EMDR (Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing)

EMDR, when it works, is faster than neurofeedback, but it is very specific to an individual traumatic memory, so you have to do it a bunch of times if the client has more than one or two traumatic memories–and some clients are very disturbed by the process of bringing the traumatic experience back into memory, preferring not to do it. Neurofeedback doesn’t seem to work with individual memories. It is more oriented toward changing the activation pattern in the amygdala/hippocampus/temporal lobe that was set up around the original trauma. Once that is changed, the experiential and behavioral effects melt away. In most the cases I’ve worked with, there was never a need to recall the traumatic material at all.

One of the potential issues always with EMDR (which I agree can be a remarkably powerful technique) is that the client has to (at least in the models of which I’m aware) call back into memory in several modalities some painful or frightening experience. A client who has a lot of very slow theta and/or delta activity may actually do this quite successfully–so successfully that they actually begin abreacting before the process fully unfolds.

I have presented the possibility that what happens in EMDR is that the two hippocamus/amygdala formations inside the two temporal lobes, which are not working together due to very early traumatic experience (hence the Disconnect), are asked to pull out of the memory banks some experience they are likely to have poorly integrated. When the client’s eyes move back and forth across the midline, the two hemispheres have to work together resulting in the possible re-integration of the memory. Don’t know for sure that’s what happens, but it does make some sense.

People with left-sided disconnects, which is more indicative of early lack of nurturing, tend to maintain emotional flatness in the face of experience. It’s possible that someone with that pattern, when the emotional/feeling tone side of the brain gets pulled into the equation, the result may be very unusual and uncomfortable.

The nice thing about neurofeedback is that, unlike EMDR, which tends to work a memory at a time, it works on the underlying activation pattern that tends to lock the problem in place. When the brain lets go of that pattern, all the individual events are affected, and it usually is not necessary to call them back into consciousness to have this effect.