Transcript

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

0:00 Uh I mean this is maybe a ridiculous question, but I'm not going to be able to How many people what percentage of people do you think Have trauma. In some form.

0:12 How you define it. Uh you know the figures I A quarter of people get physic, one out of five people get sexually abused, uh one out of Eight kids witnesses violence being their parents. Uh

0:27 So You know, yeah. If I sit in a room Yeah, it it's it's not a binary issue. It's not ideal traumatized. You didn't get traumatized, but Hm.

0:38 Yeah. When I talk to a room of professionals, which I do a lot I assume that at least half the group. This really knows what trauma means. And what is trauma d doing to my brain? You said you've done a lot of neuroimaging scans. Um if you if I if I was traumatized and you scan my brain, is there something you could see?

0:58 Not necessarily. I can see how Uh 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, Oh, there's a little more activation of the Very accurate to grain a little bit less of the Uh but insulate so you said certain patterns.

1:18 Of Uh connectivity in the brain. But to some degree, you know uh I think we We learn a lot.

1:26 But the brain. But we don't know much about the brain and I think people tend to overstate How much the brain pictures can Teach us. Uh yeah, it's a I love the Hubble's telescope or the web telescope.

1:38 No, it's our brain is like a universe and our technology is very Inadequate to really know about all the Unbelievably connect. complex connection to brainness. But we have learned a few things in the last twenty years. So how how does trauma affect the brain?

1:52 The facts of brain that you Turn to There's there's one part of your brain that I call the Cockford center of Ukraine the periac gray.

2:02 Yeah. lights up it's underneath the amygdala, everybody knows the bird amygdala these days. The part of your brain that tells you that you're in danger. But you're traumatized, you're likely

2:14 That that little part of your brain way back in the is firing all the time. You all the time you got like. I'm in danger, I'm in danger, I'm in danger.

2:25 Um Bird starts in a very elementary sensory Level. You don't know what the danger is, but you just feel

2:35 Uh you should be scared. And then there's certain Um But other part of your brain.

2:42 For example your insula. Which makes a connection with your physical sensations and Your body awareness. That for many people get shut down.

2:52 Because trauma uh bas the experience of trauma is a Visual experience of heartbreaking Godvenge. If you have a Lord that's not a good thing. You can learn to shut that part of your brain down. So you don't feel your body so much anymore?

3:07 You don't feel your body so much, you don't feel very alive either. But you don't feel so scared all the time. But it's likely that you will want to take some drugs. To make yourself feel alive sometimes. Um stuff like that.

3:21 Yeah. So The part of my brain you said just under the amygd around the amygdala. Below the below the image to R People that are traumatized, they have some kind of dysfunction in that typically.

3:31 Well the dysfunction is uh it keeps firing. He's fine. And how is that and then the Megala? So there's a constant sense of of subliminal dread.

3:40 Is that anxiety? Anxiety's already too high. Mental functioning. Okay. Your dog shaking like uh

3:53 Yeah, my daughter hasn't adopted a dog. She was a time. Two years later the dog still is uh walks to my house. You adopt to the dog and it shakes in your house still. Yeah, yeah. Still never quite comfortable. Um And that's how many times you meet it.

4:08 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 the is in part mediated by the amygdala.

4:20 Is your Mikla if you smoke detector? Yeah, tends to become hyper sensitive. So that liner things Get blown up. And

4:31 A minor thing that you may say to me, I take as the most insulting thing in the world. And so You're constantly Triggered by Things and uh

4:40 You are doing terrible things to me. And it's not like I'm hyper sensitive. Uh and when you have an off day

4:51 Um That is your issue and not my issue. No. When you have an off day, I feel your off day and I uh we start getting into trouble together. I've got a picture here of what the brain looks like when the Brain smoke detector. Yeah, yeah. Um goes off. Is that what it looks like?

5:05 Can you explain this to me? But but you see here is How good. This is a guy who is beliving Oh

5:18 Um but you see here is the The very posterior part of the brain does. Temporal parietal junction. on the right side of the brain uh fires.

5:30 And that's the feeding part of your brain. You saw you go. Oh my god. Oh yeah. I'm terrified. But there's no cognition basically the left side of the brain shut down. So when you're in your trauma

5:42 You don't become you're not a reasonable person. You actually uh become a little bit of a blubbering idiot. All of us when we really are angry upset. Uh not very articulate, but we have a lot of feelings. Mm.

