Conférence de Francine Shapiro à Bali le 09 juillet 2010

Vidéo

Durée : 25:00 - Taille : 163Mo

 

Francine Shapiro, née à New York le 18 février 1948, et morte le 16 juin 2019, est une psychologue américaine qui, à la suite de sa découverte des effets des mouvements oculaires, fonda la méthode EMDR. (Source Wikipédia)

Work in families where they were victimized and humiliated or they observed their parents acting in that way. So the processing of the earlier memories, the childhood memories, allow them to be liberated from these same types of reactions. The losses, very often early losses connected, relationship struggles among parents.

 

A husband who was abusing his wife was abused by his sister. His father used to instigate fights between his sister and him. His another one whose sister used to break his favorite toys if he wouldn't have sex with her.

 

And so the kinds of experiences that they had in childhood are carried on into the present. The fact that we can then go in after we process these earlier memories and do the family therapy in order to allow the rebuilding of the infrastructure, the building of the infrastructure that didn't occur before. How to connect appropriately with your loved one is all part of the therapy.

 

It's not only processing the negative, it's incorporating the positive. You have to remember to do that with the different skill sets. And then identifying what needs to be addressed is not always an easy question.

 

Here, you see the fear on this child's face? This is a child who has a needle phobia. And if we only go in and we address the phobia without identifying what else was happening at that time, you see the humiliation that he's feeling, you see and recognize the types of humiliation that might have occurred following that. We're not doing our clients any service if we only concentrate on the most obvious of the overt symptoms.

 

The overt symptom, the one that brought them into the office, again, is the one that has made life unmanageable, but to just get rid of that and to not address the other issues would not be useful. So when we deal now, moving to another area of somatoform disorders, there has been a case study with body dysmorphic disorder, which is now, which is put in the area of somatoform, seven cases that five out of the seven has had positive effect within one to three sessions. And often, it was a humiliation.

 

In one case, a woman had a 24-year history of believing she was covered with unsightly hair, and she would sit in front of a mirror and have to pluck out every visible hair for hours before she was able to walk out the door. It turned out that it was, the cause was a humiliating and disparaging remark that her aunt had made about her underarm hair when she was an adolescent. And this caused a 24-year history of body dysmorphic disorder that was eliminated within three sessions of processing these earlier memories.

 

So it doesn't matter how intense this appears because body dysmorphic disorder has often also been called a delusional disorder, just as olfactory reference system has been called a delusional disorder. And in this case, it was elimination of all of the cases who believed that they smelled. And in a couple of instances, it had to do with sexual abuse.

 

In other instances, it was simply, again, a humiliation. Though, as a child, she was in cooking class, and the class was canceled. And then, on a Friday, and when she went back to school on Monday, she took her bag to gym class and thought it was her gym clothes, and she opened it, and the spoiled food from the cooking class was in there, and it filled the locker room with the smell, and all of the people that were in the locker room made fun of her and said that she smelled bad.

 

And so that was locked in for years and was eliminated within three sessions of processing. So we need to identify, recognize, that regardless of how intractable cases may be with other forms of therapy, no matter how pronounced the symptoms might be and how unusual they may be, the basis, unless there's an organic deficit, are the unprocessed memories. And we do our jobs as EMDR therapists to identify what those earlier memories may be.

 

And, of course, there are numerous other cases of it, and I believe there's a presentation going to be made at this conference on dermatitis and the treatment of that. These earlier memories that are causing the stress are going to be causing somatic responses. And no more, and we see this very well with chronic pain.

 

In the EMDR conceptualization, the physical component, the emotional reaction, and the cognitive response to the pain, of course, all need to be addressed, as with any form of therapy. But what we're looking at are the unprocessed memories that contain within them the physical sensations that were there at the time of the event. So when you hear certain forms of therapy say it's stored in the body, I would say no, it's stored in the brain.

 

But we feel it through the apheric nervous system. And nowhere is this more obvious than with phantom limb pain. And so with phantom limb pain, this is the treatment of a motorcycle victim, which only took two sessions.

 

It was comorbid, of course, with the traumatization, the IES, and with BDI, depression. However, after the two sessions that were addressing the moment of impact, the initial trauma, the moment of impact, the site of the amputation, and the self-image of the individual, after two sessions, we can see this elimination, complete elimination of everything but the tingling. Now this was a Marine who said that he was feeling the feeling of sawing, shooting, radiating, aching, tingling, and you can see all at some as a nine or 10 level.

 

And after two sessions, it was gone. This is a very straightforward case. But another case reported by Schneider et al, this took nine sessions.

 

And the variety of reasons for it, one of which he was put into an induced coma directly after the event, which seems to have made more difficult to have access to the memories that needed to be processed. But what needed to be addressed was not only the trauma, not only the site of the amputation, but also the fact that his wife had miscarried because of his amputation, so he blamed himself for that. That needed to be processed.

