Recently, I undertook my first session of EMDR.
It’s a relatively new form of therapy (albeit, older than Elina), which in it’s full title is named “Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing” originally developed to help trauma victims and has since expanded into other areas.
So far, I’m quite torn about it. On one hand, EMDR is now approved and recommended by The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) and has shown to be affective in dozens of randomised controlled trials.
On the other hand, it really, really sounds like Dianetics.
For those not familiar with it, Dianetics is a concept developed by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard which divided the mind into two parts – one of which is the reactive mind that stores traumatic memories, and anything associated with those memories, related or not.
This is why Scientologists are very quite around people who have been knocked out – because anything they say will be linked to the memory of being knocked out in the reactive mind. These are stored as negative engrams and the only way to get rid of them is to pay for Audit Counseling.
I’m not a subscriber to Dianetics, and even though EMDR has a lot of key differences (for example, the traumatic memories don’t just pop out of existence in a second), it’s similarities have thrown me somewhat, despite all the evidence to show EMDR genuinely does work. It’s like some kind of reverse-placebo affect, is there a term for that?
Don't have time to check my blog? Get a weekly email with all the new posts. This is my personal blog, so obviously it is 100% spam free.
Tags: dianetics, emdr, health, scientology, therapy
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 1st, 2012 at 12:22 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.