Fringe-ology

by Steve Volk

  His grip on that worldview was weakened, however, by years and experience. Dozens and then hundreds of men paraded past him, retired soldiers awash in alcoholism, bar fights, domestic violence, divorce, drug abuse, total estrangement from their families and society—and all because of what they reported happening inside their heads. Flashbacks, depression, despair, guilt, homicidal or suicidal rage. “In the bad old days, before EMDR, once you got a soldier to really open up to you about a trauma, he didn’t sleep for days,” Botkin told me. “They bounced off the walls.”

  Then, one day, a colleague came in with a paper written by Francine Shapiro, extolling the virtues of EMDR and its odd protocol.

  Botkin and another therapist listened intently to the psychologist describe the basic outline of Shapiro’s therapy.

  And then they laughed.

  The giggle factor can arise, it seems, whenever we hear something that doesn’t fit with our worldview. And Botkin admits, when he first heard about EMDR, he laughed it up pretty good. “In that paper,” Botkin said, “she describes some fairly fantastic results. And we laughed like crazy. The idea that something so simplistic—you know, waving your finger in front of somebody’s face—would have that kind of effect? We joked about it.”

  In fact, between guffaws, Botkin barked out laugh lines like, “Which finger do you use?” before exploding again into mirth.

  For many, many thousands of therapists, and hence for many, many millions of clients, the matter ended there. With a doctor feeling superior enough to laugh in the face of new, strange information. But Botkin and his colleagues decided to look further into the subject. “What did we have to lose?” Botkin remembers thinking. “We figured it was worth a shot.”

  The year was 1990, and Botkin and his colleagues came back from a seminar, filled with uncertainty about whether this new method would work. They had been dealing with the same clients, in many instances, for years, with no relief. But EMDR turned the whole place around. “These guys used to be gripping the arm rests on their chairs at the end,” said Botkin, “white knuckling, and we’d have to say, ‘Time’s up.’ Now they were going through these painful memories, and at the end they were relaxed.”

  Botkin used to worry about what would happen to the men in his care after they left the office. Now they left him saying things like, “Thanks, doc. I’m gonna go take a nap.”

  Those first weeks at the Chicago VA, post-EMDR, were heady stuff. Botkin and his colleagues raced down the halls after nearly every patient session, going into each other’s offices, closing the door and engaging in joyous high-five sessions: “After all these years, where I hate to say it, we might have done more harm than good,” Botkin told me, “to see these guys getting better was astounding. It just felt great, to finally help these people.”

  His own therapy was an outgrowth of all that. And, like Shapiro’s development of EMDR, it happened because he attended to a kind of accident.

  BOTKIN WAS ALONE IN his office with Sam, a vet in the throes of depression over a trauma that had occurred twenty-eight years earlier. By now, Botkin had been using EMDR as his main therapeutic technique for maybe five years. He had not fully resolved his every client’s every source of trauma. Where war vets are concerned, traumatic memories can be so numerous that it takes considerable time to find and deal with each one. But Botkin had used EMDR to help Sam confront and resolve painful memories; and, finally, what seemed to be his core trauma broke to the surface.

  The old solider was sitting there, blubbering in Botkin’s office chair, sharing with him the kind of tale that seemed to come straight from a horrifying war flick. Sam had, during the war, befriended a ten-year-old orphaned Vietnamese girl. He planned to officially adopt her and bring her home to the states. Then word came: all the orphaned children on Sam’s base were to be transported to a Catholic orphanage in a distant village.

  Sam felt devastated at the prospect of being separated from the girl but dutifully loaded her onto a flatbed truck in preparation for transport.

  Then, suddenly, shots rang out.

  A sniper or snipers were firing on the base.

  Sam and the other soldiers present started grabbing kids off the truck and pushing them down on the ground, shielding them with their bodies. Minutes later, after the firing stopped and the crisis was over, Sam looked around for the girl.

  He didn’t see her till he walked to the back of the truck and found her—face down on the ground.

