REDISCOVERY OF EMDR: IN SEARCH
OF A RATIONALE
Pavel Lushyn with Scott Borrelli
October 2003
A Personal Perspective
I am a clinical psychologist and professor of psychological counseling from Ukraine.
My introduction to EMDR happened in Kiev, in 1995, when Professor A. Bondarenko
(initiator and one of the prominent EMDR proponents in Ukraine) invited me to
participate in one of the first Ukrainian EMDR workshops (Level 1) lead by Dr.
Roger Solomon. After that, Francine Shapiro sponsored my Level II training in
Los Angeles in 1996. By that time I have had a rather extended EMDR experience
with Chernobile clients. I would not say that all has been totally positive. But
still, some of my results attracted Dr. Shapiro and she used a few cases from
my practice in her second book co-authored with M. Forrest (Shapiro & Forrest,
1997). I had mixed feelings about EMDR. On the one hand, I intuitively sensed
that there are many clinical possibilities for its use. On the other, the absence
of a “strong” rationale added to my subconscious search for a more
grounded EMDR explanation than the metaphors Francine used. My first attempt to
create one of my own coincided with some major life change-events, influenced
by the breakdown of the USSR and consequently, dramatic social and personal transformations
in the fate of the nation. At the same time (1995-2001), I started my post-doctoral
project on personality change processes. I nearly stopped practicing EMDR and
was totally overwhelmed with personal survival issues facing the challenges of
the economic and political situation.
One of the ways to cope with the latter was to apply for international research
grants. I won two of them and completed my research at two American universities.
In 1996, at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, I was preoccupied with
the examination of personal change processes in organizational settings. In 2001,
at Montclair State University, I pursued an ecopsychological inquiry into one
of the very interesting and at the same time paradoxical forms of personal changes
in pedagogy: Philosophy for Children. In the back of my mind, I was aware that
I was doing one and the same thing, i.e., creating my EMDR rationale for my therapy
practice. I kept on asking myself why I was doing it if it did not seem to have
any immediate results in store. But at the same time I was nearly certain that
this very specific psychotherapeutic technique could have promising implications,
at least for my future scholarly and clinical practice. In some of my papers,
published in Ukrainian and Russian professional journals, I cautiously hypothesized
that EMDR could represent an emergent paradigm not only in clinical research and
practice, but also in a broader perspective of social reconstruction, particularly
in education (Lushyn, 2000).
In 1998 I met a well-known Ukrainian psychologist, Professor Boris Tsukanov, who
was working on the first edition of his book, Psychology of Human Time (Tsukanov,
2000), which was devoted to the study of the human brain clock (HBC). Although
he was barely acquainted with psychotherapy research and practice, I presented
him with an outline of Shapiro’s discovery of the EMDR procedure. He responded
to me immediately with the remark: “This must be associated with the rhythms
of psychological time, i.e. the subjective brain clock, which course is manifested
variously: in the rhythm of walking, breathing and also… the rhythm of saccades”.
I started to reflect on the idea, suggesting that EMDR could somehow be associated
with the operation of HBC. This reflective activity influenced my clinical and
teaching practice, which I will now briefly describe by recalling three seemingly
dissociated episodes of my professional and personal life.
Episodes: rhythmical breathing, walking and construction
of aphorisms
During one of my demonstrative counseling sessions on trauma processing, I substituted
EM (eye movement) with rhythmical breathing while following the standard EMDR
protocol. Personally, it was a clear sign that I started to explore the hypothesis
about the relation between HBC and saccades. The assumption was that the breathing
rhythm could be clinically equivalent to (and thus procedurally interchangeable
with) the effect of the artificially generated EM saccades. This little experiment
was also supported by the fact that in some specific cases, Shapiro and her followers
interchanged eye movements with bilateral tapping and/or sounds. A few of my clinical
results were promising.
