Eye Movement Integration Therapy: The Comprehensive Clinical Guide

By Danie Beaulieu

Eye Movement Integration Therapy is the first book on the subject, introducing one of the most innovative and effective new treatments available to psychotherapists today. "a splendid, coherent analysis" Marlene E. Hunter MD FCFP(C)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Release date: Apr 24, 2003
• ISBN: 9781845905088

Danie Beaulieu

Dr Danie Beaulieu is a psychologist from Montreal, Canada. Her teaching in the field of Impact Therapy and Eye Movement Integration Therapy has deeply influenced the practice of hundreds of thousands of therapists around the world. She has written over 20 books and taught on four continents. She is a much sought after speaker and lecturer at symposia all over the world. Find out some of her tools on Youtube (in French, English and German).

Book preview

Preface

It is an immense privilege to be a practicing psychologist in our era. Never before have we had such a range of effective treatments available to us, backed by an ever-deepening understanding of the nature of the mind and its disturbances. In the last twenty years, we have seen incredible changes in the way psychologists, physicians, and scientists approach the question of emotional and physical wellbeing, resulting in impressive progress in our ability to help our clients. The development of Eye Movement Integration therapy (EMI) is, I believe, among the most important contributions psychology has made to human society in modern times. It is a new technique of psychotherapy, merging insights and knowledge from formerly disparate fields into a coherent, flexible approach. Most significantly, EMI is rooted firmly in the belief that the human mind is endowed with powerful means of healing itself, if only we can trust them and find ways to facilitate them.

I feel fortunate to have learned this astonishing method during my search for greater efficacy in assisting my clients, and in my personal quest for a deeper understanding of the human mind. For so long, all of our good will, caring, and therapeutic skills were too often insufficient to alleviate the distress of people living with unresolved memories of traumatic events. Whether labeled shell shock, hysteria, depression or PTSD, the daily struggle of these individuals defied resolution in too many cases. But now, with EMI, there is reason for optimism.

EMI is the most effective method I have used for accessing and integrating traumatic memories. It has the power to unlock recesses of the multisensory mind that would remain forever closed to talk therapy. Many people have difficulty talking about their traumatic experiences, arriving in the therapist’s office saying, I can’t understand. This is stupid, I know [the trauma] won’t happen again, but … I can’t help feeling the way I do. The more they try to express themselves, the more they feel inadequate, stupid, foolish—or crazy. After years of therapy, some clients feel hopeless and exhausted by both their problems and the efforts to overcome them. Talk hasn’t helped these clients, but EMI’s unique methods and characteristics can result in remarkable—and remarkably fast—healing of previously refractory traumas.

In light of the fact that I am not the originator of the method, I am humbled and honored by the opportunity to share this exceptional technique with my colleagues and students. Several years ago, when Steve Andreas (who developed the method with his wife Connirae) first proposed the idea of writing a book about EMI to me, he told me that he was unfortunately too occupied with other projects to find the time required for such an undertaking. Given that I felt this therapy to be every bit as important as the advent of penicillin, I could not conceive of its not being made widely available. With Steve’s encouragement—and his confidence that my background, experience, and enthusiasm would see me through—I embarked on the adventure of writing what we both agreed was a much-needed book. I felt that I simply could not let this important work be further delayed because of side issues, knowing as I do that many therapists are searching, as I was, for effective solutions to persistent problems. The healing power of EMI is just too astounding to let it remain a well-kept secret. It is worth remembering that, when penicillin was put into common use, its mechanism of action was not understood. But it was understood that it saved lives. The reader will therefore find many questions and hypotheses in this book, and may discover even more when he begins using EMI in practice. But it is my hope that the magic of the results and the process will outweigh any doubts, as it has for me, for the professionals I have trained and for our clients whose lives have been transformed.

This volume is designed to be both introductory text and clinician’s guide to EMI therapy. It is not intended to replace training with an experienced EMI therapist or supervised practice within a training program. Likewise, because the material recorded in a person’s memories can have complex psychological effects, only trained psychotherapists, with a full range of other methods available to them and an excellent understanding of the complexities of trauma, should undertake EMI therapy.

