Astral Codex Ten

EMDR

4 min read

EMDR

Article

EMDR is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 13, 2021 and May 21, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “First, it justifies various psychotherapies - EMDR and coherence therapy seem to come out especially well here”; “In EMDR it’s eye movements”. It most often appears alongside Bessel van der Kolk, coherence therapy, 5-HT2A receptors.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: February 13, 2021
  • Last seen: May 21, 2024

Appears In

None.

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

The Precision Of Sensory Evidence
February 13, 2021 · Original source
First, it justifies various psychotherapies - EMDR and coherence therapy seem to come out especially well here - that focus on trying to get the brain to pay unusually precise attention, under unusually safe conditions, to something it usually represses. If dysfunctional negative emotions come from a situation where the attention you're able to focus on a negative belief/memory is so low-precision that you can't override your prior that it's terrible, you need to find a way to focus high-precision attention on it and hold it there even though that will start out being hard and aversive. Trauma-focused therapies seem particularly designed to do that - and maybe something about the eye movements in EMDR specifically increases the available precision of your attention?
Inline links: coherence therapy
Book Review: The Others Within Us
May 21, 2024 · Original source
That just leaves the apparently-successful exorcisms. Part of the story must be placebo effects. Our culture’s scientific materialist paradigm helps us get effectively placebo-ed by medicine (even medications that work have associated placebo effects stronger than the real chemical effect). Cultures with a spiritual paradigm can probably be effectively placebo-ed by exorcism. But I know that I, with my medication experience, can’t match some of the cures that Falconer claims to have effected, so something else must be going on. Here I can only say that most good trauma therapies seem to be telling the person that the trauma and its associated compensatory behavior are no longer adaptive, plus some strategy to really dig into the traumatized part of the brain and make it sink in on an emotional level. In hypnotherapy the strategy is hypnosis. In EMDR it’s eye movements. In coherence therapy it’s visualizing the contradictory beliefs really hard. In IFS, it’s interacting with symbolic Parts of yourself in a lucid-dream-like trance state. Seems like a potentially good strategy! In all the exorcisms Falconer describes, I’m struck by his careful preparatory work where he tries to find the beliefs and experiences associated with the demon and unwind the associated emotions. Do that in a hypnosis-like state and add the wow factor of a dramatic exorcism, and maybe something good happens.4
Inline links: In coherence therapy it’s visualizing the contradictory beliefs really hard, 4