Reprinted from the Health District's quarterly publication mailed to district residents (Spring 2003)

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) helps victims of trauma replace their painful memories with more positive thoughts. While following the light patterns on a light board, a rape victim, for example, might repeat to herself that the crime wasn’t her fault and therefore she shouldn’t feel shame.

The next time she thinks of the event, the memories won’t be as traumatic.

EMDR uses eye movements, most commonly following patterns on a light board or other forms of rhythmical stimulation, to tap the brain’s information processing system. Once a person’s troubling feelings are accessed, their impact can be eased.

“We store similar emotions in clusters in the brain,” explains Barbara Wetzel, a Fort Collins therapist who has been using EMDR in her practice since 1993. “When we experience something similar, it stimulates all those old feelings and information.

“With EMDR you don’t lose the memories, you just lose the negative intensity.”

By activating the information-processing system of the brain, people can achieve their therapeutic goals at a rapid rate, with recognizable changes that don’t disappear over time.

“People are amazed at how quickly it works,” Wetzel says. “In three to five sessions, clients experience a 60 to 80 percent decrease in emotional difficulties.”

Part of EMDR’s effectiveness lies in the fact that people are actively involved in the process, says Robbie Dunton, coordinator of the EMDR Institute.

“Unlike hypnosis where the client has no control, in EMDR the client has full control,” she says. “And unlike traditional talk therapy, no one is telling the client what they feel – they come to realizations on their own.”

Once realizations are made, other therapeutic disciplines come into play.

“Once EMDR brings an issue to the surface, a trained therapist can handle it in whatever way they think will be most helpful,” Dunton says. “EMDR is just one tool – but it’s a very powerful tool.”
Developed in 1987 by Francine Shapiro, PhD, to help people overcome trauma, EMDR has been proven helpful in addressing panic disorders, anxiety disorders, grief and loss issues, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and phobias. It is also used to help people attain peak performance.

Practitioners go through a two-level training course and are certified according to standards set by the EMDR International Association. Worldwide, there are 42,000 practitioners who have completed the first level of training and 27,000 who have completed both levels.

Fourteen studies support the efficacy of EMDR, making it the most thoroughly researched method ever used in the treatment of trauma. The most recent five studies with individuals suffering from such events as rape, loss of a loved one, accidents and natural disasters have found that 84 to 90 percent no longer had post-traumatic stress disorder after only three treatment sessions.
Jessica Saperstone and Cindy Guillaume, the clinical social workers who run Poudre School District’s employee assistance program, don’t need studies to tell them EMDR works — they’ve witnessed its effectiveness first-hand.

“Old methods of dealing with trauma would retraumatize the patient and have a negative impact on the individual’s work performance,” Guillaume says. “This new methodology brings relief without making the trauma a reality again.”

One evening in 2000, a handful of school district employees witnessed a homicide/suicide involving two adults in the parking lot of Poudre High School. The employees were treated with EMDR on scene.

“They were able to go back to work the next day,” Guillaume says. “Without EMDR, I don’t think they would have recovered so quickly.”

Saperstone points out it’s not just the big traumas that EMDR is effective at dissolving.

“Often people need help with events of lesser severity that occurred more frequently, such as childhood abuse,” she says. “EMDR allows us to delete the old information and put in better, more positive ways of dealing with things.”