Please cite facts when making such statements versus claiming something as fact, when only your opinion.
Hey there, Anthony. I don't want to get into an argument with you. I know you are a big proponent of CBT and it surely does have a good record and has helped many people. I am responding mostly because I'm reacting to the tone I perceived in your response to my post. I am an academic. I know how to find and read research, and how to suss out its quality. I talk to a lot of professionals. I have run trainings for neuropsychologists. I write books and articles. I do know what I am talking about, though my bias toward somatically based treatment interventions came through as an assertion of its better effectiveness. I didn't cite research because partly I didn't want to get all academic in a simple and well-intentioned post-response. I do certainly understand your concern about citing research that backs up statements about what is and is not effective in trauma therapy.
EMDR is not somatic, EMDR is closer to exposure, being a CBT therapy.
Most (all?) trauma therapy has some aspects of cognition involved at some point in the therapy, as the goal is to remap the brain's neural connections.
I indicate that EMDR has a somatic base because it goes beyond pure CBT by including bodily movement (eye tracking, hand tapping, etc.). It's maybe not categorized currently as a somatic therapy, but a major contributor to its effectiveness is the connection between the mental and the physical aspects of consciousness. I have done EMDR with a practitioner who trained with Shapiro, and I have witnessed a family member going through the treatment as well. It is challenging, but effective, especially for single-event traumas. It does not work without the physical activity. It is an 8-phase therapy according to the EMDR Institute (founded by Francine Shapiro, the person who originated EMDR). The helpful website is
What is EMDR? | EMDR Institute – EYE MOVEMENT DESENSITIZATION AND REPROCESSING THERAPY.
Note #3 below in the phases of EMDR treatment:
Phases 3-6: In phases three to six, a target is identified and processed using EMDR therapy procedures. These involve the client identifying three things:
1. The vivid visual image related to the memory
2. A negative belief about self
3. Related emotions and body sensations.
That is not factual. Please cite your source for such statement.
You seem to think I am making false statements. I had no intention of doing so. It is simply that research is increasingly moving in the direction of affirming that the most effective treatments for most traumas will include somatics. Without the somatic component, the client/patient is working with only a part of their consciousness to overcome the emotional reactivity to trauma--the intellectual.
There is a lot of research out there indicating the superiority of somatic based psychotherapy to CBT alone. I don't feel like hunting down and annotating a bibliography, but the research is out there if you are interested and wanting to pursue it. The research base is growing because of advances in understanding of neuroscience and the formerly misunderstood relationships (or lack of) between mind and body. CBT appeals to the western binary concept of mind and body separation, and it is very useful for treating some aspects of trauma, especially if the sufferer is not experiencing secondary or tertiary dissociation. However, if one reviews the current literature on trauma healing, one will find increasing agreement among theorists and clinicians that successful treatment must include both mind and body in relationship. This is no new concept in Eastern medicine, but it is still new in Western medicine, in spite of the learnings connected to WWI survivors who developed conversion disorders in addition to PTSD. CBT still seems often to be understood as the gold-standard in treatment, but that is changing in both primary care medicine and therapeutic intervention for trauma survivors. And many trauma survivors will attest to the fact that CBT alone, while it can help certain behavioral responses to traumatic reactivity (flashbacks, self-harming behaviors, phobias, etc.) does not heal the underlying trauma.
I mentioned van der Kolk's book, The Body Keeps the Score, because it is very well-researched and documented, and is useful and readable for both survivors and clinicians. Peter Levine's books are also readable and well-researched. One can go further and look at Stephen Porges's work (polyvagal theory) and research on PTSD as a disruption of the autonomic nervous system (hard or impossible to heal through cognition), and many approaches to healing adult attachment disorders (which are extremely common among survivors of early trauma.
I will stop here. I acknowledge that CBT-based therapies can be helpful. I have participated in intensive DBT programs and they are helpful to some extent, and I went through four years of intensive CBT a while back which was helpful in teaching me about my reactivity and identifying some aspects of my reactivity. I have even had exposure therapy related to some phobias which was terribly emotionally damaging even though it did allow me to overcome the phobia by retraining my behavioral responses to the triggers. So, yeah, CBT is good. But it is limited. And for the benefit of trauma survivors, I think it of extreme importance to educate them (and the clinicians who treat them) about the necessity of participating in somatically based therapies if they are interested in true and deep healing.