  The truth dawned on him by degrees.

  She was motionless.

  There was a small spot of blood on her back.

  He grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her over.

  And then he saw: the whole front of her abdomen had been blown away, torn apart by the bullet that entered her from behind.

  Sam clutched at her lifeless body, and eventually his fellow soldiers had to separate him from the girl.

  Botkin pulled this whole story out of Sam, then asked him to stay with the feeling of grief provoked by the telling.

  The first phase of EMDR was complete. Now it was time for the physiological step. Like doctors dispensing medicine, EMDR practitioners speak of “administering” an eye movement. What this means, in practical terms, is that they set some object to moving, side to side, a few feet from the patient’s face. By this time, Botkin had chosen as his instrument of choice a long, white stick his clients dubbed “Dr. Al’s Magic Wand.”

  Botkin waved that wand in front of Sam, watching the old soldier’s eyes track the tip dutifully, side to side.

  At first, as expected, Sam’s sadness increased.

  “Stay with that feeling,” Botkin instructed, then waved his wand again.

  They continued on this way for a while, and Sam’s sadness slowly began to decrease, like a deflating balloon.

  Toward the end of their hour-long session, Sam’s face was wet with tears. But he expressed relief. He had gotten through his story. And he felt the relaxed after-effect associated with EMDR.

  Normally, Botkin would have broken off the session at this point—their work done. But this time, spontaneously, he administered one more eye movement, with no specific instruction. He says now that he thought of the extra eye movement as a “kind of treat. You know, ‘this has been good for you, so here’s one more.’ Like dessert.”

  He just waved his wand in front of the soldier’s face, with no further instruction. Then he told him to close his eyes.

  Botkin figured this was it, the end of the session. But then Sam did something surprising: eyes shut, he smiled. Broadly.

  Botkin sat there, watching Sam intently. And then the soldier did something that disturbed Botkin: he giggled.

  Botkin was thrown.

  EMDR had the effect of relaxing patients, of helping to settle them down and stabilize their emotions. But this was a massive mood swing.

  He waited expectantly, then Sam opened his eyes again and told him, he saw her—he saw the orphan girl. Sam was smiling now, clearly euphoric, and the story he told stunned Botkin.

  Sam claimed to have seen the girl as a beautiful woman. She thanked him for taking care of her. She seemed happier and more content than anyone he had ever seen.

  “I love you,” he told her.

  In response, she embraced him and said she loved him, too. “I could actually feel her arms around me,” Sam claimed.

  By now, Botkin was scared. “I assumed that the agony of his grief had somehow produced a hallucination based on fantasy or wishful thinking,” he writes in his book, Induced After-Death Communication. “I had never witnessed or heard of such a response during psychotherapy … If Sam had hallucinated, the intense stress of his traumatic memories had somehow compromised his ability to differentiate reality from fantasy. That worried me.”

  Over the next three weeks, however, five more of Botkin’s patients spontaneously claimed similar experiences, “all with the same reported vividness,” writes Botkin, “the certainty the vets expressed that it was real, the
positive assurances they reported from the person who died, and the unprecedented resolution of long-standing, intractable, traumatic grief.”

  Botkin had come to expect that patients would leave his office after EMDR with less sadness. But after these unusual sessions, his clients left his office feeling joyous.

  Botkin pored through his notes, looking for some common thread running among these patients. And after some time, he found one: each of these six patients had received an “extra” eye movement. There were other changes he had made over the years in the EMDR protocol, all now incorporated into his IADC therapy, but this “extra” eye movement seemed particularly important. “Usually, you’re telling them what to focus on,” Botkin later told me. “But in these instances, in my notes, I could see I had given them a final eye movement with no direction.”

  This first “treat” he had dispensed to Sam had been inadvertently replicated. And all of these patients thought Dr. Al’s Magic Wand had granted them temporary passage to communicate from this life—across the boundary of death. Botkin had been trained not to dissuade his clients of their personal beliefs, unless the belief seemed to lead to some direct harm.

