"In One EMDR Session, You Can Sometimes Overcome Years of Trauma"

About eight years ago, Shalvi Waldman, a psychotherapist currently residing in Safed, volunteered to drive a woman from the Jewish community in the U.S., where she lived at the time, to her psychiatrist. The drive there went smoothly, but the return trip turned into a nightmare. In the middle of driving on a wide five-lane highway, Shalvi noticed her passenger moving towards her from the back. The woman lunged at her, nearly choking her, and screamed, 'Stop controlling my mind!'. Miraculously, Waldman managed to steer the car safely to the shoulder.

"The whole incident lasted just a few minutes, but I couldn't shake it off," Waldman recalls. "Every time someone approached me from behind, even one of my children, I began to panic."

The world of mental health therapy was not new to Waldman. As an American who moved to Israel at 17, she earned a Master's degree in Clinical Sociology from Neve Yerushalayim (a University of North Texas degree) and specialized in psychodynamic therapy, which she found successful for family systems therapy. However, she felt this method did not equip her to deal with her own post-traumatic stress.

"It wasn't new to me that psychodynamic methods don't work well on everything," she explains. "I had patients for whom, no matter how much we talked, something remained stuck and painful, and they couldn't let go."

To release herself from her trauma, Waldman decided to see a psychologist specializing in EMDR. "My uncle was one of the early adopters of the method, and I always heard stories about it from him. I decided to test it on myself – and it worked incredibly. After one session, I achieved my goal. Until then, I would shake every time I remembered the incident on the road, but now I started feeling as if I was in a bubble, and Hashem was protecting me from all sides. The success of the therapy piqued my curiosity, and I decided to learn the method myself."

EMDR is a psychotherapy method developed in the late 1980s by Dr. Francine Shapiro to address negative outcomes and problematic symptoms people experience following life-changing events of all degrees. "To understand how the method works, you need a bit of neurology knowledge," explains Waldman. "In the brain, there's a part responsible for thinking, planning, and organization, and then there's the limbic, emotional brain. Communication between these two parts isn't great. When someone suffers from post-trauma, the limbic brain broadcasts anxiety and stress, while the cerebral brain tells them, 'Calm down, everything is okay!' But, of course, they can't relax and they feel like they're losing control and are going insane."

"What you do in EMDR is use various methods – eye movements, headphones, a special vibrating device, and so on – to open up a communication channel between the emotional brain and the cerebral brain. Traumatic memories aren't processed like other memories – people remember smells, sounds, but can't mentally process these memories. By opening up the communication channel between the emotional brain and the cerebral brain, proper memory processing finally occurs, and the trauma is released. Many times, people say after the treatment that now they really feel the trauma is in the past, and they're no longer stuck there."

This release can sometimes be surprisingly fast – restoring mental health that was disrupted for a long time after just one treatment, says Waldman. "Once, I treated a widow who otherwise led a healthy, peaceful life – until she lost her husband at 48 to a heart attack right before her eyes. A month later, she began having panic attacks. Eleven years passed, and she required daily medications but still suffered from panic attacks and had difficulty going out alone. When she came to me, we revisited the event, her process that day, the mourning period, the first panic attack she had on Passover when she realized she was now alone facing all the challenges. We processed her memories...and that was it. She was completely relieved from the panic attacks. I keep in touch with her, and she always declares she continues to feel good and the attacks haven't returned. She's since referred all her friends to me..."

Another example of trauma release impacting daily life was a client whose husband had cancer a decade ago. "Ever since, whenever anyone in the house coughs, she panics and believes they're about to die," describes Waldman. "Yet again – after two sessions where she revisited the trauma of the illness days and processed them, this anxiety completely vanished."

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It sounds almost like hocus-pocus.

"It's not always that quick and easy," Waldman emphasizes. "A short traumatic experience is easier to treat than long-standing trauma, like years of abuse. The women who achieved quick results with me experienced the trauma as mature adults, with stable and good lives beforehand. If the trauma was experienced, say, in childhood, especially if it involved betrayal by a trusted figure, the treatment will undoubtedly be longer and more complex."

But possible?

"Absolutely. I'm currently working with an amazing woman whose life has been a series of hardships. She experienced real abuse from zero age. We've been working for three months, and everyone tells her she's a different person. Her self-confidence and zest for life have returned, and for the first time in years, she's back to work. So even though it takes more than one session, the process is still much shorter than classical therapies that repeatedly delve into pain without necessarily alleviating it so effectively."

The method is also suitable for children and teenagers?

"Definitely. With teenagers, they should naturally feel the difficulty themselves and want to resolve it... and with children, especially when supportive parents are in the background, therapy usually progresses particularly fast."

The EMDR method has gained acknowledgment from the World Health Organization as a treatment for post-trauma, following a series of studies proving its effectiveness. In the United States, it has been adopted by the American Military Veterans Association to address combat shock and related traumas, while in Israel, the 'Hatzalah' organization refers both its staff and its patients to this method.

"In my opinion, it also has a basis in Chassidut," Waldman remarks. "The testament of the Baal Shem Tov writes: "And sometimes it is necessary to gaze here and there to attach one's thoughts to the Creator, due to the corporeality of the body, which is a barrier between the soul." This aligns with what I see in my clinic. When I ask people: 'How would you like to feel about what you've been through?', they say they want to view it with faith and closeness to Hashem, who pulled them out of that difficult experience. But they can't – because their limbic brain is stuck...and then the eye movements overcome 'the corporeality of the body' – the limbic brain that controls breath, heart rate, digestion – and they process the experience and merit closeness to Hashem, just as they wished."