Francine Shapiro

So I had to wait until I was in a different place to get trained and, you know, got trained and certified and became a consultant and then wasn't planning on teaching.

But I met Roy Kiesling, who's a, who's a trainer in the EMDR world and had worked with Francine Shapiro and, He asked me to be a trainer and I was like, I don't know.

And then I started doing it.

Turned out I loved it.

Yeah.

The other thing, too, that I was thinking about was I'm curious, what do you think about the term like big T, little t? that's used for trauma?

Yeah, well, when I first learned that, Francine Shapiro, who developed EMDR and did the basis of research in EMDR, she used that language a lot, big T and little t trauma, it's in her book.

And so I used to use it a lot when I was teaching.

Can you break that down for us a little bit? Absolutely.

So EMDR was created by Francine Shapiro in the 1980s.

And I love the origin story of it.

And it won't be a whole history lesson.

I found client choice is the best way to go about it.

That the eye movements were the first thing that the creator of the therapy, Francine Shapiro, discovered or noticed.

Thank you, Francine Shapiro, for coming up with this.

I wonder what made her do that.

So she had a cancer diagnosis.

on its own before providing MDR therapy, but that's another story and I'm getting ahead of myself.

And I remember reading through Francine Shapiro's text and noticing all of the cautions about dissociation that were listed there, but that were not covered in the training or were not covered adequately enough in the training.

And so I thought, well, I'm really interested in using this modality that I am learning is supposedly highly effective for complex trauma, but the patient population that I'm hoping to work with, it could be really dangerous for them.

So I guess I have to go get trained up on both.

And in order to coordinate the ball going back and forth, you have to send information through your right and left brain, yes? So he said, come up with a traumatic emotion, close your eyes, and toss a ball back and forth.

Now later, Francine Shapiro tells a story about walking through an orchard or something, feeling upset about something, and she noticed that her eyes were going back and forth very quickly, and it dissipated the feeling.

So again, right brain, left brain integration, and she turned it into a technique.

So EMDR, when you go to an EMDR practitioner, they have you feel a negative emotion and then they put their fingers in front of you and they make your eyes go back and forth across the midline to dissipate that feeling.

Desensitization reprocessing.

It's a really long, complicated term, and the lady who invented it, Francine Shapiro, now sadly not with us, she invented it back in, what, '80, end of the '80s.

She says that, "I know the name's long and complicated." She admits in a second book, "I'd call it reprocessing therapy if I was gonna rename it now." But by the time that she'd figured out everything about it, everyone sort of recognized those initials, and she said, "Well, it's a bit like Coca-Cola.

There isn't any cocaine in Coca-Cola anymore, but it's still...

But because it's linked to these other things, the outcomes might not be the same if we just work on the one thing rather than all of those things.

So you'd have to have this conversation with someone.

Once they understand the context of the problem that you've got at the moment, the memories that maybe, that contribute to this, we can discuss, "Okay, what are we gonna work on?" So I, I think of a lady before I saw for a road traffic incident, only wanted to work on that.

There was other memories that we identified, but she only wanted to work on this one.

And that in turn changes our belief systems that we hold about ourselves.

And with EMDR, which was kind of conceived and developed by a wonderful lady called Francine Shapiro in the 1980s in America, we start to think more adaptively, not just about what happened in the present, but also in the past and in the future.

And she described what's called the three pronged approach.

So, um, we are processing the whole kind of, um, to use psychedelic language, the whole co-ex, the whole belief system.

like owned by humanity for, because we can't really heal ourselves until we heal each other as this more kind of collectivist notion that often emerges in themes in psychedelic and autostates work.

So So then having yeah, having medical patents and trademarked interventions makes interventions less accessible to the people who actually need the most, because when we consider trauma the impact, for example, of minority stress where people re-experience discrimination over and over again, and the impact that that has on the nervous system, how intersectionality creates the conditions where trauma is more likely to happen.

Poverty, I think Gandhi describes how poverty is the most brutal form of violence because of the physical impact that it has with on on the individual's body and so um and so you know if we are going to kind of have mature conversations around like treating trauma then we and through a collectivist lens then we also need to think about how do we how do we make this open source and one of the reasons that i um uh yeah published a book rather than patented a treatment was because following the lead of Francine Shapiro who made EMDR open source I wanted to make sure that these kind of very kind of useful interventions could be used by more people and by keeping them academically focused we can start to build the credibility for combining EMDR with psychedelics with ketamine, with EMDMA.

I've made the same mistake as you did at the start there.

Been here in the field of healthcare or counseling since the 80s.

So it came into Francine Shapiro was a PhD student.

She's passed now, but she created the model.

and she, I like to tell the story about it, I always tell my clients, she was doing her dissertation and PhD, the story is that she was walking through a park, she was looking left and right, and she noticed a shift in the thing that she was going through, she decided to do a PhD or her dissertation on Vietnam, or vets, so she did it on 30 vets, and she did a 90-minute session of her hand movement like this, And at the end, there was a significant difference between before and after effect.

It stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.

Now, don't let that discourage you as someone who, you know, you have blindness, right? Because this is what Francine Shapiro did.

She created other modalities so that people who were blind could still do the bilateral trauma work.

So there's tones which go onto your ears.