The Many Tracks of EMDR Therapy: Sourcebook of Techniques, Interventions, Strategies, and Modifications to the Standard EMDR Therapy Protocol

Since 1987, the chance discovery of the effect of eye movements on traumatic/disturbing memories, the Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model (Shapiro, 1995, 2001, 2018) to explain it, and an evolved comprehensive psychotherapeutic approach called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy (Shapiro, 1995, 2001, 2018) have transformed clinical practices. Because of its success in permanently ameliorating symptoms over short periods of time, EMDR became a global mainstay psychotherapeutic approach in thousands of clinical practices. As clinicians became more confident and competent in the psychotherapeutic process of EMDR, they began to identify different and/or unusual situations or special populations that arose during the basic EMDR therapeutic process where the standard EMDR principals, procedures, and protocols were not enough to resolve the dilemmas at hand. Much like Dr. Shapiro before them who solved a problem by developing a new trauma treatment approach, clinicians every day have “aha” moments when clients hit obstacles and become stuck in therapy and need a push or a prod to move them along. They create “on the fly,” problem-solving in the moment to find what their client needs to address whatever issues arise within a solid theoretic framework. Clinical adaptations and enhancements to the basic eight phases of EMDR therapy come in many creative forms. They include new procedures, protocols, and approaches to treat mental illnesses and client populations, stories and metaphors which make the therapeutic process more palatable and understandable, resources which help prepare clients for processing, interweaves to unblock stuck processing, and many other techniques to take a client history, find the target memory, and closea session. The Many Tracks of EMDR Therapy: Sourcebook of Techniques, Interventions, Strategies, and Modifications to the Standard EMDR Therapy Protocol is a handbook of these innovations created by clinicians, inspired by the clients they treat, that have arisen throughout the years, making EMDR therapy more robust and ultimately more successful. These creative discoveries and enhancements unlock the unique client circumstances and enhance the processing within memory networks. Thus, the next level of EMDR history has been born. This book is the first and only one of its kind to identify, describe, and categorize many of the innovations as well as the theoretical underpinnings that have arisen. It is based on Shapiro’s eight-phase, three-pronged protocol to unlock patient processing within the basic EMDR protocol. The Many Tracks of EMDR Therapy captures and folds into its eight phases the many innovations that have evolved over the past thirty years since Shapiro’s (1989ab) seminal articles on Eye Movement Desensitization (EMD) and its subsequent change to Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) to emphasize the shift from desensitization to information processing (1991). Expanding on Shapiro’s (1995, 2001, 2018) famous train metaphor, the author winds the reader through the tracks of the eight phases and three-prongs of EMDR therapy, highlighting the creative ways clinicians help a client unload damaged cargo (i.e., dysfunctional material) and load recovered cargo (i.e., adaptive resolution, learning) at each stop until the train arrives at a predetermined destination.