Most Replayed Moment: Can Eye Movements Heal Trauma? Bessel Van Der Kolk Explains EMDR Therapy!

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0:33How many people do you think, I mean, this is maybe a ridiculous question, but how many people, what percentage of people do you think have trauma in some form? How you define it? I think, you know, the figures are a quarter of people get physically abused, one of five people get sexually abused, one of eight kids' witnesses, foreigners being their parents, etc etc. So, you know, if I sit in the room, it's not a binary issue, it's not either you're trying to tell you, you didn't get trying to tell you, but when I talk to a room of professionals which I do a lot, I assume that at least half the group visibly knows what trauma means.

1:18And what is trauma doing to my brain? You said you've done a lot of neuroimaging scans. If I was traumatized and you scans my brain, is there something you could see? Not necessarily. I can see how your brain may be different from other people's brains. I may take a particular population, you can average it out, and you can say, there's a little more activation of the barrier activity, or to gray a little bit less of the bite insular. So you see certain patterns of connectivity in the brain. But to some degree, I think we learn a lot about the brain, but we don't know much about the brain. And I think people tend to offer states how much the brain pictures can teach us.

2:05I love the Hubel's telescope or the web telescope. Our brain is like a universe and our technology is very inadequate to really know about all the unbelievably complex connections in the brain. But we have learned a few things from the last 20 years. So how does trauma affect the brain? The effects of brain that you tend to... There's one part of your brain that I call the Cockroach Center of your brain, the peri -actors of gray, that lights up on the knees of a mithrilinevary, nose to the brain, to mix with these days. And the part of your brain that tells you that you're in danger. But you traumatized your likely that little part of your brain way back in the brain.

2:47Your brain's time is firing all the time. You're all the time you go like, I'm in danger, I'm in danger, I'm in danger. And that's where it starts. In a very elementary sensory level, you don't know what the danger is, but you just feel that you should be scared. And then there are certain parts of the other parts of your brain, for example, insula, which makes the connection with your physical sensations and your body awareness that for many people get shut down because the experience of trauma is a visceral experience of heartbreak and gutvenge. And if you have a Lord that you can learn to shut that part of your brain down so you don't feel Feel your body so much in your world.

3:37I mean, you don't feel your body so much, you don't feel very alive either. You don't feel scared all the time. But it's likely that you will undertake some drugs to make yourself feel alive sometimes. Stuff like that. Yeah. So, the part of my brain, you said just under the amygdala. Reload them. Below the amygdala. People that are traumatized, they have some kind of dysfunction in that typically. This function keeps firing. He's firing. And how's that? And so you're... And then the mixer there's a constant sense of subliminal dread. Is that anxiety? Exactly. It's already too high of mental, actually.

4:17Okay. It's more elementary, yeah. It's like you're dog shaking. Like, you know, my dog has adopted a dog. He was a tummy. And two years later, the dog still walks through my heart. You've adopted a dog in a shake in your house, though. But still, never quite comfortable. And that's how many times you meet a never quite comfortable. So when someone says they're triggered? No, trigger isn't a higher level thing. Okay. So then the next level is indeed the trigger that is important mediated by the amygdala. Is your amygdala if you smoke the detector, that tends to become hypersensitive, So that minor things can blow up and a minor thing that you may say to me, I take it's the most insulting thing in the world.

5:05And so you're constantly triggered by things and that makes you feel like you are doing terrible things to me. And it's not like I'm hypersensitive and when you have an off day, that's your issue and not my issue. You know, when you have an off day, I feel you off day, and then we start getting in trouble together. I've got a picture of what the brain looks like when the brain's smoke detector goes off. Is that what it looks like on the brain when it's... I just want particular guy. Nobody is exactly the same as everybody else. Can you explain this to me? But basically, but you see here is... This is a guy who's been living terrible car accident he was involved with.

5:50And what you see here is that the right posterior part of the brain is temporal parallel junction or the right side of the brain fires and that's the feeding part of your brain. So you go, oh my god, oh my god, I'm terrified. But there's no cognition. Basically the left side of the brain starts to down. So when you're in your trauma, you don't become, you're not a reasonable person. You actually become a little bit of a blubbering idiot. All of us, when we really are angry, upset, and not very articulate, but we have a lot of feelings. And then the piece that I showed is that as he, this guy is really living his drama, these two parts of the brain go offline.

