IEMT – Integral Eye Movement Therapy?

What is IEMT? I hear you ask.  Is it like EMDR? Well yes and no.

 

 

IEMT like EMDR is an Eye Movement Therapy and one which I use at my hypnotherapy practice in Chigwell, Essex.
One of the important differences between EMDR and IEMT is that IEMT does not used just left – right movements. IEMT uses a precise variety of axes along which the eyes of the client are moved to achieve rapid change. Careful observation allows the therapist to see changes occurring during the eye movements.

What is IEMT?

Integral Eye Movement Therapy (IEMT) is used to bring about rapid change. It was developed by Andrew T. Austin out of the Eye Movement Integration work developed by  Connirae Andreas.

If you are reading this as a potential client you might have already been through CBT, counselling or something similar, without quite obtaining the solution you want.  Somehow the problem is still there, whether a behaviour or a thought, or a sense of who you are.  It’s almost as though you are stuck in the problem.

IEMT Practitioners are trained to observe the patterns of behaviour or “imprints” which you will often not be aware of, but which keeps you in the problem state. By identifying, provoking and challenging these behaviours the negative feelings and patterns of behaviour or emotional imprints can be changed and overcome.

for example

Allow me to give you an example. An emotional imprint is how you learn to feel about certain things.  Your boss comes out of his office, crooks his finger and says “a word please”.  Suddenly you feel like you are back at school and about to get a good telling off. Your experience as a school child gives you the pattern for how to feel whilst waiting to see the boss.

There are also identity imprints.  You have more than one identity during any given period of your life, and often several in certain situations.  At a wedding for example, you could be both bridesmaid and mother and sister, and wife and daughter in relation to someone else.   You might be Best Man and best mate.   If you are gay or lesbian or bisexual you might have come out at school and had a series of mixed responses.  As a result you might feel anxious about coming out in current or future situations, or might not feel quite as happy about being gay as you might like based upon an imprint.

Imagine you worked in a place where you were the go to guy, you had the people skills that made others come to you with their problems or you had the technical know how that meant you were an essential cog in the workplace machinery.   This gave you status. It gave you a role. It gave you an identity.  Imagine you are then promoted to a different location, or different company altogether – you might very well have lost that status, you might very well have lost that identity.  This could leave you feeling adrift, like the new kid again. Not nice.  IEMT can work with a person’s identities as easily as with emotions or memories.
IEMT asks “how did the person learn to feel this way about this thing that troubles them”, and “how did the person learn to be this way”. IEMT works then with emotion, memories and identities.

IEMT – How does it work?

To answer that fully you would need a good working knowledge of the brain, or I’d have to give you a Neurology 101 course.  So, let’s keep it simple. You will have been given the advice at sometime to “sleep on it, you’ll see it different in the morning” or words to that effect.  It is interesting, isn’t it, how a new morning apparently seems to bring a fresh perspective or solution to a problem that the evening before seemed insoluble. Of course it hasn’t anything at all to do with a the apparent rising of the sun. It is to do with what you were doing whilst you slept.
Sleep is a pretty active state. In a healthy person around 90 minutes after falling asleep the REM stage of sleep is entered.  REM stands for Rapid Eye Movement.  You eyes will be seen to be moving back and forth behind the eyelids as though you are searching for something.   Cycles of REM sleep occur throughout the night and are associated with dreaming. Now it is thought that REM sleep allows you to process emotions, encode memories properly, and sort out problems.  A sort of mental housekeeping, or defragmentation – if you are into computer analogies.

During a session of IEMT the practitioner helps the client elicit the problem state, the correct algorithm is applied whilst the client holds the problem in mind  – usually as an image.
What happens is that the emotional impact of the problem is reduced, and the emotion, memory of image becomes less disturbing.  This works very well with the phenomenon of flashback or intrusive images that can occur in PTSD, for example.

 

 

 

 

 

Gavin Bowtell is a registered hypnotherapist in Chigwell, East London.   Hypnotherapy appointments are available face to face, and sometimes via Skype.  Gavin’s Essex Hypnotherapy practice is within easy reach of Hainault, Grange Hill, Loughton, Buckhurst Hill and Epping.
Many clients come for hypnotherapy from Enfield, Hertfordshire, Kent and further afield – Scotland the USA and even Brazil!

As a professional hypnotherapist dedicated to obtaining the change you want and need, Gavin also makes use of other tried and tested techniques.   Besides hypnotherapy Gavin also uses NLP, EFT and WSN Counselling & Coaching.
Gavin is a certified practitioner of OldPain2Go and Slim via Hypnosis, an IEMT Practitioner, and an advanced practitioner of BWRT® – BrainWorking Recursive Therapy.