Emmanuel Contamin is a psychiatrist, child psychiatrist, and trainer in EMDR (“Eye Movement Desentization and Reprocessing”). She lives in Lyon.

Take care of yourself with EMDR techniques

• A highly experienced psychiatrist tells how through EMDR he discovered another way to treat trauma in psychotherapy and to accompany patients towards recovery.
• Explaining EMDR is to address the issue of memory and plasticity of the brain: it is to show, drawing upon different cases, how this technique makes it possible to dissociate the memory of an event from the emotions attached to it and that the brain has stored.
• Since EMDR offers good results in psychotherapy for treating trauma, especially attachment disorders, can we not apply our understanding of what is at work in this technique to care for ourselves and teach ourselves to manage our emotions more effectively? This is the aim of Dr Contamin who, in a book full of scientific references but intended for the general public, goes so far as to propose a certain number of resources and tools that the reader can apply by himself and learn to stabilize his emotions.
• A form of personal ecology. Could something that works well at individual level be applied to improve the overall mental health of our society? Avenues to explore for another form of ecology…