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The fundamental idea behind psychotherapy is that we tend to grow mentally unwell because
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we haven't been able to think with sufficient clarity about the difficulties in our past,
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typically in our distant childhoods. Damaging incidents have been locked away, and continue
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to have an outsized impact on us, but we have no way of going back over them in order to
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liberate ourselves from their distorting influences.
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At the dawn of therapy, Sigmund Freud noticed that many patients, when asked about their
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childhoods, provided accounts that were too neat, too intellectual, too distanced from
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the emotion contained in events to be of any use. In order to encourage more real feeling,
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he made a radical innovation: he asked if his patients might lie on a couch, shut their
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eyes and enter a dreamy state that he called 'free association'. He soon found that
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these patients recovered far faster than those who insisted on sitting in chairs. As a result,
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there are now couches in therapy rooms around the world – and the past has for many of
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us been a lot easier to access.
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Then, in the early 1990s, an American psychologist called Francine Shapiro became fascinated,
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as Freud had been, with the damage done in therapy by our tendencies to intellectualise
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the past rather than re-live it. Not coincidentally, Shapiro was at work on a PhD in English literature
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which drew her attention to a key difference between the methods of the non-fiction essay
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and those of the novel.
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In the former, an author provides neat summaries of positions and emotions: they might tell
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us that their mother was often 'sad' and their father 'frightening'. But novelists
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do something very different, they provide us with 'scenes': they don't state,
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they show. They take us to a particular moment and let us experience it vividly through our
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senses.
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With this distinction in mind, Shapiro wondered if patients in therapy could become more like
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novelists of their childhoods rather than just their non-fiction narrators. And it was
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here that she stumbled on a remarkable phenomenon. When we are asked to perform a repetitive
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movement – like tapping gently on our knees or our chests from left to right or look at
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a finger moving from side to side a few inches from our eyes – then our ordinary practical
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day to day mentality often cedes to a more trance-like, speculative state of consciousness
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(something similar can occur when we are on a long train journey in a quiet carriage and
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follow a line of telephone poles flashing past us). In this state, if we are asked to
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think back to a scene in our past, we may remember an emotional texture that would previously
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have eluded us; we become more like novelists than essayists.
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This special state became the bedrock of what Shapiro termed EMDR therapy (Eye Movement
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Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy). The EMDR therapist, entirely loyal to Freud's
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basic insight about the need to bring traumatic scenes back to conscious awareness, invites
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patients to return to key scenes that make them who they now are, often scenes of great
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difficulty: their first night at boarding school, the day their mother told them about
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the divorce, the moment they were humiliated by a stranger. They are helped to linger in
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the past, to experience it in all its dimensions. The patient might cry in a way they haven't
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in years – if ever.
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But the idea is not to abandon a younger self in one of the most difficult moments of their
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lives, it's to help them find a way out of their pain. So an EMDR therapist might,
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after a time back in a foundational 'scene', ask the patient what they might want to tell
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their younger self; they might want to comfort them, to encourage them to be angry, to help
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them stop taking all the blame. Before initiating a session of time travel, the EMDR therapist
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will also ask a patient to identify both someone who gives them support and someone who is
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wise. These two characters will then be asked to enter an early traumatic scene to give
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it a new, more redemptive ending. A current loving partner might be asked to comfort a
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child-self; Winnicott, the Buddha or Plato might say a few words to an angry father or
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weeping mother.
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In this way, EMDR honours the traditional ambitions of therapy: it renders conscious
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feelings that had been shut away, and it liberates us from the influence of the past through
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a deeper understanding of its secrets. But it has the added advantage of allowing us
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to reconnect with our histories via sensorily-rich scenes rather than analytical summaries. In
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this way, the world can become less oppressive and fear laden, as our formative moments are
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unearthed, understood and properly laid to rest.
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"Psychotherapy" is a set of 20 beautiful cards, each containing a short essay on a key concept in psychotherapy;
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creating a pack that offers a perfect introduction to the concept.