I have arranged this book to serve its dual purposes by providing information on the development and underlying concepts of EMI therapy in the first chapter. Chapter Two presents a brief review of our current understanding of the nature of traumatic memories, their impacts on wellbeing, and the utility of the EMI approach for their resolution. The interrelationship between eye movements and thoughts is explored in Chapter Three, including a discussion of the various psychotherapeutic approaches that have made use of this fascinating interrelationship. Chapters Four, Five, and Six guide the reader through the groundwork that precedes an EMI treatment session. These three chapters present, respectively, the pretreatment assessment process, the preparation of both client and therapist for EMI, and the selection of the initial targeted memory. The heart of the method is covered in the next two chapters: Chapter Seven describes in detail how to conduct an EMI session, while Chapter Eight presents extensive information on closing a session, completing treatment, and providing follow-up. Advanced techniques and advice for working with challenging situations or clientele are offered in the final chapter.

As the first book written about EMI, this volume cannot be considered the final version of the treatment, nor can it provide all the answers to the numerous questions that EMI raises. My goal in writing it has been to make EMI available to more therapists, so that they can add this incredible tool to their clinical repertoire. It is my fond hope that some readers will be inspired to add their expertise to the further development of EMI, and to explore the full range of its applicability. I would also be delighted if this book provided food for thought to academicians hungry to learn more about the mechanisms of memory and the interlocking lattice of the multisensory experience.

Chapter One

The Origin of EMI

Introduction

Marc was referred to me about five years after prison inmates took one guard and three other prisoners hostage at the maximum-security penitentiary where Marc was a guard on the crisis-management team. The hostages had been tortured savagely during the long negotiations before the gymnasium, in which the hostage takers had barricaded themselves with their victims, was finally forced open. Marc was the first guard on the scene, and the first to confront the horrifying vision of the mutilated corpses of the three hostage prisoners and the appalling wounds of the guard, Jean. Marc’s friend and co-worker lay with burns covering every exposed inch of skin, the result of torture with cigarettes and lighters. Later, Marc was to recall most distinctly the intense concentration of energy that was required to deal with the psychopathic inmates, the long minutes as he carried Jean in his arms to the infirmary, and the clean-up of the pieces of brain tissue and smears of blood from the walls and floor of the gymnasium.

When I met him, Marc had not been able to work for the past three years, disabled by a tremor in his right arm that had developed progressively as he attempted to maintain his self-appointed role of protector of his fellow guards—helping them recover from the trauma of the hostage incident and continuing to be the first to take action whenever there was trouble. He had been examined by a neurologist and told that the tremor was a permanent condition for which no treatment was offered. The tremor worsened whenever a conversation with old colleagues or the sight of passing prison trucks reminded him of the hostage crisis.

Even without the shaking in his arm, it is doubtful that Marc could have held a job at that point: he was suffering severe symptoms of posttraumatic stress that several attempts at psychotherapy had been unable to improve. He was plagued by frequent nightmares, paralyzing flashbacks, outbursts of rage, and fits of depression. He had become sexually impotent, violent toward his wife, completely impatient with the slightest provocation. Marc reacted most strongly to the sight of men with tattoos or men who, according to his view, looked like criminals. As his symptoms worsened, he had self-medicated his pain with alcohol and drugs, and eventually spent many weeks in a psychiatric ward for treatment of his suicidal tendencies. By the time I saw him, it was clear that he held out no great hope that yet another psychologist with yet another new form of therapy would be able to help him.

In our first session, we discussed Marc’s background, the nature of his current difficulties, the effects of his problems on his family and social life. I explained to him how Eye Movement Integration works, and the type of reactions he might experience, and he agreed to return the following week for the first treatment. During that second session we began EMI with Marc focusing on his most intense memory—the first impression he had when he broke through the gymnasium door and saw the devastation. For ten seconds or so, Marc’s eyes tracked the movement of my hand, leading him in a series of horizontal, vertical, and diagonal patterns, while he concentrated on his memory. After each segment of eye movements, we paused briefly, and Marc told me what was in his mind.

