Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR)

EMDR stands for "eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing". EMDR is a relatively new tool that many psychotherapists now use to help their clients to generate change. One of the main reasons for this is that EMDR helps to produce change very rapidly and is sometimes effective in situations where no other form of therapy has been effective.

EMDR was originally developed to help with long-standing cases of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) often where symptoms had been present for many decades. Where other therapies had failed EMDR frequently generated change within a couple of sessions. The therapy involves producing rapid left to right / right to left eye movements at the same time as being directed to focus on a sequence of thoughts or feelings following very precise, tried and tested protocols.

One of the therories proposed to exlain EMDR is that when we in the rapid eye movement dream state our mind is highly able to make associations between things and process information. EMDR simply generates simlar eye movements and gives the mind somthing specific and beneficial to 'process'.

Perhaps more so than any other therapy, EMDR is even more effective when a computer is used to generate the eye movements. For this reason computer assisted EMDR is used by Bill Frost in situations where EMDR is advantageous.