Response

• Predicting Who Will Respond to EMDR by Peter M. Barach, Ph.D., 7/22/97
  
  

In determining which patients would have the best response, it seems to me at this point that it has been those that have been more traumatized in their subjective experience that have seemed to respond best to EMDR. Even patients who have the same diagnosis such as panic disorder can have extremely different subjective interpretations of similar life events. In using the example of panic disorder, one patient may be simply misinterpreting events cognitively with comparatively less overall stress while the one who responds well to EMDR was severely traumatized due to possibly constitutional or genetic variables. In other words, what traumatized severely one patient may have just created high states of anxiety and worry in another. It seems the difference in the response to EMDR and the cure is dependent upon the phenomenonological etiology and whether the patient initiated the locking characteristic that severe trauma seems to have.

• Small *t* trauma by Francine Shapiro, 8/12/97