6:36This is the Dorsal Natural, we form the cortex. That's the part of the brain that's the time keeper of your brain. And so if something unpleasant happens between us, let's say, I go, oh, it's not a half hour and I'll be okay. So let me just put off with this. But when you get traumatized, the time keeper disappears and this is all there is. Yelusia sounds like perspective and that is what's happened when you're in your trauma. You don't know the difference between the past and the present because the time keeper of your brain goes offline and whatever is your feeling is real as opposed to be feeling like a memory.

7:15So if you get it, yeah, so if people that can't see it in this brain scan, what I'm basically seeing is the right side is extremely activated. The left side looks like it's off off, and then there's these two blank empty spaces that aren't activated, called the doors. There was a lateral prefrontal cortex. That's probably the system in the brain that give you a sense of time. And as long as you have a sense of... It's like, little babies only have a sense of time either. Whatever happens, happens totally. Do you see a child slowly grow in the sense of perspective? It's happening by now, but tomorrow it will be different.

7:53Okay, so that's when... I mean, because you'll be... That's when you get anxiety, right? When you start thinking about the future. It is about having a perspective of this is happening right now, very now I'm really scared, but the moment I go home, the moment I call my friend, I feel better. So you need to have the capacity for perspective and the perspective goes offline when you're in your trauma and you become a trauma disperse. So this particular person, this brain scan that I have here, this guy was in a car accident and the the triggered brain that I'm looking at here is he was basically put in a an M F M R I scanner and he was intentionally triggered to see what would happen in his brain exactly so he was showing maybe a car accident or something no no we specifically his car accident oh you showed him a picture of his what did you see what did he hear what you smell what were you thinking very specific sensory details okay so you're not somebody else's sensory your sensory disease.

8:52And the right side of his brain was illuminated. Yeah, lighter being became very active, but what got inactivated was the time -keep of his brain. So he could not lie there and say, oh, I'm remembering what happened to me yesterday. He's been living what happened yesterday. Instantly. You feel like it's happening right now. And that's the nature of trauma. trauma. Trauma is not a memory, it's a reliving. Are you consciously reliving it or is you subconsciously reliving it? We feel like it's happening right now. With all forms of trauma. But not, it's happening right now, but my feeling is happening right now.

9:34You don't know that the feeling is actually belong to the time that your dad used to beat you. It is no, I feel the same way because I disagree with you. So I've been triggered in the past and I felt that sort of instant final fly response because something's happened or whatever. And it's instantaneous. So although I don't feel like I'm back there, my body does feel like it's right there. And so people are confused about it and say, oh, you've relived the past. Now, actually, not aware of you relived the past, because the past is the present. So you don't think all this remains to be about the time that my dad used to beat me as for years old.

10:15No, it feels like you are beating me right now. And is there a way for this particular gentleman here who's been through that car crash to ever stop this triggering? Yeah, he's done quite well. He did, uh, he did, uh, EMDR actually, I move from this incursion. And what was his results? He is an, alright guy. He's, he's functioning his fight. He's no longer trying to disperse him. What's the most radical improvement you've seen in your clinical practice? Oh really people really coming to life people just saying it's over. Give me the the most the best example. The good example is the videotape I showed you people yesterday over a woman again terrible action freezing upset freaked out and then three sessions later we got talking about He says, yeah, this shitty thing happened to me.

11:10I was in his car accident and I jolted for it and my head was full. And boy, that was terrible back then. But I'm not even granddaughters. I drive my car to my granddaughters. I have five. Three sessions it took. Three sessions, yeah. And we saw it in psychedelic therapy all the time. What did you do in those three sessions? Bigel, your fingers in front of people's eyes. I mean, for me, EMDR was the gateway to VAR.

11:39I've written three books about PTSD, actually, both a very first book in which the word PTSD exists in 84 or something. But they didn't know how to treat it. So I'm a world renowned expert, but I have no idea how to treat it because people keep living that charm and they don't know how to stop that. And somebody starts telling me about EMDR and I don't believe it, word of it. And they say, just, you move your fingers in front of people's eyes. I mean, you move your eye from side to side as you relive the trauma. And I go, that's crazy. I've really, he isn't. That's crazy. And then people start doing it.

