29/05/2026
A therapist talked about trying EMDR with me at one point, but determined I probably didn't need it. I have heard great things about its effectiveness with PTSD and trauma and I have a therapist friend who tells me of the difference it makes in her clients. Do you have experience with EMDR?
My therapist friend posted this very long story of Francine Shapiro, the original developer of EMDR on her own FB page. I love the persistence of this amazing lady.
In May 1987, the most important breakthrough in modern trauma therapy happened because a woman was walking alone through a park in Los Gatos, California, trying to calm down a painful thought she could not shake. Her name was Francine Shapiro.
At the time, she was 39 years old. She was not leading a famous laboratory. She was not backed by a pharmaceutical company or a prestigious psychiatric department. She was carrying years of private fear inside her own body.
Less than a decade earlier, in 1979, Shapiro had been a doctoral student in English literature in New York. Books and language were supposed to be her life. Then, at 31, she was diagnosed with cancer.
The treatments saved her physically. But survival left behind something medicine barely understood at the time. Even after the disease was gone, her nervous system stayed trapped in a constant state of alarm. Fear lingered in her muscles. Anxiety surfaced without warning. The body kept reacting long after the danger had passed.
That experience changed the direction of her life.
She left literature behind, moved west to California, and began studying psychology instead. She became obsessed with one question: why do terrifying experiences continue living inside the brain long after the event is over? In the 1980s, trauma treatment was harsh, slow, and deeply rigid.
The psychiatric establishment believed healing required prolonged excavation of pain. Patients were expected to verbally relive their worst memories again and again in clinical offices. Combat veterans, r**e survivors, abuse victims, disaster survivors. They were told recovery depended on revisiting the trauma repeatedly until it somehow lost its power. Sometimes the process lasted years.
Many patients left sessions emotionally shattered. Some became more destabilized the deeper they dug into their memories. Yet when treatment failed, the blame often fell on the patient. They were labeled resistant. Uncooperative. Unwilling to heal. The system especially struggled after the Vietnam War.
Thousands of veterans had returned from Southeast Asia carrying invisible injuries no one fully understood. PTSD had only officially entered the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1980. Before that, many veterans were dismissed as unstable, weak, or simply unable to adjust to civilian life.
Inside Veterans Administration hospitals, men who could not sleep, could not function, and could not stop reliving combat were placed into endless therapy circles. They described firefights, ambushes, burning villages, dead friends, helicopter crashes. Week after week. Month after month. For many of them, nothing changed.
Then came the walk through the park.
One afternoon in Los Gatos, Shapiro noticed a disturbing memory rising into consciousness. Her body reacted instantly. Tight chest. Elevated heart rate. A familiar wave of anxiety. Then something strange happened. The emotional intensity suddenly disappeared.
The memory itself remained. She could still picture it clearly. But the panic attached to it was gone, as if someone had unplugged the fear from the thought. She stopped walking.
She paid close attention to what her body had just done. She realized her eyes had been moving rapidly back and forth, almost automatically, while she walked beneath shifting patterns of sunlight through the trees. Curious, she decided to repeat the process deliberately.
She brought the upsetting memory back into focus. Then she intentionally moved her eyes from side to side again. The fear dissolved a second time. She tried another painful memory. Same result. Again and again, the emotional charge weakened.
To Shapiro, it felt less like philosophy and more like biology. The brain seemed capable of processing traumatic memories mechanically, almost the way the digestive system processes food. That idea sounded outrageous to most psychiatrists.
The entire field was built around the assumption that severe trauma required years of deep analysis and verbal processing. The suggestion that eye movements could directly alter emotional memory sounded simplistic, even ridiculous. But Shapiro trusted what she had observed.
For months, she experimented carefully on herself. Then she began working with volunteers. She documented physiological reactions, emotional intensity, physical stress responses, and changes in memory recall. Eventually she developed a structured protocol. She called it EMDR: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. The therapy itself looked almost absurdly simple.
A patient would focus on a traumatic memory while following a therapist’s fingers moving rhythmically from side to side across their field of vision. No machines. No drugs. No hypnosis. Just memory, attention, and movement. When Shapiro brought her findings into academic circles, the reaction was immediate and brutal.
Researchers mocked her openly. Critics compared the therapy to pseudoscience and stage magic. At conferences, psychologists joked by waving fingers in front of each other’s faces.
One Harvard psychologist delivered a cutting dismissal that became famous inside the field: what was effective in EMDR was not new, and what was new was not effective. Most assumed rigorous testing would destroy her claims. So Shapiro did the testing herself.
She paid for early research out of her own pocket. In 1989, she conducted controlled studies involving Vietnam veterans and survivors of sexual assault, many of whom had already spent years trapped inside traditional therapy with little improvement.
These were people living with constant hypervigilance, crippling anxiety, violent nightmares, emotional numbness, panic attacks, and flashbacks so vivid they felt physically real.
During sessions, Shapiro asked patients to hold the worst moments of their lives in their minds. The ambush in the jungle. The explosion. The assault. The body on the ground. Then she moved her fingers back and forth for twenty or thirty seconds while they tracked the motion with their eyes. Something remarkable began happening.
Patients reported that the memories no longer felt immediate. The images became distant, almost detached, as if they were watching events on a screen instead of reliving them inside their bodies.
Some cried during sessions. Some shook uncontrollably. Others sat in stunned silence afterward because, for the first time in years, the memory no longer controlled their nervous system. A combat medic who had suffered severe night terrors for two decades reported that the nightmares stopped after treatment. Others described finally being able to sleep through the night. In 1989, the Journal of Traumatic Stress published Shapiro’s controlled study. The backlash continued anyway.
Critics insisted the results were placebo effects. Others argued the therapy violated accepted psychological theory. Some refused to engage with the data at all because the mechanism sounded too strange to be credible. Shapiro kept going. In 1992, she founded the EMDR Institute and trained clinicians directly, bypassing academic institutions that would not support the work. Then the evidence became too large to ignore. By the mid-1990s, military researchers and independent trauma specialists were studying EMDR with combat veterans. The results repeatedly showed rapid improvement in many patients who had failed traditional treatments.
One Department of Defense study found that a large majority of veterans suffering from single-event trauma no longer met the clinical definition for PTSD after only a few sessions. That result forced institutions to pay attention. Slowly, the same establishment that had mocked Shapiro began rewriting its guidelines.
The Department of Veterans Affairs adopted EMDR as a frontline treatment. The American Psychiatric Association endorsed it. In 2013, the World Health Organization formally recommended EMDR for trauma treatment in both adults and children.
Today, the therapy is used around the world for combat trauma, sexual assault, natural disasters, childhood abuse, terrorism survivors, and emergency responders. Scientists still debate exactly why it works. One leading theory is that the rapid eye movements resemble the neurological activity of REM sleep, the phase where the brain naturally processes emotional experiences and stores them properly in memory. Another theory suggests the bilateral stimulation helps interrupt the nervous system’s fear response while the memory is being recalled.
But whatever the precise mechanism turns out to be, the outcomes became impossible to dismiss. Every morning in VA hospitals and trauma clinics across the country, therapists still sit across from patients carrying memories they cannot escape. A clinician raises two fingers. A veteran follows the movement with their eyes. And somewhere inside the brain, a memory that has remained frozen in terror for decades finally begins to move again.
Francine Shapiro did not discover a new drug or invent a machine. She discovered that the brain may already know how to heal itself, if given the right way to process what it could not survive alone.
Thank you Francine Shapiro for restoring hope and peace for thousands of people. -jb-