5:55 And then the the piece that I by showed us. Is that As he is real this guy is reliving his drama. These two parts of your brain go offline. This is the dorsal lateral preformal cortex. That's the part of the brain that's the timekeeper of your brain.

6:12 Uh so if something unpleasant happens between us, let's say Mm. I'll go, Oh, it's not a half hour and I'll be okay. So let me just sort of put up with this. But when you get traumatized, the time keeper disappears. And this is all there is. You lose your sense of perspective and that is what happened with you. In your trauma.

6:32 You don't know the difference between the past and the present. 'Cause the timekeeper of your brain goes offline. And whatever is uh you're feeling. Is real. as opposed to be feeling like a memory.

6:44 Yeah. So for 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. Oh, yeah.

6:57 So that's what prefondocortex so that'll prefond the cortex. That's part of the system in the brain that gives you a sense of time. Okay. And as long as you have a sense it's like Little babies don't have a sense of time out there.

7:13 Whatever happens, happens totally. Do you see a child slowly grow? And it gets a sense of perspective. It's happening right now, but Tomorrow it will be different.

7:23 Okay, so that's when I mean that's when you get anxiety, right? When you start thinking about the future. It is but G having the perspective. Oh, this is happening right now, right now I'm really scared. But

7:35 The moment I go home, the moment I call my friend, I'll feel better. I'm sorry. That that you need to have that capacity for s perspective. And the perspective goes offline when you're in your trauma and you become a traumatized person. So this particular person, this brain scan that I have here, this guy was in a car accident.

7:54 And the The triggered brain that I'm looking at here. Is He was basically put in a Uh

8:00 And um F M R I scanner. And he was intentionally triggered. Exactly. So he was shown maybe a car accident or something. specifically his car actually what that you see.

8:14 What ye hear, what you smell. What are you thinking? Very specific sensory details. And the right side of his brain was illuminated. Yeah, Lighter Became very active.

8:28 Yeah. Got inactivated. But That timekeeper of his brain. So he could not

8:36 Lie there and say, Oh, I'm remembering what happened to me yesterday. He's reliving what happened yesterday. Instantly. Mm. You feel like it's happening right now.

8:47 And that's the nature of trauma. Tama is not a memory. It's a me living. Are you consciously reliving it or is your subconscious reliving it? With all forms of trauma.

8:59 But not the It's happening right now, but my feeling is happening right now. You don't know. that the feelings actually belong to The time that your dad used to beat you.

9:11 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 fight or flight response because something's happened or whatever. It can and it's instantaneous. Yep. So although I don't feel like I'm back there, my body does feel like it's back there.

9:30 And so people are confused about it. They say, Oh, you believe the past. No, actually you're not aware that you lived the past. Because the past is the present. So you don't think Oh, this reminds me about a time that my dad used to be beat me when I was four years old. No, it feels like you are beating me right now.

9:49 And is there a way for this particular gentleman here who's been through that car crash? To ever stop. This triggering. Yeah, you've done quite well. He did he did uh EMDR actually, yeah.

10:01 I movement desensitization. And what was his results? He's a all right guy. He's he's he's Functioning, he's fine. He's no no longer trauma desperate. improvement you've seen in your

10:15 Clinical practice. Oh really people really coming to life. People just saying it's over. Give me the the the most Good example is the video tape I showed you

10:27 Again, terrible car accident, freezing. Abset Freaked out. And then three sessions later we go talk about it.

10:38 Yeah. This shitty thing happened to me. Uh I was in this car accident and Uh I was jolted for it and my head was full. And Boy, that was terrible back then. But I'm no I have a granddaughter and I drive my car to my granddaughter and five.

10:53 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? Wiggle your fingers in front of people's eyes. For me, EMDR was really the gateway drug.

11:07 Um sorry. Yeah, I've written three books about peaches. He actually wrote the very first book. In which the work PTSD exists. And eighty four or something. Um

11:18 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 reliving their trauma and they don't know how to stop that. And um Somebody starts.

11:30 Telling me about EMDR and I don't believe a word of it. And they say just. You move your fingers in front of people's eyes and you move your eye from side to side. As you We live the trauma.

11:42 I go. That's crazy. Everybody who hears it that's crazy. And then people start doing it. And they show me how it works, I got it.

11:51 Wow. And people indeed. Yeah. A sort of subsample of

11:59 Indeed. After Colleague. Yeah, that really sucked.