During sequential eye movements, Marc revived many associated impressions of terrifying and appalling situations at the prison, and the fury he felt toward the inmates who were capable of such brutality. However, as he continued to track my hand movements with his eyes while thinking about Jean, for the first time his thoughts contained elements of emotional satisfaction. Letting go of his entrenched belief that it was all his fault, that he should have taken action earlier, he was able to realize that it was the psychopathic prisoners who were the source of the horror, that he had done everything he could, and that Jean had been placed in good hands. Although it was emotionally wrenching at times, by the end of an hour and a half of integration, Marc felt real relief. Immediately after the integration, as we were reviewing the results together, he looked down at his hands—which were not trembling now—and exclaimed, Hey! I won the lottery!

In the weeks following the first treatment, Marc’s sexual potency returned, and he began to feel more in command of his reactions. Although the trembling in his right hand occasionally returned, it was no longer uncontrollable. He began to perceive the tremor as a signal that he should switch his attention away from his experiences at the prison. Not surprisingly, though, certain aspects of the experience still caused him pain, and when he returned for the third session we chose to work on the most pressing remaining problem.

One of the triggers of his outbursts of fury seemed to be the particular yellow-green color of his little girl’s plastic scissors. At the mere sight of them, Marc would fly into a wild, inarticulate rage. After such outbursts he was devastated and exhausted, barely able to stand, and would spend most of the remainder of the day lying down on the couch. Beginning with that situation in mind and following a few eye movements, Marc suddenly recalled that the color of Jean’s burned skin was the same vivid yellow-green as the scissors. Although some progress had been made in the previous session, a strong visual association persisted. Subsequently, when I asked him to picture a good memory of the yellow-green color, he mentioned that, when he was young, his mother had hung some cheerful yellow-green floral curtains in the kitchen. When asked to hold both images in his mind—the original scene where he found his friend covered with yellowed burns and the picture of the kitchen curtains—Marc was astonished at the image that suddenly sprang to mind: he saw his friend Jean, lying comfortably in a garden of yellow flowers, with a wide smile on his face. In the next segment of eye movements, Jean was waving goodbye as he drove off, still smiling. Marc felt an unburdened lightness at the conclusion of that day’s work, and had no further problems with his daughter’s plastic scissors.

A total of six treatments were needed to overcome the entirety of Marc’s original trauma. At one defining point toward the end of the integration, he saw himself walking out of the prison, waving goodbye, as if it was all over. Previously potent triggering stimuli had lost the power to provoke flashbacks or anger, and Marc was able to perceive criminal types more objectively and calmly. The trembling in his hand had become almost nonexistent as fewer and fewer situations triggered distress. Today, Marc is employed in the information-technology industry, no longer uses any drugs or alcohol, and enjoys a renewed happiness and vigor in his relationship with his wife.

* * *

One of the objectives we share as psychotherapists is to help our clients as quickly and efficiently as possible. Numerous therapeutic approaches are used to help suffering clients surmount and resolve a myriad emotional and mental difficulties, with various degrees of success. However, some of the presenting complaints that we encounter are more difficult to face and more difficult to heal: the victims of violence and abuse who are trapped in an endless cycle of flashbacks and nightmares; the young college student who has been rejected by her boyfriend, and is despondent to the point of suicidal thoughts; the retired engineer whose wife has died of cancer, and who remains fixated on the injustice and prematurity of her death; the businessman whose life is absolutely great, except for the persistent pain in his back and the unremitting headaches for which doctors can find neither cause nor solution; and people like Marc, who have seen true evil, up close and personal.

The distress of these clients elicits our deepest sympathy and desire to help, and yet we are often frustrated in our attempts to do so. Traditional forms of counseling and psychotherapy—which generally entail talking with the client about his problems at length—assume that the cognitive processes will eventually permit the client to arrive at a healthier understanding of his situation, and to develop appropriate behaviors. Even when cognitive therapy helps, it often takes too long for those who endure intense anguish and who await alleviation of their symptoms. Statistics on usage of mental-health care indicate that clients remain in therapy for an average of only five appointments (Weiner-Davis, 1993). If no concrete progress is evident in that period, we are simply offering too little, too late. And some clients, like those described above, have problems that are almost inaccessible by cognitive means and therefore experience limited improvement with purely cognitive interventions, no matter how many hours they are seen. What can we offer those whose reactions are at the level of reflex, not involving thought at all? Marc’s enraged response to his daughter’s yellow-green scissors was so rapid and intense that it seemed to preclude thought entirely. And what can we do for a client who assures us that his life is absolutely great, but whose body is screaming a contradictory message?

