EMDR as a Mystic Practice

Everything old is new again.

When I finally committed to getting training and certification in EMDR, I was tickled by how many components of the work reminded me of occult practices.

Insurance loves an evidence-based practice with a clear method and a short course of treatment. It’s cost effective, and if there are studies that point to long-term benefits, also good for clients. We like things that work, and it’s great to be able to prove that they work.

But study after study in psychology points to things we all intuitively know: the relationship to the therapist matters more than anything else, all methods have pretty much the same degree of success once you account for other variables, there are good and bad practitioners within any sort of practice, and there is no one practitioner who is good at working with everyone. Pretty much the only factor consistently linked to better client-reported results is the therapist’s willingness to ask for and accept feedback.

Effort matters. Focus matters. A therapist’s ability to take care of themselves well matters. Knowledge and skill matter a great deal too, but they are hard factors to track, so instead we look towards things like affiliations with prestigious institutions or certifications as a kind of stand in for the real thing.

I’m much more interested in the real thing. Attention, care, willingness to tailor treatment to the individual, and something else—something like the sort of wisdom that is so wise that it is like a thread through every method. The things people have been doing since people have been around. The embrace of a mother, the attention of a friend, the strength of having a champion on your side who believes in you, the kind of security that happens when one can rely on consistency. These things are all components of good care, and we see them in effective practitioners in every helping profession, whether they are measurable or not.

And in our most science-y sounding on-trend method of trauma treatment, that undercurrent exists.

Within manualized, standard EMDR care there are exercises that resemble Jung’s active imagination, or even the kind of vision-questing practiced by shamans. There is an invitation to create and identify figures of care—to imagine what it might be like to have a compassionate figure you can call upon in times of trouble, and to bring that imaginary archetype to mind when you experience stress. It is quite similar to ideas like calling upon guardian angels, though somehow, when it is in a manual, and tested, it gains a quality of legitimacy that one tends to lack if they simply tell their clients to pray. But the psychology is quite the same.

Eye movement itself, back and forth, induces the sort of suggestible trance states that hypnotists are aware of. These trance states can be used for good or for ill, and I appreciate that EMDR is explicitly focused on goals set by clients themselves, so that practitioners who have been through this training have gotten a good implicit lesson in consent.

And also—the notion that it is the cure all strikes me personally as quite silly. There is flexibility in the method, specific ways that it can be adjusted for young people, or for victims of trauma. The training itself is good. But it’s not appropriate for all clients, and the things it points to (values like flexibility and consent, alongside the willingness to use some embodiment, trance, and imagination) are values I deeply share.

I’d just appreciate some acknowledgement from the practitioners who use it that none of it is new. It’s a synthesis of wisdoms that are very, very old.