Then I remembered that on the day of her discovery Shapiro had been walking in
the park. I thought - “It must also be the rhythmical walking that was systemically
associated with the saccadic movements and the problem resolution”. This
was supported by the well-known fact that for many creative individuals rhythmical
walking enhances intellectual productivity. Walking worked for me, too, when at
some very critical moments of intellectual blocks I preferred to have a walk or
do some jogging to restore my “creative balance”.
There was a third episode, which I also related to my personal search for an EMDR
rationale. While writing the first chapter of my book, The Psychology of A Man
in Transition: How to Survive when Everything Goes Wrong?, I completed a short,
creative experiment. I selected a few sentences from already written text that
seemed to me controversial and paradoxical. I concentrated on them, attempting
to make a quick synthetic response to them. What I received in a couple of minutes
were aphorisms, or “psychological holograms”, as I came to call them.
Within an hour I produced about 50 of these, eventually exceeding 160 on the completion
of my book.
Many of these aphorisms were characterized by an original reinterpretation of
socially and psychologically relevant concepts and ideas. Personally, it was a
breakthrough, appealing from a number of perspectives:
- Illness is a way to realize you are basically healthy - your immune system
works. In the case of fatal disease there is a strong need to change the type
of immunity.
- The major problem of the discoverer is loneliness.
- If you are a human with no conflict, I wonder if there is anyone you love.
- If you don't know what to do, just see what you are doing.
- If you can't find your talent, then you are a genius of modesty.
- If an immigrant is a person who changes herself by moving to a new country,
then a citizen is the one who is to be constantly "immigrating"
within his/her own country.
- Apathy and indifference is a good marker of the coming change.
- True patience comes in when one is bored being patient.
The process of creating these “aphorisms” felt familiar to me. I first
stated or formulated something that felt disturbing to me (e.g., a contradiction)
and then wrote immediate responses to them with one goal in mind – a conclusion
that was emotionally acceptable. Occasionally, I relied on feedback from my friends.
According to the dialectical perspective, Negative Cognition (NC) and Positive
Cognition (PC) seemed to coincide with the thesis and anti-thesis. The tension
between these two polar states would create both a barrier to and the potential
for positive change and development. The final resolution statement - the synthesis
– allowed adaptive change. I am not sure whether the key to sustaining the
reconstructive rhythm was the breathing or the EM’s. One thing I am sure
of is that I trusted my gut feelings; I was attracted to something personally
relevant.
These episodes seemed to be related, suggesting that the reconstructive process
is propelled by ambiguity and uncertainty. Applying this to the EMDR protocol
meant that the sets of eye movements represented defibrillation of the distorted
rhythm of processing in the nervous system, eventually allowing positive reconstruction
and personal change. This was consistent with EMDR principles described by Shapiro
in which the process of (any) change rather than the emotional states of the client
are the primary focus.
Integration: an ecopsychological perspective
The episodes I use to describe my understanding of EMDR rationale can be integrated
on a systemic level. EMDR suggests that the client is regarded as an open, self-regulated
system, capable of setting personal goals and testing hypotheses based in the
context of personal history. The clinician’s role in this process is as
facilitator. While it may look like a linear process, especially given it’s
step-by-step approach, the process of EMDR is actually nonlinear, irreversible
and relatively unpredictable. The positive outcomes may be referred to as life-changing
events or metamorphoses. The EMDR clinician operates from an open system perspective,
such that the quality and type of therapeutic change cannot be predetermined,
and all symptom changes are acknowledged and accepted.