  As Botkin put it to me, if a patient thought he could go up to the VA roof, leap off, and fly, he would have counseled him otherwise and restrained him if necessary. But this was different. He continued to monitor the patients who spontaneously had the experience. They all seemed to be doing well. None seemed disassociated in any way from reality. In fact, they seemed to be reconnecting. “I don’t consider anything that goes on in IADC to comprise scientific evidence for the afterlife,” Botkin told me. “But once I saw that it was safe, I wanted to explore it as a therapeutic tool.”

  He had seen great improvement in his patients with EMDR, “but this was on an entirely different level,” he says. “People were leaving my office not just more grounded and peaceful, but happy. Even ecstatic.”

  So he took the next step and started giving his clients one last eye movement, without direction, as part of his own protocol. And incredibly, they had the same experience. They met deceased friends, loved ones, even enemy soldiers they shot. They felt them, smelled them, and believed the experience, in almost every case, to be real.

  Botkin told me all this in my hotel room. And I found myself unable to believe a word of it.

  Then he opened his briefcase.

  It was my turn.

  I HAD BY THIS time talked to several of Botkin’s soldiers on the phone. And I knew what to expect. But when Botkin reached into his brief case and pulled out … a magic wand? I laughed. The giggle factor kicked in, big time.

  Botkin smiled, waiting patiently for me to compose myself. This was, in fact, serious stuff. My brother-in-law had died after a protracted battle with cancer just a few months earlier. I had sat in his hospital room for many long nights, including the night he passed away. And I’d arrived in Chicago not just as a journalist, but as a client.

  I often woke in the middle of the night, with the smell of that hospital room heavy on my face, like a rag clamped over my nose and mouth. The sense of helplessness I felt watching him go would come storming back into my consciousness. I would sputter, get up, and walk around my apartment—unable to breathe normally until I gave into my grief for a while. And the same sensation came at me at other times, too, usually after I had spent the day out in the busy, heavily populated streets of Philadelphia. Suddenly, alone, unlocking my apartment door, in the evening, I would suddenly catch that same smell, boiling up out of my own subconscious. Then the rush of emotion came—the same cycle of helplessness, panic, and despair. The only thing I’d found to do to help myself at that stage was to walk the sensation off, like a football player who just tweaked his knee. But these episodes were wearing me down. There were too many nights in which I simply lost sleep. And I had, in fact, experienced one of these episodes the day before my flight to Chicago. So IADC, EMDR—the acronyms mattered to me only as a journalist. As a person, I was hoping Botkin might help end these flashbacks.

  In my hotel room, Botkin asked me to focus on the smell and the images and the sounds that were the source of my discontent. He listened, wand in hand, till I felt good and weak from the weight of these recollections. He worked with me verbally, like any cognitive therapist, trying to reach the depths of my sadness. Only after I leaned heavily forward in my chair, did he seem satisfied. “Stay with the feeling,” he said, then lifted his stick in the air and moved it across my field of view, repeatedly, for maybe ten seconds.

  The act of doing first-person journalism sometimes feels incredibly silly. And at the time, this episode with Botkin ranked right up there. But I pressed through any self-consciousness, and in the first stage of the process, nothing terribly dramatic happened—or at least, nothing shot through with mysticism. Botkin administered maybe six eye movements, and by then, incrementally, my sense of sadness and despair had lifted. I felt relaxed and even yawned. I started thinking about Botkin’s departure and seriously considered taking a nap.

  “Great,” said Botkin. “Now I’m going to give you one more eye movement—without direction.”

  A note here: in the beginning, when Botkin’s soldiers first started reporting their experiences, the whole thing happened organically. But I had of course been given a direction before I ever arrived. I had listened to a radio interview Botkin conducted. I had spoken to him on the phone. And I had just interviewed him in person. I knew what he expected of me now was that I would have a vision of my brother-in-law. That is an awfully powerful suggestion, so in this respect I knew I wasn’t an ideal research subject. But for whatever it’s worth, over the course of two days, Botkin performed the procedure with me twice—and each time, well, something happened.

