ART has been recognized as an effective psychotherapy for PTSD, depression, stress, and personal resilience. ART has also been classified as a promising therapy for symptoms of phobia, panic, anxiety, sleep and wake disorders, disruptive and antisocial behaviors, general functioning and well-being.

ART is firmly grounded in techniques used in well-established evidence-based treatments, including exposure through visualization, visualized in-vivo exposure, relaxation/stress inoculation facilitated by eye movements, re-scripting of negative images, Gestalt techniques, and others.

Freeing Bad Memories

Specifically, it has been shown that whenever we recall an emotional memory, that memory becomes open to change.  As a matter of fact, we are always making changes to emotional memories when we recall them, we just didn’t realize that this was happening. Read The Full Article

Now that we know this happens, when it comes to traumatic memory, we can harness this opportunity to purposefully make the changes that will free us from the troubling images and sensations and the emotions that cause suffering.

Add to this, the power of eye movements. It has been known for some time that when clients (through tracking a therapist’s hand or object) moves their eyes back and forth while engaging their thoughts in certain imaginative exercises, the ability to make favorable changes is enhanced, and clients experience relaxation.  While the reason eye movements are so powerfully helpful has not been uncovered, one theory posits that eye movements are thought to replicate the responses experienced during the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) phase of sleep.

With ART, the process is very straightforward.  Safely, with the therapist’s reassuring presence, the client undergoes sets of eye movements while silently recalling the traumatic scene. This phase of the ART therapy usually lasts from 30 seconds to about 10 minutes. Physical and emotional reactions are addressed through these sets of relaxing eye movements. This recall causes the window of opportunity to make client selected favorable changes to the traumatic memory to open. Under the guidance of the ART trained therapist, clients are then empowered with the ability to make any changes they want to the images or other sensory experiences that come up with this memory. After engaging in this process for a relatively short amount of time, (1-5 sessions), positive long-lasting changes are made. While clients retain the ability to recall the facts of the incident(s), they no longer experience the adverse effects that were previously associated with its recall. That is why we say, “Keep the Knowledge, Lose the Pain.”