Health Self Defense ❤️🔥😷EMDR therapy is a pseudo-science
https://healthselfdefense.substack.com/p/emdr-therapy-is-a-pseudoscience
WHAT IS EMDR THERAPY?
The EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) technique, developed by Shapiro in the late 1980s, is a very popular therapy that attempts to “reduce the intensity of disturbing thoughts and emotions by evoking ‘traumatic’ memories, while guiding specific eye movements (visual stimulation) or other types of bilateral stimulation (auditory or tactile).”
Although EMDR therapy follows the standard method of clinical research, has “proven” efficacy, and has a systematic application procedure, it is still not known exactly how or why it works.
THE ROLE OF EYE MOVEMENTS
Bilateral stimulation (the therapist’s index finger tracing from side to side, alternating sounds in each ear, or tapping on the client’s shoulders or hands) is supposed to allow us to disregard traumatic memories by distracting ourselves with the stimulation, thus facilitating a new processing (reprocessing) of these negative traumatic thoughts.
To be frank, the effect or help provided by bilateral stimulation is probably due more to the ritual and the complete eight-step, ceremony-like procedure than to the supposed reprocessing of a traumatic memory.
The role of eye movements is not directed toward the supposed neuronal reprocessing that is advocated; rather, their role is simply to give the therapy a name and substance, in addition to playing a fundamental part within the ceremony, as they provide meaning and structure to the ritual. On the other hand, it gives prominence to the therapist as someone capable of performing extraordinary actions (bilateral stimulation) that represent a decisive or miraculous moment in the therapy. Patients even readily accept the suggestion that the therapist is “accessing their brain directly,” insofar as the eyes seem to be their most direct connection.
The fact that the participants (therapist and client) do not perceive themselves as performing a ceremony does not invalidate this view; rather, it validates it, since the native people participating in healing ceremonies also do not see themselves as performing a ritual, but rather as doing what they have to do.
WHY DOES EMDR THERAPY WORK?
EMDR therapy works, and it is a grave mistake to claim otherwise. However, how and why it works is unknown, and the reasons given for its effectiveness are likely flawed (eye movements, bilateral stimulation, and reprocessing) and still completely unknown.
To try to unravel the “mystery” of its workings, we must assume that EMDR has behavioral components, reminiscent of systematic desensitization, which other therapies might recognize as their own (EMDR’s initial name was Eye Movement Desensitization/EMD). The results could be due more to these components than to the eye movements and bilateral stimulation that define it.
For this reason, behavior analysts attribute EMDR’s effectiveness to the exposure it involves, although it can hardly be reduced to exposure alone, since this exposure is neither systematic nor prolonged, as is typical of exposure techniques.
Precisely because of this lack of plausible or potentially justifiable hypotheses for its effectiveness, EMDR is attempting to evolve, albeit not in the right direction, through speculative and as yet unproven neural models, and through approaches that integrate other perspectives (such as Beck’s Unified Model of Depression).
Unfortunately, it will continue to be included on the map of “effective therapies,” even though the therapeutic procedure that gives it its name remains unexplained or is even clarified as not being linked to any of the processes it postulates.
THE PLACEBO EFFECT IN EMDR THERAPY
If therapists and clients were to discover that bilateral stimulation has no active effect on their results, nothing would be the same, since the placebo effect of EMDR affects not only the client but also the therapist.
The EMDR placebo lies in the credibility and enthusiasm or faith with which the therapist applies the therapy, while in the client it lies in the need to please the clinician.
The mention of the placebo effect in EMDR should not be seen as a devaluation, but rather as an effort to understand its efficacy. There is a growing interest in reevaluating the placebo as a phenomenon in its own right, and to be honest, no clinical practice is immune to the placebo effect.
FINAL CONCLUSION
The classification of EMDR therapy as a pseudoscience does not stem from the scientific method, nor from its efficacy, but rather from the explanatory theory it attributes to the mechanism supposedly responsible for its functioning and usefulness.
EMDR therapy is a victim of the mechanistic approach it advocates; that is, its efficacy depends on a mechanism that, while being its raison d’être and function, and directly giving the therapy its name, also possesses an inexplicable and implausible character.
“It is easier to label a practice as pseudoscience than to analyze how it works if it is not scientific. Rather than labeling or disqualifying, it is about analyzing how and why pseudoscientific practices work.”
REFERENCES:
▪️ García-Morilla, S. (2017). EMDR: ¿Una pseudoterapia avalada por la APA?
▪️ Pérez-Álvarez, M. (2021). Ciencia y Pseudociencia en Psicología y Psiquiatría.
