What Top Mental Health Practitioners and Researchers Have Reported About the Efficacy of EMDR:*

“The speed at which change occurs during EMDR contradicts the traditional notion of time as essential for psychological healing. Shapiro has integrated elements from many different schools of psychotherapy into her protocols, making EMDR applicable to a variety of clinical populations and accessible to clinicians from different orientations."
-- Bessel A. van der Kolk, MD
Professor of Psychiatry, Boston University School of Medicine


"EMDR assists survivors in the immediate aftermath of violent trauma by breaking through the walls of denial, shock, grief and anger. Ideal for those who have been unable to forget past traumatic life events, as it allow for a rapid processing of even deeply rooted memories, giving individuals back control of their lives and their emotions."
-- Dusty Bowencamp, RN CTR
Disaster Mental Health, American Red Cross


"EMDR is a significant component of treatment in the Trauma Recovery Program at the Menninger Clinic."
-- Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic


"Francine Shapiro has made an enduring contribution to the field of psychotherapy."
-- Jeffrey K. Zeig, Ph.D.
Director, The Milton H. Erickson Foundation


"Dr. Shapiro’s work has proven invaluable to clinicians around the world in helping people following trauma."
-- Atle Dyregrov, Ph.D., Consultant to UNICEF


"A lifesaving process for battered women...everyone who has experienced the psychological pain from abuse or knows someone who has should know about EMDR!"
-- Lenore Walker, Ed.D. ABPP, Domestic Violence Institute


"EMDR provides a proven approach to address the trauma that can interfere with healthy grief and mourning following the loss of a loved one."
-- Therese A. Rando, Ph.D.,
Founder and Executive Director,
The Institute for the Study and Treatment of Loss


"EMDR is proving to be the silicon chip of psychotherapy; it allows people to process incredible amounts of material in a shockingly short time."
-- Michael Elkin,Ph.D.
Director, Center for Collaborative Solutions


"EMDR quickly opens new windows on reality, allowing people to see solutions within themselves that they never knew were there. And itâs a therapy where the client is very much in charge, which can be particularly meaningful when people are recovering from having their power taken away by abuse and violation."
-- Laura S. Brown, Ph.D.


"EMDR is the most revolutionary, important method to emerge in psychotherapy in decades."
-- Herbert Fensterheim, Ph.D., Cornell University

What is EMDR?

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It can be used in shorter term therapy or in conjunction with longer term therapy. 

In the course of our human journey, we can sometimes unfortunately be exposed to events that are traumatic, which can cause us to freeze and become locked into negative patterns of sensing, thinking and feeling, both emotionally and somatically. As long as the trauma is unaddressed, the imprint of the most traumatizing part of the incident governs our functioning in a distorted way that causes misinterpretations, negative self-concepts, somatic complaints, and continuous re-traumatization. EMDR unhooks the traumatic attachment from the traumatic memory and restores the memory to a non-traumatized state by reprocessing the trauma so it becomes completely discharged and released.

How does EMDR work?

“When a disturbing event occurs, it can get locked in the brain with the original picture, sounds, thoughts, feelings and body sensations. EMDR seems to stimulate the information and allows the brain to process the experience. That may be what is happening in REM or dream sleep-the eye movements (tones, or tactile) may help to process the unconscious material. It is your own Brain that will be doing the healing and you are always in control.”

“When a traumatic or very negative event occurs, information processing may be incomplete, perhaps because strong negative feelings or dissociation interfere with information processing. This prevents the forging of connections with more adaptive information that is held in other memory networks. For example, a rape survivor may “know” that rapists are responsible for their crimes, but this information does not connect with her feeling that she is to blame for the attack. The memory is then dysfunctionally stored without appropriate associative connections and with many elements still unprocessed. When the individual thinks about the trauma, or when the memory is triggered by similar situations, the person may feel like she is reliving it, or may experience strong emotions and physical sensations. A prime example is the intrusive thoughts, emotional disturbance, and negative self-referencing beliefs of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is not only major traumatic events, or “large-T Traumas” that can cause psychological disturbance. Sometimes a relatively minor event from childhood, such as being teased by one’s peers or disparaged by one’s parent, may not be adequately processed. Such “small-t traumas” can result in personality problems and become the basis of current dysfunctional reactions.”

EMDR is effective for treating the following unresolved issues

• Developmental traumas and painful traumatic memories that impair current functioning.
• Trauma event victims (auto or work related accidents, natural or man made disasters, combat veterans, crime victims, police officers, and field workers
• Persons with phobias and panic disorders
• Persons experiencing excessive loss or grief of a loved one, or line of duty deaths
• Sexual assault victims
• Accident, surgery, and burn victims suffering from emotional or physical debilitation
• Victims of marital and sexual dysfunction
• Clients in various stages of chemical dependency recovery and pathological gambling recovery
• Persons engaged in business, performing arts, and sport who’d like to benefit from EMDR as a tool to help enhance performance.
• Persons with somatic problems, including chronic pain who would like to attain rapid relief from suffering
• Other persons with a wide variety of PTSD who may experience substantial benefits from EMDR

“The United States government has recommended EMDR for the treatment of trauma populations at all times…EMDR has a broad base of published case reports and controlled research which supports it as an empirically validated treatment of trauma. The Department of Defense/Department of Veterans Affairs Practice Guidlines have placed EMDR in the highest category, recommended for all trauma populations at all times. In addition, the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies current treatment guidelines have designated EMDR as an effective treatment for PTSD (Chemtob, Tolin, Van der Kolk & Pitman, 2000) as have the Departments of Health of both Northern Ireland and Israel (see below), which have indicated EMDR to be one of only two or three treatments of choice for trauma victims. Most recently, the American Psychiatric Association Practice Guideline (2004) has placed EMDR in the category of highest level of effectiveness.”

Testimonial

"My relationship with my adolescent step-son can very stressful at times, especially because he can be aggressive, and it reminds me of my relationship with my father, who was verbally abusive. I knew, as a parent, I needed to find a way to respond to my son, in the moment, with less reactivity from my past, but I was having difficulties managing my feelings. With Joanna's help, I have become less irritable with my son and more attentive to his needs, even when he is expressing feelings of anger or is loud or brash. Using a technique called EMDR she guided me through a special process that can be especially helpful to persons who have had stressful or traumatic experiences with persistent after-effects. I began to feel noticeably more relaxed with my son after one session. In addition to her skill, Joanna is warm and engaging. It is clear she not only enjoys her work, but feels a special calling to helping others. I would recommend her unequivocally to anyone desiring help with difficulties in their lives."

-- Stephanie Miller, client



Testimonial

"What a great time I had! You know it’s good when you leave with that feeling of gratitude and love. Joanna is gifted. She listened. She decided which words of mine to pluck out of the stream. She asked me to follow where they lead. We hopped together from one story and experience to the next, and the process had its positive transformative way with me. I followed my EMDR session with other kinds of healing experiences and the changes I experienced were deepened and broadened. I would recommend any kind of follow-up work to maximize the benefits."

--David, Inverness 2007

* Partially Adapted from the EMDR website.

Joanna Intara Zim, M.A.
email: joanna@joannaintarazim.org
San Francisco Office - 2282 Union Street San Francisco, CA ~ 415.923.0481
Sonoma Office - 24 Western Avenue, Suite 313, Petaluma, CA 94952 ~ 707.781.9231