I was talking with someone recently about EMDR, and how it sits alongside tapping, toning and a handful of other approaches to trauma. Ask how does EMDR work, and the short answer goes something like this. You bring a painful memory to mind while part of your attention is taken up by something else: following a moving hand, a pattern of taps, a sound alternating between your ears. Divided like that, the memory becomes possible to stay with. And being able to stay with it, when on your own it was too frightening to go near, seems to be where the change happens.
That made sense to me. What struck me was how familiar it sounded.
What EMDR involves
EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing. Francine Shapiro developed it in the late 1980s, after noticing that distressing thoughts seemed to lose some of their charge while her eyes were moving. It’s grown into a structured therapy with a clear protocol. NICE now recommends it for post-traumatic stress, and a great many people have found it useful.
Tapping, sometimes called EFT, works along similar lines. You hold a difficult feeling or memory in mind while tapping a sequence of points on the face and body. Toning uses sustained sound in much the same way.
How does EMDR work, and why does the second task matter?
Nobody’s entirely settled on why it works. One explanation is that holding a memory and tracking a movement at the same time stretches your attention. The memory arrives less vivid and less overwhelming, and you can stay with it a little longer than usual. Some researchers think the eye movements themselves matter less than was first believed.
What most accounts share is the idea of dual attention: one foot in the memory, one foot in the present. You’re close enough to the thing to feel it, and anchored enough not to be swept away by it. The second task is the anchor.
We’ve been doing this for as long as there have been people
Long before anyone wrote a treatment protocol, people were finding ways to approach unbearable things from the side. They drummed and danced. They sang their grief and keened at the graveside. They walked pilgrimages and fasted, and sat round a fire while someone told the story of a hero who lost everything and came back changed. Each of these pairs the hard material with something else for the body and mind to do: a rhythm, a step, a melody, a plot.
I spent years as a storyteller and running drum circles before I trained as a therapist, and storytelling is the one I keep coming back to. A story lets a room full of people sit with betrayal, death, cruelty and shame at one remove. It isn’t you; it’s the woodcutter’s son, or the girl who went into the forest. And yet everyone listening knows exactly what it’s about. The distance is what makes the closeness bearable.
There’s one other thing all of these have in common. None of them happen alone. A ritual has witnesses. A story has listeners. Grief is sung with others, not to an empty room. I wonder whether that’s the part we’ve lost sight of.
The harder part of the story
Many of the communities that held these practices most richly had them taken away.
In the United States, the Code of Indian Offences of 1883 outlawed many Native American ceremonies, including the Sun Dance. People could be imprisoned or have their food rations withheld for taking part. It wasn’t until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 that the right to practise was formally protected. In Canada, the potlatch was banned from 1884 to 1951. Versions of the same thing happened across the colonised world. Drums were confiscated and languages were forbidden in schools. Healing traditions were relabelled as superstition or witchcraft.
The effect on those communities was devastating. Many people describe the return of ceremony since then as part of how they’ve begun to recover.
Repackaged and sold back?
So I find myself wondering about something. Western psychology built its picture of the human mind largely from studies of people like me: Western, educated, from industrialised, rich, democratic countries. It looked closely at trauma and found methods that work. It gave them names, trademarks, training routes and fees. And then it sometimes offers them back to the communities whose own ways of healing were outlawed.
I don’t think EMDR or tapping are bad things. They help people, and I don’t imagine anyone set out to borrow. But I do wonder whether we realise how much of what we call innovation is rediscovery. If we did, it might change how we hold it: with a little more humility, and a little more curiosity about what people already carry in their own traditions.
That applies to my own work as much as anyone’s. Talking therapy, one person disclosing their inner life to a professional in a room, is a particular cultural shape. It isn’t the universal human one.
If you’re looking for help with trauma
None of this is an argument against EMDR. If you’re weighing it up, or any other trauma therapy, it might help to know that these methods share a structure. That structure may matter more than the name on it. It has three parts:
- a way of approaching the memory that isn’t all or nothing
- something that keeps you anchored in the present while you do
- someone with you
The last of those is where I’d put my weight. In the work I do, the anchor is usually the relationship itself. It means being with someone who can stay steady while you go near something you’ve kept your distance from, at a pace that’s yours. What helps may also lie partly outside therapy: in music, in making things, in your own faith or traditions, in people who’ll listen to your story. Those count too.
If you’d like to talk about trauma counselling in Bude or online, the first step is a free phone call. We can talk about what you’re carrying and whether working together might suit you.
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