Getting Past Your Past: Take Control of Your Life With Self-Help Techniques from EMDR Therapy [ハードカバー]

Life is cumulative. Past experience builds upon more experience and we
become who we are whether we're conscious of it or not. Memories of these
experiences are stored physically in the brain. Dr. Shapiro's book helps
people think about their lives and provides specific techniques to find the
links to make sense of who we are. She provides real life examples to which
one can relate, then suggests hands-on strategies and exercises that enable
the reader to connect the dots, make new decisions, take different actions,
and achieve the means to effect change and growth. However, nowhere in this
book does she recommend or mention moving one's eyes, nor does she suggest
self-administered EMDR, because that would be clearly unethical and
irresponsible. Rather, when an emotional problem is described, she offers a
variety of self-help techniques that can be safely used. In addition, she
offers guidelines for readers to decide if it would be useful to get
professional help with an experienced EMDR clinician.

Getting Past Your Past is full of accessible, empowering self-help
resources. It's a delight to read, difficult to put down, and has something
beneficial and fruitful for everyone.

It's not as if Francine Shapiro, the author of this important new book, hasn't already given more than a life's worth of gifts to us through the blessing of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). Now she shares with us this marvel of a jewel that is a virtual manual for removing the effects of past pain and abuse and finding a deep inner peace. It puts a powerful self-healing tool into the hands of everyone - even those who don't have or can't afford a qualified therapist.
Not long after I met Dr. Shapiro for the first time at a training I was teaching in hypnosis and age regression techniques back in the 1980s, she began stopping by my office to share her remarkable research. She showed me videos of Vietnam Vets who had been suffering the effects of PTSD (flashbacks, insomnia, social avoidance) for more than ten years. As they responded to her carefully structured questions about their inner experiences and memories, she moved a finger back and forth in front of their eyes. Within as few as two or three sessions their symptoms would disappear. Each time she visited there were even more amazing things happening.
Soon she had developed a protocol and was teaching classes in how to apply this tool in a therapy session. I hurried to become certified, and now, some 25 years later, I have used this tool thousands of times - nearly always successfully, and often remarkably so. The principles of EMDR Therapy have become important elements in my practice of mind-body medicine and psychotherapy, as it has in the practices of so many others. I have integrated EMDR therapy with my cognitive restructuring and guided imagery approaches with remarkable success.
Dr. Shapiro is one of the most caring, compassionate, and generous people I know, and the intimate look at her work and her thinking offered here in Getting Past Your Past, clearly reveals the heart and soul she brings to her work. She starts the reader from scratch, offering opportunities to experience the magic of this transformational approach at once! The multitude of fascinating stories she tells of how people with different issues apply these tools then show us how we can apply the wisdom of this wonderful set of perspectives and tools in our personal lives.
Gently, step by step, we are introduced to gradually increasing levels of self-awareness - with the result that soon it is quite possible to examine some of the upsetting issues from the past without undue stress, and then create balance in an incredibly simple and most non-threatening way - like tapping on your knees or giving yourself hug-taps for instance! For the nervous public speaker, battered wife, stressed out businessman or simply someone who wants to relieve the blocks to their creativity and happiness or hasten the resolution of their physical illness - here's how you can explore yourself and your past, using a most wise and kind set of self-applied skills.
Each of us is aware that whether we have conscious memories of them or not, we have had experiences that have limited us, made us ill or unhappy, and blocked our abilities to create and be happy. That is, as Dr. Shapiro explains, because these memories are unprocessed. The reader soon learns how these unprocessed memories exert their enormous control over our lives, filling us with rage, pain, hate, despair, or fear, and blind us to the incredible healing that is always just one decision away.
The clinician or student will be intrigued and enlightened by a multitude of examples drawn from her clinical experience that help to reveal the subtleties, beauty, power and wisdom of this approach and those suffering from wounds of the past will find freedom from applying them.
And as if that weren't enough, Dr. Shapiro is offering this soon-to-be-a-best-seller and classic as a benefit for the humanitarian nonprofit organization she founded, HAP. I recommend it highly: try this book on - you will feel better for it.

I first talked with Dr. Francine Shapiro about EMDR back in 2001 when her Humanitarian Assisstance Program was gearing up to work with emergency personnel and survivors of the 9/11 attacks. I found it a fascinating and important subject then, and was recently delighted to hear about this new book which explains in detail and in plain language, using real life examples, how EMDR works.

EMDR is best known for its effectiveness in treating people who have experienced major trauma--like natural disasters, war, rape or other crime, an abusive childhood and so on--quickly and hence inexpensively.

But what about the rest of us? Fortunately most of us are not combat veterans or rape victims. We may have made a few bad decisions in our lives, or occasionally have nagging thoughts about the past. Maybe a certain type of person always pushes our buttons, perhaps we find ourselves becoming anxious in situations that don't bother most people, or we may have trouble relaxing, concentrating or sleeping. Can EMDR work for us? This book shows how it can.

The book is enjoyable to read, and the exercises are easy to understand and to do. I have read a number of self-help books over the years, and this is certainly one of the best. I highly recommend it.