  The first time the vision I had was light, relaxed, like an incredibly vivid daydream. My brother-in-law appeared to me as he had in his early thirties, with long black hair and a full, healthy face. He appeared close to me, in the pitch dark.

  “You’re all right,” I said, in my mind.

  “I’m good,” he told me, and laughed.

  This man had been in my family since I was twelve years old. He was like a brother to me.

  “I love you,” I told him.

  “I love you, too,” he said.

  Then suddenly, he appeared before me at a distance, swinging a Wiffle Ball bat, like he did when he played with me as a child. “All the times we had,” he said, “don’t end. They go on forever. They’re still happening.”

  I wouldn’t have expected my brother-in-law to reflect with me on the nature of time. But I opened my eyes after he said “I love you” again. That first vision was over. The most logical explanation was that Botkin’s ministrations rendered me receptive to the more positive memories in my own subconscious.

  I say this because, even though no one has yet pinned down the exact mechanism for EMDR’s effectiveness, the most promising area of research relates to the storage of memories. The side-to-side eye movements of EMDR recall the more chaotic motions that occur in the rapid eye movement stage of sleep. And some sleep researchers believe one function of our vivid, REM-stage dreaming is to help us consolidate, process, and file our memories—an internal historian, hard at work, contextualizing and writing down the relevant aspects of our lives.

  The intriguing twist here is that, studies demonstrate that the quality and quantity of REM sleep declines dramatically in people suffering from PTSD. Is this because some events are so traumatic we literally can’t bring ourselves to process them? Unprocessed memories might explain why soldiers suffering from PTSD react to the memory of gunfire with a full-out fight-or-flight response—gripping their chairs or diving to the floor. This might also explain why my subconscious occasionally kicked the smell of my brother-in-law’s hospital room up, into my conscious mind; I had yet to make the experience a part of my past, and so there it was, in the present.

  If all this is true, the waking, directed eye movements of EMDR facilitate
a physiological process in the brain, similar to REM sleep, and get the process of memory storage moving again, putting traumatic memories where they belong—in the past.

  “You won’t know what kind of effect this had until later,” Botkin advised me.

  But I already knew one thing: seeing my brother-in-law swing a Wiffle Ball bat, and run after he hit the ball, felt invigorating after last seeing him unconscious and in bed. I felt lighter, like I had a new memory of my brother-in-law now, sitting between me and all those darker visions. Looking back, I wonder if processing the negative memories on which I was stuck cleared a path for more positive associations to come back to the fore.

  The next day, Botkin put me through the same steps. We talked about my brother-in-law. But when I closed my eyes, I saw my oldest brother. He had died more than ten years earlier. But I’d been thinking of him that morning, so perhaps the power of suggestion had already been at work.

  He suffered horrible acne as an adolescent, leaving his face as an adult still pitted and scarred. He had contracted diabetes many years before his death, and he lost a lot of weight he never regained. But in my mind’s eye he appeared whole and strong and healthy again—his weight up, his face unblemished. I was surprised to see him this way, so different but still looking just like my brother. And this episode, like the one with my brother-in-law, seemed marked by that interplay between my conscious thoughts and sudden, spontaneous happenings.

  We exchanged “I love yous.”

  We embraced.

  I asked my brother if he liked it where he was, and he said, “It’s great.”

  Then just as I’d seen my brother-in-law suddenly appear with a bat in his hands, I saw my brother standing there with a guitar. He used to play electric guitar when I was a child, and I can still remember arriving home from a trip to the grocery store with my parents to the sound of then-current, now-classic rock, exploding out of his bedroom window. These Herculean, arena-rock riffs, played without drums, vocals, or any great talent, marked the soundtrack of my childhood. But in this vision, when he played a chord, an array of colors flew from the strings. I can’t say I recognized the song. But the sensation was exhilarating.