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