12:19And they show me how it works. I go like, wow. And people indeed had a certain sub -sample of people. People we studied indeed after a few sessions of EMDI go like, yeah, that's really sucked, but it's over. It belongs to the past. It's not happening right now. You're telling me that wiggling your fingers in front of people's eyes can help heal that trauma? Well, then of course we had to do a little research which took us 15 years to get enough funding to get to do it, to see what happens when you move your eyes back and forth. And then we discover that if you move your eyes back and forth, as you, we call it traumatic experiences, you activate certain pathways between the temporal, parietal junction, which gives you a sense of self and your insolvent, your body.

13:07So your brain is able to say, oh yeah, this would happen to me, but it would happen to me in the past. So these are pathways that makes it possible for your brain to make that distinction. And in the research that's been done on this, what did the outcome, what was the conclusion in terms of its efficacy? Oh, in terms of, in our research, 78 % of the people who had adult cancer trauma, so being of salt as a raped by a stranger, 78 % of them were completely cured. But that's not the majority of people we see it because most people we see have early childhood trauma, which is much more complicated in the street.

13:56Early childhood trauma is much more sort of stubborn and resistant to this treatment. Yeah, because your early childhood experiences is create who you are. As if you go to fancy college when you're 18, you do become identified with a college, but it doesn't radically change into a new person. How about it becomes part of your identity? But if you grow up in a certain family early on in your life, you actually become that. And you that the imprint is very deep early on. Yeah. So it's called eye movement desensitation and reprocessing treatment. I was just looking at some stats about it. It says it's been extensively studied with evidence supporting its efficacy across various conditions, with PTSD a 2014 metronalysis of 26 randomized control trials found that EMDR significantly reduced PTSD symptoms with a large effect size, depression, a 2024 systemic review, and metronalysis encompassing 25 studies, and more than 1 ,000 participants reported that it alleviated the pressures, depressive symptoms.

15:04The same 2014 metronalysis noted that EMDR are the significant reductions in anxiety symptoms among PTSD patients with a large effect. And finally, a 2024 systemic review and individual participation data metronalysis concluded that EMDR is as effective as other psychological treatments for PTSD, achieving comparable symptom reduction and remission rates. So can you show me how it works? Can you do it on me? Good.

15:37Can I move my chair? Of course you can. You're going to come closer. So can you bring to mind and really to rather unpleasant experience you have had not to long ago? Yeah. And when can you bring to mind what you saw at that point? Yeah. Can you remember what the voice sounded like at that point? or whatever it was. Any sounds come to mind. Yeah. Do you remember what your body felt like back then? Yeah. Can you remember what you were thinking or bring to mind what you were thinking?

16:27Yeah. Okay. So, how vivid is your feeling right now by collecting it? Like a six, seven hour time. Okay. So stay there. Now, follow my finger with your eyes. So, look at me right now. And the...

17:03You can do both.

17:09So, what comes in your mind right now is we're doing this. I feel calm. Huh? Yeah, I just don't feel calm. Okay. So when you go back to what we're just feeling, what's it like now? Um, it's.

17:32It's hard to recall why I was bothered. It's the best way to describe it. That is the weird stuff. Why is that? Is that just because it... Why is that? No, see, that is... That is what's so great about this work. We don't know the linearity. And we don't know where the hell the emotional imprint is gone now, but it is. And, you know, of course, if we bring up something much worse than what you had gotten to, it takes us much longer and all about the stuff comes up. But somehow EMDR seems to do, it creates new associative processes in the brain. So let's say, first of the people that EMDR are me, something very nasty that happened to me, and I started being very upset.

18:24And then during the EMDR, I'd know if that happened to you, I had images of sitting in my dining room table as a kid, and that images of playing in a playground in primary school. So I don't really, don't come in mind. And then we stopped it and she needed it. So that really sucked time to go on. An important part of this, you did not tell me what you were going through. No. Because I'm suspicious of language. Because language is always an interactive process. And if I could ask you to tell me what happened, And you will filter yourself because certain things may be embarrassing or you don't want me to know about it.

19:07And so we circumvent this whole verbal process of your making meaning out of it and we reorganize some core ways in which your brain is perceiving this. So you saw a little bit of this way in minor way. For me when I first saw this, I was blown away by it and thought I need to study this. So when they called the studies, the main study was done by me, NIH funded it. But it was also last time that somebody could fund it for NIH, for EMDR. What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description.

19:50Thank you.