 

What also needed to be processed was a well-meaning priest who came into the hospital and said to him that God looks over and protects all of us, and he felt he must have done something wrong because God didn't protect him. So that needed to be addressed. So, but across the board, when we're dealing with phantom limb pain, it's the earlier memory of the impact, the amputation, self-image.

 

Who am I without the leg? Very often the individual feels that people are looking at them and viewing them as a freak and as different, and this then needs to be processed along with any of the other issues that are around it. So claim cases can be more complicated as with any of our cases. Is it very straightforward, only one or two memories, or do we have to look at other factors that are contributing as well? But the fact of the amount of accident victims, landmine victims, war victims that are undergoing needless pain, needless pain, when we know we can eliminate it, 80% of the cases so far that have been addressed by the MDR has either been completely eliminated or substantially reduced.

 

This is needless suffering that's occurring. A huge amount of children are suffering in this way, and I hope that we'll be able to make the difference not only through your good work throughout Asia, but also by helping to put the research together that will allow us to convince those to support the work. Also, in terms of neurophysiological disorders, EMDR is not going to eliminate something that is purely organic.

 

But what are the contributing factors that might be there? For autism, there's the perceptual overload, that inability to deal with stimuli coming in, there can be an overload. But imagine then, if there is a traumatization, if there is a type of disturbing life experience that's unprocessed, there's also an overload coming in from internally. So I believe that Joanne Morris-Smith reported a case of working with a little boy who was severely suffering.

 

It turned out he was in a car wash. His parents were with him in a car wash, and when they'd gotten locked in, was all of that chaos of the car wash. So you can imagine this child who has a difficulty with perceptual overload from having this constant volcano going on inside.

 

So looking at children who have autism, what might we be able to process to reduce the load? And what maybe we'd be able to process in terms of humiliations and failures that they've had in order to reduce the load? With ADHD, the same way. Millions of children are being diagnosed worldwide with ADHD, and it's a false diagnosis. What they have is trauma in various types.

 

They have disturbing life experiences that are stored in, so they're not able to concentrate. That lay by mood. All of the various different symptoms that would be identified with ADHD can be mimicked by traumatization.

 

So to identify with the client, with the parent, what may need to be processed to see if it's able to be eliminated. If it is truly organic ADHD, verified by brain scans, et cetera, we can't eliminate that. But we can process the failure experiences that they've had that are adding to it.

 

We can process the various other experiences that they've had that are making them feel less than good. We can process triggers to allow them not to respond differently. We can incorporate new strategies for them to learn in order to compensate for the organic problem.

 

There are many ways in which we can assist the individual even if we cannot get rid of the actual cause. Traumatic brain injury. We are getting numerous reports of clinicians working with combat veterans that those with TBI respond very well to EMDR, and we're also getting reports of increased cognitive facility after the EMDR trigger.

 

Again, this is begging out for research because of what's going on in the war, in the wars that are going on now with all of the traumatic head injuries that are occurring. To know that we can help is a very important aspect. And with mental retardation, we cannot get rid of organic mental retardation.

 

But again, processing the failures, processing the humiliation that can be exacerbating the condition, and also to see whether we can help in the learning process, incorporate in the learning process by using positive templates. All of these are areas that are very fruitful for research on an ongoing basis. The work of Paul Miller, with a subset of schizophrenics that have been called dissociative schizophrenics.

 

This individual had major hallucinations, delusions, 22 years duration, delusions of reference, persecution, grandiosity, religious delusions, auditory hallucinations. He experienced his first psychotic symptom when he was 12 years old. After nine sessions of EMDR, you can see the results here, the three targets that he used during nine sessions were the delusion that the neighbors could see his thoughts when he was cutting grass, an overwhelmed situation at work, and a relationship with his father.

 

After nine sessions, it's now a three-year follow-up, he's no longer on medication, and he's symptom-free. Now this doesn't mean we have a cure for all schizophrenia, but this means that there is at least a subtype of schizophrenia where we can be useful. And to help identify what those subtypes may be, and the best way of being able to do the treatment, again, with the appropriate stabilization, and this is an area that's also fluid.

 

So when we're looking at the current situation, before I came down today, I looked at the news, and apparently there's another 45 people who have died because of the suicide bombing in Pakistan. The feelings that occur for all those, the fear for those, the loss that the families are experiencing, we know that the use of EMDR with traumatic grief can be extremely successful. This is EMDR compared to CBT.

 

The traumatic symptoms went away in equal measure, though the EMDR group was more rapid. What is different, though, is that positive recall of the individual was very different post-EMDR and post-CBT. Again, the AIP prediction that the reason for the negative recall, when you think of the loved one that has had a traumatic death, that you only see the negative experience there is because the unprocessed memory is blocking that network.

