Summary

“Letting Go of the Past: EMDR” opens with a quote form poet John Keats, wondering whether a particular experience was a vision or a dream – something from the waking world, or from the sleeping. Author van der Kolk then prologues the chapter with the story of David, an emotionally violent man traumatized as a teenager whose suffering and acting out were eased by the application of a therapy called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR). As the author describes it, in EMDR the patient is asked to recall the traumatic experience while focusing on the therapist’s finger, moving slowly back and forth in front of his / her eye at a distance of about twelve inches. The author describes how, after only a few sessions, memories of the trauma stopped having controlling power over David’s behavior, and he found...