If Not Talk Therapy, Then What?




When I started my search for what would create sustained change for people I explored various spiritual traditions, energetic healing methods and body centered psychotherapies. What I learned from all of them is that we have an innate wisdom within us (well really it is not within us, it is us) that knows how to heal, physically, emotionally and psychologically. It is usually our conditioning (what we are told to believe or how to see the world, ourselves and others) or shock trauma that prevents us from healing spontaneously.
When you know how real profound change occurs it is not from thinking, figuring, understanding from our prefrontal cortex, it is from our innate wisdom/truth. Thinking, figuring & understanding from that much slower part of the brain (which processes only 6 bits of information per second – see “Why I am not a fan of talk therapy – Part 2) is out of the way and innate wisdom/truth can do what it knows how to do.
This is why EMDR therapy works so well. When the eye movements are going fast enough you cannot think. I have had many clients who have commented on how much gets done when they are not thinking. They begin to notice the difference between thinking and reprocessing.
The other than conscious parts of the brain (that process billions of bits of information per second) can change things exponentially if allowed to do what they are capable of. This is why “alternative” therapies can often seem so miraculous. Really, they should be the default form of realigning ourselves with our innate wisdom/truth.
Of course, innate wisdom/truth is no longer valued in current western culture. That is a really sad statement. The anxiety I see in clients in this day and age, is perpetuated by conditioning. How they should be or not be; what they should be doing, or not doing. Life is not done by who we are, and expressing our own unique talents, and how that contributes to the whole. It is done by looking the right good way, acting the right good way, having the looking good job, making the most money, and on and on.
In studying alternative treatments, I observed that sometimes change would occur and then return to old, conditioned patterns. This is why I found energetic forms of treatment, body centered treatments and cognitive treatments were not as reliable as independent forms of treatment. What I realized is the reason the change was not sustained is that things had to change throughout their system, energetically, physically, emotionally which would result in a spontaneous change cognitively. Once change occurred on all of these levels, change became consistent.
When I learned EMDR therapy I already had experience with “alternative” treatments so how EMDR works and how to implement it was relatively easy. For practitioners who are now just trained in cognitive forms of treatment is it much more of an up hill journey. They really have to unlearn what they have learned, or should I say how they have been conditioned.
EMDR therapy uses the physical, emotional and cognitive limitations to start the reprocessing and the innate wisdom/truth within does the work, and things change energetically. It really does not make sense. Which is why so many clinicians were so opposed to it in the early days, they could not “figure it out.” Dr. Sharpiro, founder of EMDR, was really smart to push for research knowing it was the only way to get clinician out of their limitations and see that it worked.
There are many experiential and energetic activities I use in Phase 2 of EMDR therapy which assess someone’s readiness for reprocessing. These experiential activities build a strong foundation for reprocessing to go well. People need a stable internal sense of self and internal resources for reprocessing to occur. This why Phase 2 was built into EMDR. EMDR therapy is about building in resources that a person needs, and reprocessing experiences that limit them and cause symptoms.