It feels like every day on national and local news very sad stories are told by individuals, families and charities of the failings of mental health services, but there is never any mention of what can be done to help these people. EMDR therapists and doctors around the world share the frustration this highly effective clinical treatment has not been widely publicised, and people need not suffer any more, but only if they can access affordable EMDR treatment.
Our minds are programmed to ‘process’ experiences of traumatic memories to ensure we learn from them and use the wisdom of experience to keep us safe in the future, so why does this far too often not work?
Processing might take 1 minute, 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week 1 month, but if it takes longer than 3 months – this is the magical time frame, the memory will become ‘locked in’ our mind. We now know after 25 years of mental health study that once trauma is ‘locked in’ for ever deep within the mind no matter what we do, and that part of our mind becomes stuck at the age it happened.
I explain it’s like an Application running in the background of a ‘smartphone’ that hasn’t been turned off. If there are enough Apps running silent in the background they start to drain the phones battery, everything starts to slow down, the phone plays up until eventually the phones memory shuts down.
Our own minds operate just like smartphones. This is why therapy and counselling for trauma rarely works and isn’t recommended for unresolved trauma beyond 3 months. Therapy and Counselling helps us to process the immediate trauma but we now know we have to access those services within the magical window of 3 months, and we all know just how hard it can be outside of private medicine to get to see a counsellor or have any kind of therapy. It may take months, using up the window of opportunity. This is why national clinical bodies such as NICE in the UK recommend EMDR for trauma beyond 3 months.
But if as a child our minds are still developing and we cannot understand what’s happened or the memory is too painful then it can become locked in at that age of the actual memory regardless of the 3 month point or not!
This often depends on the adult’s reaction around the time of the trauma. Often we see adults ‘teach’ their children anxiety. This is why it is so important when treating any child the parents also look inwardly at themselves and use this EMDR to treatment to resolve their own fears and anxiety lead behaviours where this is needed, to heal the family as a whole.
This is a major contributor to the increase in global mental health cases. Healing the family as a whole is one of the most important aspects of this book hence the name EASY EMDR for EVERYONE EVERYWHERE.
But in some communities, refugee camps or countries as a whole there simply aren’t any councillors or therapists. In developing countries or those ravaged by war or natural disaster only basic health services may exist.
Einstein once said “Imagination is more powerful than knowledge”.
It took an inordinate amount of hard work for Einstein to formulate the simplest answer to the most complex question in the universe – the Theory of Relativity which was simplified into E = Mc 2; which has just 4 parts.
Likewise it has taken an inordinate amount of hard work and time around the world for the solution to the questions posed by mental health and daily wellbeing challenges, which we thank and praise Dr Francine Shapiro PHD for EMDR, and with the simplicity created further in this book set, EASY EMDR has been simplified for the masses finally, in equally just 4 steps as EMDR is for Everyone Everywhere.