What is called for, in these and many other situations, is a therapy that does not require the client and therapist to reveal, analyze, and comprehend every aspect of the various causes and effects of the distress. Clinging to the expectation that the rational mind is capable of resolving all problems dooms therapists to frustration—and too many of our clients to a lifetime of supportive therapy and medication that control, but do not relieve, the pain. But the human mind is capable of much more than purely conscious, cognitive processes. All the specialized sensory organs feed endless information into the brain, via the thalamus, and thence to the central integrator of the hippocampus, to the emotional hub of the amygdala and the infinite complexity of the cortices. The recordings of all the events—major and minor—of our lives are retained in distributed, multisensory form somewhere in our brains. Our conscious cognitive processes can lead us to only the smallest fraction of this information. The remainder—the vast majority of the information recorded and stored in multisensory and emotional form—continues to have profound and subtle influences on all of our behavior.

How can we tap into this rich mine of experience and memory, and recruit it to the benefit of our clients’ mental health? Is there some system by which we can activate these resources, which naturally and constantly help us to adjust to the stresses of life? This is the hope that EMI offers. By facilitating access to the individual’s associated memory networks, and unleashing the power of internal multisensory experience, EMI promotes a process of self-healing that is made to measure for each person and for their specific difficulty. It relies, implicitly, on an internal, homeostatic regulator to help find and retrieve the information that will help the client adjust to whatever bad experience or situation brings them into the therapist’s office. It is not a miracle, not a trick, not a gadget or a gimmick, but rather an amazing technique that has been in use for over thirteen years, and has been continually refined during all that time. It wasn’t invented in the blink of an eye, or inspired by a dream, but was carefully created by two highly skilled developers of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). This chapter will present the roots of EMI, from the fundamentals of NLP and the devoted work of Connirae and Steve Andreas in developing the technique, through the modifications I have made, including the influences of other therapies.

I. The originators of EMI

Effective new therapeutic methods arise from experience and ingenuity, two characteristics that Connirae and Steve Andreas possess in abundance. When they developed EMI in 1989, it was the latest of an extensive list of innovative therapeutic techniques that they had developed. Motivated by the desire to assist people in the process of personal change, Connirae and Steve have consistently sought the most effective and practical solutions to address issues as diverse as accepting criticism constructively; patterns for forgiveness, guilt and grief; evolving family relations; improving job performance; and establishing or pursuing life goals. Their educational backgrounds—Connirae Andreas holds a PhD in psychology and Steve Andreas an MA (studying under the tutelage of Carl Rodgers)—provided the starting place, but it is their pursuit of clinical effectiveness that guides their work.

Steve’s curriculum vitae reads like a road map to unexplored territory. From his early days as a polymer chemist (already making linkages between discrete entities!), to his first teaching experiences in psychology, he followed a path of his own making. As a rising star in the world of Gestalt therapy, under his previous name, John O. Stevens, he worked with both Fritz Perls and Virginia Satir. Later in his studies with Richard Bandler and John Grinder, the founders of NLP, he ventured further into the frontier regions of psychology. Always breaking new ground, he established his own publishing company in 1967, Real People Press, with the specific objective of putting into print works in new areas of psychology and personal change. When NLP began to take form as a discipline, Steve edited and published Bandler and Grinder’s fundamental book, Frogs Into Princes: Neuro-Linguistic Programming (Bandler and Grinder, 1979). In the same year, Steve and his wife, Connirae, started their own institute, NLP Comprehensive, for training and certification of NLP practitioners, and to offer the power of NLP to any who were interested. Since then, Steve has become an internationally known speaker and NLP trainer, in addition to his work as an editor and author. As Steve has been known to say, I’m a searcher, not a researcher, and his life quest has been to find ways to help people blaze their own trails. Steve’s journey has included numerous books, the latest of which is Transforming Your Self: Becoming Who You Want To Be, an amazing guide to self-discovery and change (Andreas, 2002).

