Q3 : What led to your development of RDI? - Dr. Andrew M. Leeds Ph.D. - ONE80CENTER

Dr. Andrew Leeds is talking about the EMDR: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.

Q3 : What led to your development of RDI and what made you believe it could work?

Resource Development Installation grew out of one of my treatment failures. I tell a story about this case in a book chapter in a book edited by Phil Manfield, The case book of EMDR. It's called, Lifting the Burden of Shame, it's a story about Meredith. I won't belabor the case story here, but this young woman came to me with a complex set of co-occurring disorders including some medical conditions that made her not a good candidate for the standard EMDR protocol. And I deferred offering it to her but she saw the certificates appear on the wall in my office indicating my training and growing status in the EMDR world and demanded I treated her with EMDR and as I anticipated she did not respond well.

She had a problem with intense shame. She grew up in a family without supportive parents, with verbally abusive and neglectful parents. Her physical needs were being taken care of but her emotional needs were not being met.Whenever emotional material was activated she would go into what I call a shame melt down, hiding her face in her hands weeping silently for 20 30 40 minutes at a time and everything I would try to do to pull her out of those shame meltdowns failed. This had gone on for a couple of years. I didn't really invent the thing that's called RDI. I gave it a name and I came up with a standardized way of using it. Similar ideas have been proposed by other people. The idea of focusing on some other positive experience or some kind of positive symbol. Like Ron Martinez, talked about kids and having them think about superheroes and then installing the feeling about the superhero to help them feel stronger about themselves and being able to face their fears.

Other people had proposed this idea but they had done it in fragmentary ways or in very narrow populations. After several failed EMDR sessions that had melted down and we could not proceed. The next week Meredith came in and told me about a dream that she'd had. It was what I call a consolidation dream. It had some positive images in it, with some hopeful dream imagery I asked her if she was willing to focus on the dream images and strengthen them with some eye movements and so that's what we did. She responded very positively to that. We then did a series of imagery exercises where she accessed internal images. A lion like figure for courage an old woman for self-acceptance and compassion for self. Just a whole series of very spontaneous images that were coming up through imagery.

I installed a series of these exercises with her over the space of about 45 minutes. When she came in the next week I almost didn't recognize her. She suffered from a Lupus type condition that had left her with chronic physical pain. She often walked with a limp and sometimes needed a cane. She had chronic insomnia. She would wake up in the middle of the night and couldn't get back to sleep. She couldn't tolerate medications. She struggled with relationships with men. She had trouble with boundaries and assertiveness in social situations and when she came in the next week. The first thing that she reported was that she actually scheduled an early session a day or two earlier.

I was really afraid that I may had harmed her that she was asking for an early session but as it turned out she wanted to report some gains. She reported that she had no physical pain for the last five days. She said that she had slept through the night every night. She has reported a series of very positive things and I couldn't quite make sense of how much change there had been from just doing eye movements on positive imagery. I'd never seen anything like it. I'd been practicing for about 17 years at that point and had been using EMDR for several years.

Complete transcript: http://goo.gl/tTnOf

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