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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Valley&State Backpage O&E Sports Archives Classifieds Faith&Beliefs Obituaries Revels September 17, 2004 Technique heals the mind through eyes By John Darling Tidings Correspondent It's not like any other psychotherapy. You don't talk about your past pain and issues. You're laying down and fast-blinking your eyes and - with the therapist rhythmically chanting affirmations and waving a wand rapidly before your eyes - it looks more like a shamanic session than the time-honored "talk therapy." Ashland therapist Claudia Harrington uses a rapidly waved wand to stimulate the brain into removing past psychological traumas. Denise Baratta | Ashland Daily Tidings Called Rapid Eye Therapy, this exotic new treatment is being used to clear up all manner of psychological complaints - depression, addiction, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, phobias, codependency, low self-esteem, even autism, according to its practitioners. Typical clients, like Bonnie Greener, 56, of Cave Junction, have tried other therapies, not found success and just toughed it out. After four decades of depression and plenty of verbal psychotherapy, Greener felt unworthy, lacked self-confidence but was "operating very functionally, under a cloud, bogged down, home schooling my three kids and making an art form out of hiding my depression." In other words, nothing was working. Then, she did RET. "It just worked," Greener said. "It put a different message in my brain and changed things. I have a lot more energy and confidence. It may seem magical but then an awful lot of life is magical and can't be seen or explained." Conceived 16 years ago by Dr. Ranae Johnson, a Salem psychotherapist, it's modeled on REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, a time when the dreaming brain sorts out, discharges and adapts to the day's experiences. How did she discover REM as a healing tool? "I was desperate," said Johnson. "My son was autistic. I was inspired by a lot of people in pain around me. When you get desperate, you listen. You eliminate what doesn't work and you look at what the body is naturally doing. I thought, why not get the body to simulate REM sleep while awake - by tricking the brain into thinking it's asleep? The process developed over 10 years of research, and included largely healing her son of autism. It drew on the findings around REM sleep, neurolinguistic programming (NLP), kinesiology and brain mapping - emerging as a technique that resolves stresses and greatly curtails "re-creating" (mentally replaying old hang-ups) by "getting the left, rational brain talking with the right, spiritual brain." What it feels like is a blend of mild hypnosis, pre-game peptalk, shamanic incantations (of positive statements) and some kind of ethereal alpha-state experience where you can feel you mind being organized in a better way - all the while blinking your eyes rapidly, as the RET therapist encourages releasing old stuff by saying, "blink it out, let it go, give it to the light." Said RET therapist Claudia Harrington of Ashland (Greener's therapist), "We relax the client and focus on the deeper mind. The wand works as an eye-catching device to guide the rate of blinking or eye movement. Left and right brain hemispheres are activated and integrated. It opens files to the different modalities - auditory, visual, kinesthetic, memory and re-creating." Clients might have flashes of past memories, she said, or experience deep feelings, but, with the blinking, bi-hemispheric activity and rapid pattern - "so as not to give the ego time to build defenses" - these thoughts and emotions pass rapidly and there's a sense of relief. "You keep on blinking, that's the main thing," Harrington said. "We might slow it down and go to left-right eye movement if a major emotion comes up." Afterward, said Johnson, "you still have memories and emotions, but the hooks are gone. People say the anger (or other emotion) goes through them and they live more in the present." Promotional Web site language, like this from Hannah Zaiv in Portland, asks, "Do you suffer from unwanted patterns that refuse to change, despite all your efforts? Traumas from your past that stubbornly repeat themselves, in various forms? Stresses that cause or contribute to physical illness, or otherwise divert you from the progress you would so much like to make? "Through blinking and eye movements, in which ... we literally remove dysfunctional core beliefs and the emotional charges surrounding past traumas from their very roots ... RET looks and feels like magic. In response to the directings of a wand, clients might twitch, cry, feel and express other emotions, experience shifting body sensations. ... Sometimes it doesn't appear as if a client is doing much in response - and yet the issues which they want to heal clear up!" RET is a cousin to EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), which is also used on trauma resolution. Instead of a wand to activate brain hemispheres, clients may tap each leg alternately, hold a buzzer that alternates stimulating each hand or hear sounds alternating each ear, said Ashland therapist Kathryn Kelley. Sometimes EMDR therapists, who must be licensed counselors, have the client follow a finger back and forth, augmenting with other bilateral stimuli because eye movement can be "very tiring," she said. They do verbal therapy to identify memories that are "triggering trauma," ask what the feeling state is that goes with it, identify where in the body this is occurring and then, when the charge has dissipated, work on new, positive strategies and responses. "EMDR is highly successful with such post-traumatic stresses as abuse, rape and war," said therapist Joel Turgeson of Medford. "We've all had traumas in life and have memories of them. In EMDR, we recall them and feel the emotional charge. "This happens a lot in relationships. We're going to encounter unresolved wounds, our buttons are going to get pushed. EMDR heals that. It activates the brain's information processing system. You use more of your brain. It's an innate process that moves you to re-balance." 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