On post-traumatic stress

The treatment I use is EMDR, a technique developed by California psychologist Francine Shapiro that has shown to be successful treating post-traumatic stress. The technique is designed to process traumatic memory by mimicking the way people generally process thoughts into memory, during the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) phase of sleep. You can put patients into rapid-eye movement in several ways, including having them move their eyes back and forth as if following the ball in a tennis match, or tapping their hands. They concentrate on the troubling images in their mind or repeat `I feel horror,' for example, and the brain can then begin to process it. I work with children with nightmares or fears and they usually go away fast. Even if you don't understand it, EMDR can still work.

Newspaper

English

Patty Shillington

Shillington, P. (2001, October 4). On post-traumatic stress. Miami, FL: The Miami Herald, Final, Living, 3E