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EMDR: Ugly Rumors (was Re: Addictions)


Brent Auble <aubleb@lafcol.lafayette.edu> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 3 Oct 1996, Dave DiRito wrote:
> <SNIP> of a bunch of good material, just leaving the stuff about EMDR
> > something to effectively deal with their trauma, I discovered EMDR (Eye
> > Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing).  I found this method to be
> > vastly more effective and elegant than anything else I tried, including
> > NLP's Fast Phobia/Trauma Cure, hypnosis, etc.  Also, for those who are
> > interested, it has an ever growing body of sound scientific research to
> > support it. No one's yet come up with a plausible explanation for why or
> > how it produces it's results, but work it does.
> >
> > So, there it is.  My first post to this NLP group and I've just proposed
> > that EMDR is superior to anything NLP has to offer for trauma resolution.
> >
> > Looking forward to the responses,
> > Dave DiRito
> >
>
> Dave, as far as I'm concerned, there's nothing wrong with saying
> EMDR is better a trauma resolution than NLP.  EMDR in fact can be
> explained from an NLP standpoint and be added to the NLP
> repertoire of techniques.  EMDR consists of moving the eyes back
> and forth (from side to side) when thinking about an anxiety
> producing memory/mental state (correct me if I'm wrong about
> this.)  Now, connect how NLP describes mental states and the NLP
> eye-movement hypothesis.  By moving the eyes back and forth
> quickly, the mental representation of that unwanted state/memory
> is getting scrambled.  This is exactly what happens in the fast
> phobia (theater) technique, just without explicitly eliciting the
> memory and dissociating from the experience.  All the fast phobia
> technique ultimately does is scramble the mental representation
> of the phobic cue(s) so that their effect is neutralized.

Yes.  The NLP term I have heard used is "disruption pattern",
of which both the Fast Phobia Fix and EMDR are examples.

> There's another interesting connection between NLP and EMDR.
> EMDR was discovered/created/? by Francine Shapiro, who is at the
> Mental Research Institute (MRI) in Palo Alto, CA.  MRI studies
> various sorts of Brief Therapies.  Some of the people who are
> connected (at least on a theoretical basis) with both NLP and MRI
> are Gregory Bateson, Virginia Satir, and Paul Watzlawick.  If you
> want to know more about MRI, their web page is: http://www.mri.org
>
> Hope this is useful,
>
> Brent

And in an earlier post, Micheal Doherty wrote:
>
> Robert Dilts did an impressive demonstration which looked like EMDR
> even though he didn't call it that (it was before I had heard of EMDR).
> I guess my question is how you think EMDR is different from NLP?
>
> Regards,
>
> --
> Michael Doherty, MSW     http://www.top.monad.net/~vsi/


I'm normally averse to sharing unsubstantiated rumors, but I couldn't
resist this.  I heard these rumors during some training, I don't recall
from whom.

It is apparently known that Dr. Francine Shapiro once took an NLP
training from Robert Dilts.  It is thought that this was around the
time that Dilts was experimenting with a disruption technique which
involved having the subject (client) follow with his eyes the
practitioner's rapid wagging back and forth of the practitioner's
finger.  I am told that Dilts stopped experimenting with this technique
after a while, his evaluation being that it was not precise enough for
his tastes, and that better techniques being available for whatever
applications he was pursuing (I don't know what those better techniques
or applications might be).

The ugly rumor is that the similarity between Dilts's technique and
Shapiro's EMDR is more than coincidental.  But whether Shapiro took
Dilts's now-discarded technique and developed/refined it further
herself, or whether Shapiro discovered the technique herself and shared
it with Dilts during the training (before she decided to enshroud the
technique and merchandise it in her seminars) leading to Dilts's
experimentation, was unclear.  I know that Shapiro does not publicly
acknowledge any relationship between EMDR and NLP.

I don't know what to believe.  I normally give people the benefit of
the doubt, thinking the best of them unless I have evidence to the
contrary.  On the other hand, plagiarism, taking credit for oneself and
not acknowledging the contributions of others is a common human failing
and sadly more than a few examples of this type of behavior are known
within the history of NLP.  I would love to hear from the original
sources what really happened back then.

So much for dirty laundry.

That said, from what I have read, EMDR and NLP do seem to be
complementary, and as Brent points out there is no reason that NLPers
can't also benefit from adding EMDR to their repertoire.  Perhaps even
more importantly, even though EMDR is by no means fully embraced yet by
the academic community, Dr. Shapiro has provided an excellent model of
how to take a non-mainstream therapy and work through the mainstream
academic/medical/psych community to give it the garb of Scientific
Respectability.  While this may be of little interest to most NLPers,
there are bound to be some who would like to see NLP likewise accepted
by the Scientific Community, not because we need convincing of NLP's
efficacy, but rather because there are situations where such acceptance
would be useful.  They could do worse than to model the good Dr. Shapiro.

-- Kurt Luoto