Connirae has followed a more direct path, with a clear vision of her role as a therapist, a researcher, and a trainer, and it is she who took the lead in developing EMI. The warmth, skill, and insight she brings to bear in every sphere of activity have made her a much-sought-after and respected educator. Connirae’s research and development efforts have made contributions to many aspects of NLP. She has left her mark in numerous articles and books. Among others, Connirae has co-authored the groundbreaking book Core Transformations with her sister Tamara (Andreas and Andreas, 1994). With Steve, she co-wrote Change your Mind and Heart of the Mind, in which they explain numerous NLP techniques that they had either created or modified (Andreas and Andreas, 1987, 1989).

EMI developed as a part of their never-ending search for what works. As we will see in the next section, their thorough knowledge of NLP, combined with Steve’s willingness to go into unknown territory and Connirae’s more analytical approach, permitted them to recognize and harness the power of eye movements to facilitate change.

II. Roots of EMI: Neuro-Linguistic Programming

When John Grinder and Richard Bandler began the collaboration that gave rise to the field of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), they constituted a formidable team of a linguist with an interest in behavior and a mathematician with training in Gestalt therapy. This rare combination of interests, training, and skills drove the research that built the foundations of NLP. In 1974, they set out to construct a model of language patterns and behaviors that made some therapists remarkably effective. Two essential elements of their approach to the study of effective behaviors were the observation of behavior with astonishing attention to detail, nuance, and patterns; and the codification of those observations into reproducible, teachable methods. Their early books, The Structure of Magic, The Structure of Magic, Volume II, and Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson, M.D., they analyzed the behavioral strategies of three legendary psychotherapists: Milton Erickson, Fritz Perls, and Virginia Satir (Bandler and Grinder, 1975a, 1975b; Grinder and Bandler, 1976). The groundwork of NLP is largely derived from observation of the effective communication methods that these therapists used to lead people to make changes in their lives.

Widely acknowledged as one of the most important figures in the field of hypnotherapy, Milton Erickson was also responsible for developing an entire style of therapeutic intervention that integrates nonverbal communication, pacing, and leading—three mainstays of NLP. Fritz Perls was the originator of Gestalt therapy, in which the sensory aspects of experience are regarded as of equal importance with the cognitive, and the separation between body and mind is regarded as artificial. Gestalt techniques are designed to be experiential rather than intellectual exercises, and the goal of therapy is to reach full awareness of the here and now, without avoidance or undue influence from the past. NLP derives its emphasis on nonverbal cues and sensory experience in part from a close analysis of Gestalt methods. Satir’s specialization in family therapy and interpersonal dynamics likewise influenced the development and early applications of NLP. Bandler and Grinder demonstrated that part of the secret of the magic that Perls and Satir created with their clients depended on their innate abilities to observe, pace, mirror, and modify the behavior that the clients displayed during therapy sessions. While Perls’s and Satir’s effective behaviors were mostly unconscious, Bandler and Grinder found that if other therapists adopted the same behaviors they could achieve similar results with their clients. These original investigations concentrated on modeling the behavior of highly competent individuals and creating a useful analysis of those behaviors that correlated with their effectiveness. Eventually, that work led them to study general patterns of subtle behaviors; in particular, it led them to an awareness of the representational systems and accessing cues.

Representational systems

As the term Neuro-Linguistic Programming implies, this branch of psychology focuses on the relationship between the linguistic representation of our world and the neurologic representation, and the programs by which these two representational systems interact to produce behaviors. Essentially, it is a field of behavior modeling devoted to the study of the structure of subjective experience. NLP recognizes that all human mental processes are neurologically based, and that experience is essentially the synthesis of all the information that is received and processed through the nervous system. Language—the means by which we communicate our experience to other people—is an imperfect translation of that internal, neurologic representation. Words serve as triggers that permit access to internal meanings, which are represented in sensory, emotional, and cognitive terms; however, the specific information accessed in response to a given word is unique to each person.