 

The processing of that memory allows it to be appropriately encoded, and so we can go back to remembering the loved one with love in the positive ways that we can remember. Given that we know that many areas in ethno-political violence continue from one generation to the next, because each child sees himself as being a victim, because they remember what's happened to their parents, to other family members, that these images continue to come back, if we can imagine the possibility of going in to work with those who have been traumatized, whether by natural or man-made disasters such as war, and work through these traumas to allow, rather than going in the pain, to go into violence and more suffering, to be able to go potentially into reconciliation, is part of what the HAP has been about, and what brought HAP to Asia in working after the natural disasters. As you know, the ability to use the group protocols with children and adults, of teaching the stimulation through the butterfly hug, of using artwork to identify the feeling.

 

In this case, this was in Mexico after a hurricane. 200 children were treated within one session. That after the treatment, you can see the change in picture and the change in sun level.

 

And here was the results of one of the treatments. These were 200 children that were treated within one session, and then another 124 in Argentina. There are at least five studies that have been done.

 

I think about 500 children and adults have been documented using the group protocol. And our colleagues in Palestine have also shown the resilience that occurs, that though there may be repeated traumatization, the children are not affected, not traumatized, they're able to have this memory of that was healed, of now mastery, of having a sense of control, of having a sense of safety, so that they don't go back into traumatization. The possibility of being able to use this protocol throughout the region to address the children and adults, so that we don't move into more violence, but we can potentially move into reconciliation.

 

I think this is extremely important. And the fact that I mentioned before, that when we have trauma, mothers will often respond in depression and anxiety, and are then unable to bond with their children. The children now are growing up with a deficit of not having the maternal love and bonding that they so desperately need.

 

The men in the research show the response often goes into anger, which potentially can go into more violence. So the intergenerational transfer through the inappropriate bonding, and the continuation of the ethno-political violence through the anger, is what we're seeing now throughout the world. The fact that we do have the possibility of going in and making a difference in a timely way, is what this has been all about.

 

And the fact that we do not need homework with EMDR, means that treatment can be done in consecutive days. That means the individual treatment, or the group treatment, when appropriate. So that means that teams of therapists, of EMDR therapists, can go into regions of need, where there has been violence, where there has been disaster, and work within a week, on consecutive days, in order to eliminate the traumatization, and therefore potentially eliminate the possibility of an ongoing violence.

 

That is the goal, and one of the reports that we've had in working with a combat victim, again over a five day period, two hours a day, eliminated the PTSD for this war victim. Now, here is a combat veteran, and the anger in his face is occurring at a peace rally. And you can see the other veterans around him are trying to hold him back.

 

The complexity of the case is not only going to be the war trauma, it's going to be the earlier events that set the groundwork for the vulnerability for the PTSD for that individual, in combination with the horrors that they saw. In all of these cases, we have the ability to make a difference, because if we look at the pre and post brain scans, and these were policemen who were involved in shooting incidents, and this is the lit up pre scan, was not when they were thinking of the trauma. No, this is when they were simply doing a concentration task, in other words, this was their brain all the time.

 

And so when we have people that are suffering in this way, the violence that occurs in them, and the harm that they do to their family, and the harm that can then be done to the community is one that becomes ongoing. The ability to go in and do the treatment in a timely way, in how beauty you would be bringing to the world, to join together in EMDR Asia, and EMDR half, they wanted to make such a difference for the region. Ultimately, the research that has been done has said that there's a new understanding now that when they think of the future, they used to think it was only cortical somehow, it was just a cognitive construct, to think of oneself in the future, and now they've discovered that exactly the same areas of the brain light up when one is thinking of the past, or one is thinking of the future.

 

And they've come to understand that in order to imagine a future, it's based on the memories of the past. And we have the ability to eliminate the negativity and the dysfunction from the memories of the past in order to assist in making a positive future. The story that stays with me, that stayed with me for many years, was something that happened in Mexico.

 

There were EMDR clinicians that came to attend an EMDR workshop, and after the day's lessons were done, they decided to go down to the beach to go for a swim in a cove that they had enjoyed together the day before. What they didn't know now, as they entered the water, was that the current had chased, and now there was a riptide that when they entered the water, those who entered the water were pulled away from shore, and as much as they tried, they were not able to get back to shore. Those who were still on the beach were so frightened to see their colleagues, it was at night, only the stars, only the moon, and there they were, possibly going to drown in this ocean alone.

 

We don't know who it was who did it, but someone on shore said, let's link our arms together, and they all linked their arms together, and together as a group, they walked out into the ocean and were able to bring each back to shore. And that's what I see us doing through EMDR HAPPEN, to be able to go out into the world to make sure that no one is there drowning alone in the water, but that together we're able to rescue those who need to be rescued. So I want to honor you for coming together to start EMDR Asia as part of this process, and many blessings on the work and on you for coming together.

 

Thank you.