12:05 But it's over. It belongs to the bus. Not happening right now. You're telling me that wiggling your fingers in front of people's eyes heal the trauma. Fifteen years to get enough funding to get do it to see what happens when you move your eyes back and forth. And then we discovered that if you move your eyes back and forth.

12:25 As you we call it traumatic experiences. You activate certain pathways. Between the Temporal parietal junction which gives you a sense of self. And you're inside your sense, your body so you

12:38 brain is able to S Oh yeah, this is what happened to me. But that happened to me in the past. Pathways that makes it possible for your

12:48 Green too. uh make that distinction. And in the research that's been done on this, what does the what did the outcome, what was the conclusion in terms of its efficacy? Oh. In terms of uh in our research

13:02 Um Seventy eight percent of the people who Yeah. Adult onset trauma. So so uh being assaulted or raped. Uh by a stranger.

13:13 Seventy eight percent 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 for you.

13:26 early childhood trauma is much more sort of stubborn and resistant to this treatment. Yeah, because your early childhood Uh experiences. Create who you are. So if you go to uh fancy college when you're eighteen you do become

13:44 identified with that college, but it doesn't radically change you into a new person. How about it becomes part of your identity. grow up in a certain family uh early on in your life, you actually become that. You that the imprint is very deep. Pretty um, yeah. So it's called eye movement desensitation.

14:02 And Reprocessing. Treatment. Yeah. Um I was just looking up some stats about it. It says it's been extensively studied with evidence supporting its efficacy across various conditions.

14:12 with PTSD a two thousand and twenty two thousand fourteen meta analysis of twenty six randomized control trials found that EMDR significantly reduced PH D symptoms. With a large effect size. Depression, a two thousand twenty four systemic review. And metro analysis in

14:27 Encompassing twenty five studies. And more than a thousand participants reported that it alleviated depressive depressive symptoms. The same two thousand fourteen meta analysis noted that EMDR led to significant reductions in anxiety symptoms among PTSD patients with a large effect. And finally. two thousand twenty four systemic review and individual participation data meta analysis concluded that EMDR is an effective is as effective as other psychological treatments for PTSD, achieving comparable symptom reduction and remission rates.

15:00 So Can you show me how it works? Can you do it on me? It could. Yeah.

15:06 Uh Can I move my chair? Of course you can. You gonna come closer? So

15:12 Can you bring to mind an Really chef. But an unpleasant experience you have had not too long ago. Yeah. Um

15:21 But Can you bring to mind what you saw at that point? Yeah. The voice sounded like

15:32 Whatever it was. Any sounds come to mind. Yeah. Uh do you remember what your body felt like back then?

15:45 Yeah. Can you remember what you were thinking? Or bring to mind what you were thinking. Yeah. Okay.

15:59 So How vivid is your feeling right now if we Recollecting it. I guess six, seven out of ten. Okay. So stay there.

16:09 No follow my finger with With your eyes so look at my look at me right now. Deep. So what comes to your mind right now as we're doing that? I feel calm.

16:44 Yeah. Yeah, I I just don't feel calm. Okay. So when you go back to what you were just feeding. What's it like now?

16:57 Um it's It's hard to recall why I was bothered. That's the best way to describe it. That is the weird stuff. Why is that? Is that just'cause why is that? No see that is That is what's so great about his work.

17:15 We don't know the linearity. And We don't know where the hell. The emotional imprint is gone now. But it is.

17:26 Mm- And you know, of course if we're Bring up something much worse than what you had going to it takes it much longer and a lot of other stuff comes up. But But somehow EMDR seems to do it creates new associative processes in the brain.

17:43 So let's say Um First time people did EMDR on me. Uh something really very, very nasty has happened to me. And I started off being very upset.

17:54 And then During the EMDR, I don't know if that happened to you, I had images of sitting at my dining room table as a kid. And that images of playing in a playground in primary school. Subordenly. Don't tell me mine, but

18:08 And then We stopped it and Indeed. So Yeah, that really sucks. Time to go on.

18:15 An important part of this. You did not tell me. No. Um because I'm suspicious of language.

18:23 Because language is always an interactive process. And if I would ask you. Yeah. You will filter yourself because certain things may be embarrassing or You don't want me to know about it.

18:36 And so We we circumvent this whole verbal process of your Making meaning out of it and be we organise some core ways in which your brain is perceiving this. So

18:49 So you saw a little bit of this very 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 quoted studies. The main study was done by me.

19:02 Uh NIH funded that. But I was also last Time that's probably good funded for NIA. For E 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. Thank you.