One of the principles underlying NLP is borrowed from the father of general semantics, Alford Korzybski, who stated, A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness. In NLP shorthand, we say simply, The map is not the territory. Korzybski recognized that we do not experience objective reality, but rather our perception of that reality—our map (Korzybski, 1995). Our perception of reality is the aggregate of the information collected by our senses and processed by our internal representational systems. The sensory systems of the body act as both conduit and filter of information. The information collected is also stored in the five anatomically distributed sensory modes: visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory, and kinesthetic, with associated emotional and cognitive connections.

The nature of our maps of reality—our internal representational systems—is consequently multisensory and multifaceted. All mental functions, as described in NLP theory, involve sequences and networks of sensory information. Memory, learning, decision making, motivation, creativity—even dreams—are all dependent on a structured, ordered pattern of sensorial information processing, which forms the program for each mental activity.

Accessing: eye movements as cues to information retrieval

The mental process of seeking and associating information in disparate sensory modes and in different neuroanatomical sites is referred to as an accessing strategy. An individual’s accessing strategy, in any given cognitive task, is reflected by and affected by subtle behavioral and physiological changes, which NLP refers to as accessing cues. These include such observable behaviors as gestures, facial expressions, breathing patterns, voice tones, flushing, head movements, posture adjustments and eye movements; as well as physiological changes that are difficult or impossible to observe casually, such as altered heart rate, respiration, perspiration, and muscular tension. Among these accessing cues, eye movements are most easily observed and most consistent among different populations and cultures.

Robert Dilts, one of the early students of Bandler and Grinder, focused on eye movements as a behavior to be observed and modeled, and devoted substantial effort to decoding the meaning of eye movements as accessing cues. Beginning with what had already been learned about the lateralized organization of the brain, and the tendency of eye movements to reflect the type of information accessed, Dilts conducted experiments to further refine the mapping of eye movements on the informational landscape of the mind. Dilts recognized that the mind might differentiate between not only the sensory/cognitive mode in which information is available, but also whether that information is part of memory (recorded) or imagination (constructed). While tracking both eye movements and electroencephalogram with electrodes, Dilts asked each subject a set of questions designed to elicit visual, auditory, kinesthetic, or visual information, from either a memory or a mental construction. From his recordings and subsequent observations, Dilts was able to recognize a prevalent pattern of eye movements as associated with different types of processing (Bandler and Grinder, 1979; Dilts, Grinder, Bandler, and DeLozier, 1980) (see Figure 1.1).

While making no claim that the described pattern is universal, Dilts, Bandler, and Grinder determined that careful observation of any individual will reveal a more or less consistent pattern of eye movements that that person unconsciously makes when activating different sensory modalities in their thoughts. In fact, the pattern described above is sometimes reversed in left-handed people, and may be organized quite differently in ambidextrous individuals. No matter what pattern of eye movement accessing cues a person follows, however, they will systematically use the same movement when accessing the same sensory mode.

Figure 1.1: Eye accessing cues

Up and left: Nondominant hemisphere visualization; i.e. remembered imagery (Vr). Seeing images of things seen before, in the way they were seen before. Sample questions that usually elicit this kind of processing include, What color are your mother’s eyes?, What does your coat look like?

Up and right: Dominant hemisphere visualization, i.e. constructed imagery and visual fantasy (Vc). Seeing images of things never seen before or seeing things differently than they were seen before. Questions that usually elicit this kind of processing include, What would an orange hippopotamus with purple spots look like?, What would you look like from the other side of the room?

Lateral left: Nondominant hemisphere auditory processing; i.e. remembered sounds and words, and tonal discrimination (Ar). Remembering sounds heard before. Questions that usually elicit this kind of processing include, What’s the last thing I said?, What does your alarm clock sound like?

Lateral right: Dominant hemisphere auditory processing; i.e. constructed sounds and nonsense words (Ac). Hearing sounds not heard before. Questions that tend to elicit this kind of processing include, What would the sound of clapping turning into the sound of birds singing sound like?, What would your name sound like backwards?

