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1998: EMDR: Life after trauma

Life after trauma
by Marlies Bosch

One of my best friends has been frightened of lightning as long as she can remember. She panicked whenever lightning would crisscross through the sky. During thunderstorms she would hide in a built-in closet in her house, mattress always ready on the floor for the stay overnight.

During one of my visits a storm occurred and I was a witness to how an existential fear can be a terror in someone’s life. She had endured a severe lightning experience in her early childhood, during which the whole family had to evacuate the house when it was hit. Her therapist recommended EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy because no other method so far had helped. During four sessions it became clear to her that this deep fear was not only connected to the lightning experience, but went much deeper. She saw visions of the Ku Klux Klan members who burned a cross in her front yard, after it became known that she was one of the first black students in Birmingham, Alabama, to be granted a scholarship to the famous Cornell University.

During the sessions with her therapist the scenario of this frightening event changed and she discovered what she, being an academic deep at heart, had really wanted to do. She had wanted to go towards this gruesome bunch of men and women, dressed in white caps and dresses, and try to have them come to their senses. She had wanted to convince them black
people were human too. After the EMDR sessions she discovered much to her surprise during the next thunderstorm that she could just let the lightning be. After that she was able to use her closet for its intended purpose.

The positive outcome of my friend’s therapy made me curious about this apparently successful method in which one’s eye movements seemed to play the main part. I myself had undergone several therapy-methods to overcome my paralyzing fears of confrontations, without any memorable results up till now. Developed in the U.S., EMDR has been used by a growing number of therapists, and has been found to be especially helpful for with people with a post traumatic stress syndrome. In this article I would like to describe to you the way EMDR-therapy works. While undergoing it myself as well as studying literature about the method, I tried to look at it from a women’s perspective.