Three experienced therapists, trained in hypnosis and EMDR, distilled some tentative hypotheses about the use of hypnosis in EMDR from fifteen cases, two presented here. When a therapist uses hypnosis with EMDR, it seems that the client is having difficulty or the therapist anticipates that the client will have difficulty managing the experiences processed with EMDR. Hypnosis initiated either during the introduction to EMDR or within a therapy session prior to the initiation of EMDR seems to have served two functions. The first function is to activate inner work that prepares the client to use EMDR successfully, and the second function is to facilitate overtly the processing of the traumatic experience. Clients might have two kinds of difficulties in managing affect or distress: (1) they may have a long-standing, irrational and strongly held belief that interferes with managing affect or distress, and (2) they may never have developed the capacity to tolerate intense affect, distress or pain. Should a therapist use hypnosis during the closing down phase of a session without preparing the client with hypnosis during the introduction to EMDR, the therapist should seriously reconsider the pace and focus of EMDR and the client's resources to manage affect and distress.
Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), though controversial, is increasingly utilized for treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This article reviews the debate concerning efficacy and concludes that the evidence, though not definitive, supports EMDR's positive treatment effects. The authors argue that EMDR is a therapeutic intervention different from exposure. The authors set forth three interrelated hypotheses to explain EMDR's therapeutic mechanism: bilateral hemispheric activation, normalized brain activation patterns, and activation/desensitization of emotion/arousal; avoidant/constricted attention is disrupted, allowing normalizing processes to occur. Lowered arousal then leads to a resumption of more adaptive cognitive processing. Some predictions to test this model are presented.
This study compared the responses of dissociative inpatients and general inpatient psychiatric controls on the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT; Murray, 1943). We found the stories of dissociative participants to be characterized by a greater interpersonal distance and more trauma and dissociation responses than those of the controls. No significant differences were found regarding total number of emotional references, although references to positive emotions were almost nonexistent for the dissociative group. A post hoc analysis of the data found the testing behaviors of dissociative participants to be characterized by switching, trance states, intrainterview amnesias, and affectively loaded card rejections. Questions were raised regarding the relevancy of the findings to clinical practice and how they might explain some of the controversies surrounding the diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder (DID).
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.