Down and left: Internal auditory dialogue, or inner self-talk (Ad). Talking to oneself. Instructions that tend to elicit this kind of processing include, Say something to yourself that you often say to yourself., Recite the Pledge of Allegiance silently to yourself.

Down and right: Kinesthetic feelings, both tactile and visceral (K). Feeling emotions, tactile sensations (sense of touch), or proprioceptive feelings (feelings of muscle movement). Questions to elicit this kind of processing include, What does it feel like to be happy?, What is the feeling of touching a pine cone?, What does it feel like to run?

Straight ahead, but defocused or dilated: Quick access to almost any sensory information, but usually visual.

(Adapted with permission from Trance-formations Grinder and Bandler, 1985)

Altering processing with accessing cues

Further experience with eye movement accessing cues revealed a reciprocal relationship between accessing cues and processing modes: eye movements indicate which sensory mode is dominant during a thought process, but also processing modes can be changed by changing eye movements. If a person’s gaze is guided in the direction of a different accessing cue from that which they would unconsciously use, the sensory mode in which they think about a given cognitive task may be altered. Connirae and Steve Andreas described these methods in detail in their book Heart of the Mind (Andreas and Andreas, 1989).

One line of evidence for the behavioral effects of changing sensory modes comes from work done by NLP practitioners with bad spellers. Having observed that many people with spelling difficulties gaze up and to the right when thinking about how to spell a word, practitioners realized that these people were probably accessing constructed visual imagery—in essence, trying out various possible spellings that could be used for a given word. Good spellers, however, will look up and to the left, accessing remembered visual imagery—looking for the remembered shape of the written word as they have seen it before. By guiding poor spellers to gaze up and to the left, copying the behavior of good spellers, it was found that their spelling performance improved (Andreas and Andreas, 1989).

Rarely does a situation evoke thought that is purely in one sensory mode. For instance, when listening to symphonic music, a listener might be constructing visual images of mountains and forests inspired by the auditory experience, then remembering a similar scene that she saw when hiking in the mountains, and finally feeling the kinesthetic sensations that she felt when she was there. In response to a trigger—a spoken word, or a passage in the music in our example—the sensory system first used to seek information is called the lead system, which characteristically will be accompanied by a brief corresponding eye movement. The representational system is that which is present in consciousness—the content that we would use to answer the question, What are you thinking about? Finally, many thought processes use a reference system to verify whether a given piece of information is valid or not. As a person’s thoughts progress from lead, to representational, to reference systems, their eye accessing cues will track the pattern of informational access. In our example, the lead system would have been auditory, as she listened to the tones of the music, while the representational system would be first constructed visual imagery, swiftly followed by representation in remembered visual imagery. Finally, the kinesthetic sensations induced by being in the mountains are an evaluation of the experience of being in the mountains.

The precise sequences of multisensory processing that people use when dealing with any situation may vary enormously. When choosing from a menu in a restaurant one person may read the words, visualize the food, have an internal dialogue with themselves about the characteristics of the food, and finally imagine tasting it and imagine the feeling of pleasure that the food might bring to them. Someone else, however, might proceed through a completely different sequence in making his or her choice, starting with taste perhaps, while yet another might first have an internal dialogue. Each person’s strategy is unique, and each strategy will influence the decision they finally make.

While in theory any individual can follow any sequence of thought, in practice each person tends to develop habitual sequences. Irrespective of context, they tend to consistently use one mode as their lead system, another as their representational system, and another for their reference system. While this is expeditious, it is not necessarily the best sequence for all contexts. A person who uses many different accessing strategies has greater flexibility in their approach to the varied experiences of life. By using different sequences of access to diverse types of information and processing, a distinct perspective can be gained.