I discovered another essential element in Shapiro’s work regarding the interference
between the rhythmic hand movements of the therapist and the eye movements of
the client. In her early clients, Shapiro (1995) observed difficulty following
the therapist’s hand, and sensed a sort of eye-muscular resistance on the
part of the client. Following Tsukanov’s (2000) arguments that saccades
are the demonstration of HBC (which determines and reflects the rhythm of personal
reconstructive process or, in terms of Shapiro’s model, of information processing),
the most obvious strategy is to pre-diagnose the subjective time unit, which ranges
between 0,7 and 1,1 seconds. Then, the therapist should generate defibrillation
of the distorted rhythm by calibrating the therapist’s hand movements to
the client’s individual rhythm. But, in fact, there is no need for a clinician
to do the pre-diagnosis. Intuitively, Shapiro correctly chose to maintain the
rhythm by establishing a rapport with the client’s saccades. Thus, the key
element of the procedure is establishing hand-eyes rapport by overcoming the resistance
on the basic level of HBC, i.e. saccades rhythm. Further, by synchronizing the
rhythm of the therapist’s hand (the measure of it is given in the EMDR protocol:
two sets of bilateral eye movements – 24 movements) with the rhythm of the
client’s eye movements, the clinician generates a new impulse to maintain
the existing rhythm in the framework of an emergent social or therapeutic dimension.
This helps to catalyze the reconstructive process, making it irreversible, non-linear
and hardly predictable.
EMDR clinicians should stay open to ecologically accept all emergent client’s
responses, including other resistances (fibrillations), including powerful abreactions.
The assumption is that the self-regulated open system and its natural preference
for survival will find its way to positive resolution given appropriate facilitation,
i.e., EMDR. I refer to this manner of facilitation as “ambiguous control”,
“ecological facilitation”, or “ecofacilitation” (Lushyn,
2002 & 2003).
In this way, the client as well as the clinician shares a clear sense of movement.
Maintaining a shared and consistent rhythm between therapist and client establishes
rapport at a deeper level, encouraging further mastery over the semantic ambiguity
of trauma. As a result, clients are able to produce greater tolerance of ambiguity
and stronger creative goal setting skills.
Within this context, trauma as an extraordinary external event that causes extremely
powerful physical and psycho-social responses is redefined as a transitional,
even evolutionary condition. The process of trauma resolution reflects the ongoing
social interaction and reconstruction of various open systems and, eventually,
the emergence of new social identities. From this new perspective, the fatalistic
diagnosis of post trauma stress is transformed by EMDR into a time of profound
transition and fresh discoveries at the deepest levels of personality.
Background
Pavel Lushyn is Professor of Psychology at Kirovograd State Pedagogical University
in Ukraine, and Director of the International Center for Educational Innovations,
Philosophy for Children. He is the author of 90 articles and three books: The
Psychology of Man in Transition: How to Survive When Everything Goes Wrong; The
Psychology of Pedagogical Change: Ecological Facilitation; and The Psychology
of the Personality Change Process.
The sphere of his scholarly interest is the psychology of transitional states
in education and psychotherapy. He participated in many international research
projects in Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA; EMDR-Institute, Los Angeles,
USA; IAPC, Montclair State University, NJ, USA (1996-2002).
His contact details are:
Pavel Lushyn
Schevtchenko, 1
Kirovograd 25006
Ukraine
Phone (380-522)232-313
E-mail:loushian@kspu.kr.ua
Web:www.kspu.kr.ua/lushin/index-en.html
References
Lushyn, P. and Kennedy, D. (2000) The psychodynamics
of community of inquiry and educational reform: A cross-cultural perspective.
Thinking 15 (4): 9-16.
Lushyn, P. (2002). «The Paradoxical Nature of Ecofacilitation in the Community
of Inquiry."
Thinking 16(1): 12-17. And in:
www.kspu.kr.ua/lushin
Lushyn, P., Kennedy, D. (2003) Power, manipulation and control in a community
of inquiry. Analytical Teaching #3 (forthcoming).
Lushyn, P. (2000) The Psychotherapeutic meaning of EMDR. Journal of the Practicing
Psychologist, 6, 85-90.(in Russian) and in English:
www.kspu.kr.ua/lushin
Shapiro, F. (1995) Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing: basic principles,
protocols, and procedures. New York: The Guilford Press.
Shapiro, F., Forrest, M., (1997) EMDR: breakthrough therapy for overcoming anxiety,
stress, and trauma. New York: Basic Books.
Tsukanov B. (2000) Time in the Human Psyche. Odessa: Astroprint.
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