Eye Movement Integration

Working from the premises given above, Connirae and Steve Andreas began to use guided eye movements to assist clients who were facing persistent problems that they couldn’t seem to resolve. The principle involved is that many limitations in a person’s life are internally generated, and are related to habitual modes of thought, i.e. to habitual accessing sequences. Changing the accessing sequence facilitates access to all the mental resources a client has at their disposal, including those habitually neglected. Altering the ordered sequence of thought disrupts the client’s limiting habits, permitting a fresh perspective on the problem to be reached. Notably, these modifications are not restricted to a verbal cognitive mode, as might be the case in therapy based on talking and listening alone. In talk therapy, the words exchanged do act as triggers for access to information, but the sequence of access will follow the habitual, ingrained pattern; that ingrained pattern has thus far not helped to resolve the problem the client is facing. With guided eye movements, the multisensory representations are accessed nonverbally, resulting in modifications of linkages that are derived from the full repertoire of sensory modes (as well as emotional and cognitive associations) of the internal representation. Because the therapist interjects no new information during the process, the changed linkages are also completely ecologic, having been generated on the basis of the person’s own mental resources.

The Andreases’ experience with this method led them to develop a distinct therapy, Eye Movement Integration, which they began teaching in 1989. The basic process of the treatment requires that the client hold in their mind a representation of the problem they wish to address and simultaneously follow a moving target with their eyes. As the therapist guides the client’s eyes into different regions of the visual field, access to different mental resources is facilitated, allowing the formation of linkages between formerly separated modes of information processing. The processing characteristics of the client’s habitual modes of thought are modified, permitting adjustment of their perception of the problem and its solutions. Again, the therapist’s role is limited to facilitation and monitoring of this internal process; he does not analyze, counsel, or in other ways attempt to control or influence the associations and connections that the client forms between the problem itself and ameliorating information.

Further experience with EMI led to the recognition that the clinical results they achieved were dependably positive for clients whose problems were related to unpleasant or traumatic memories, or to uncertainty or anxiety about the future. In both these cases, the thought process is heavily sensory in nature, and lack of integration of the sensory information could lead to distress. The methodological details of EMI therapy will be described in Chapters Four through Seven, including the components of the technique that I have added to create a comprehensive treatment. The underlying principles and the essential approach, however, remain as the Andreases developed them in the late 1980s. As described below, the revisions in the method derive from my own experience with several other psychotherapeutic approaches, striving always to achieve better efficacy and greater acceptability by the client.

III. Refinement of EMI: the author’s contributions

Experience and exploration: modification of EMI

I was first introduced to EMI in 1993, when Steve Andreas was an invited speaker at the Erickson Conference in Orlando and presented his technique. Curious to hear about this new eye movement treatment, I sat in on his workshop. The whole presentation lasted about an hour and a half at most. Steve briefly explained EMI to the audience and then did a live demonstration of his technique with a Vietnam veteran who had been suffering from painful flashbacks about five nights a week for over twenty years. I was definitely impressed by Steve’s skills as a therapist, and the apparent simplicity of his technique. I was also amazed by the results he had been able to get after only fifty minutes or so of treatment. Clearly, Steve could make EMI work, but it wasn’t clear to me how I could make it work for my clients. When I walked out afterwards, I must admit that my first impression was, What is this? It seemed just too strange, and I thought that it could not be possible to help anybody just by waving your hand in front of his or her eyes. To be completely honest, I was a little angry, thinking that I had wasted my time. I was also frustrated because the technique had not been extensively explained and described. (From my training, I was used to absorbing a good five hundred hours of theoretical information before putting it into practice!)

Over the next few days, I tried to analyze what I had seen in Steve’s demonstration. I could understand that, by being immersed in his memories, the client would recall different scenes and noises, or he would re-experience the emotions that were associated with the memory. But the surprising thing for me—and the most incomprehensible at the time—was the rapidity of the emergence of the information and its effects: the shift in the type of material recalled during each eye movement segment; the physical, emotional, and cognitive reactions; and, most of all, the strong manifestations of autonomic nervous system responses, which are not under the conscious control of the client, such as hot flashes, shaking and flushing. This was unlike anything I had seen before, so by the time I was back in my office, I had decided, There must be something to this. Let’s give it a try!

In spite of Steve’s inspiring example, my initial attempts to use EMI were not breathtaking successes. I started using the technique with an extensive range of problematic complaints, even though I had so little information to start with. However, as Vernon