Michelle: Alright Mark, I'm going to say the title of a self-help book, and you have to give me your most brutally honest, one-sentence roast. Ready? Mark: Born ready. Hit me. Michelle: Getting Past Your Past. Mark: Sounds like something my therapist says right before handing me a very large bill. Michelle: (Laughs) I think that’s a fair assessment for a lot of therapy, actually. But the book we’re diving into today, Getting Past Your Past: Take Control of Your Life with Self-Help Techniques from EMDR Therapy, is written by someone who might have a unique claim to that title. The author is Dr. Francine Shapiro. Mark: Okay, the name sounds familiar. Why is she special? Michelle: Because she didn't just write a book about a therapy. She literally invented it. And the story goes that she stumbled upon the core mechanism of EMDR—Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing—completely by accident, during a walk in the park. Mark: Hold on. One of the most recognized trauma therapies in the world started with a walk in the park? That feels a little too simple. Michelle: It’s one of those amazing scientific origin stories. She was having some disturbing thoughts, and she noticed that when the thoughts went away, her eyes were moving rapidly and diagonally. She started experimenting, and that observation became the foundation for a therapy now recommended by the American Psychiatric Association and the Department of Defense. Mark: Wow. Okay, so she's not just an author, she's the source. That changes things. So what's the big idea here? How does this therapy she discovered actually help you 'get past your past'?

Michelle: Well, the book’s central argument is both simple and mind-blowing. It suggests that many of our most painful, confusing, and self-sabotaging behaviors aren't really conscious choices at all. They're automatic programs running in our brain, triggered by what Shapiro calls "unprocessed memories." Mark: Unprocessed memories. What exactly does that mean? Is it just a bad memory, or something more? Michelle: It's much more. Think of it like this: your brain has a natural information processing system. When something happens, your brain is supposed to digest the experience, learn from it, and file it away as a normal memory. But if an experience is too overwhelming, too traumatic, or happens when you're too young to understand it, the system gets overloaded. The memory gets stuck. Mark: Stuck how? Michelle: It's stored in its raw, original form. It’s not just the story of what happened; it’s the emotions, the physical sensations, the five-year-old’s beliefs about the world, all frozen in time in a neural network. Shapiro uses a great analogy. You know the rhyme, "Roses are red..."? Mark: "...Violets are blue." See? Automatic. Michelle: Exactly. Your brain just completes the pattern without thinking. Shapiro argues that our emotional lives work the same way. A present-day situation—like a boss giving you critical feedback—can have a tiny element that matches one of these frozen memories. And boom, your brain automatically runs the old program. You’re not reacting as a 35-year-old adult; you're reacting with the terror or shame of a 7-year-old who was humiliated in class. Mark: So it's like our brain has a file that never got saved correctly, and every time a new document looks even slightly similar, it tries to open the corrupted file and the whole system crashes. Michelle: That is a perfect analogy. And the book is filled with stories that show just how profound this can be. There’s a woman named Justine, 25 years old, successful, smart. But she has one major problem: she consistently dates emotionally unavailable men. And the moment they try to leave, she becomes intensely clingy, begging, pleading. It's a pattern she hates but can't break. Mark: I think we all know someone like that, or have been someone like that. What was her corrupted file? Michelle: In therapy, they traced it back. When Justine was six years old, a severe thunderstorm hit one night. She was terrified, alone in her bedroom upstairs, crying and screaming for her parents. But they were downstairs in the kitchen, and the storm was so loud they never heard her. She eventually cried herself to sleep, feeling completely alone and abandoned. Mark: Wait, a thunderstorm? That's it? That seems... small, to be the reason she's picking bad boyfriends two decades later. That feels like a huge leap. Michelle: It does, doesn't it? And that’s the core insight of the book. From an adult perspective, it’s minor. Her parents weren't neglectful; they just couldn't hear her. But for a six-year-old's brain, the experience was stored with a few key ingredients: overwhelming fear, the physical sensation of a racing heart, and a core belief: "I'm in danger, I'm all alone, and no one will come for me." Mark: And that memory just sat there, frozen? Michelle: Exactly. It was unprocessed. It never got updated with adult knowledge, like "My parents loved me" or "I can take care of myself now." So, fast forward to age 25. A boyfriend says, "I think we should break up." That situation triggers the old network. The feeling of being left, of abandonment, is the same. And suddenly, she's not a 25-year-old woman anymore. As the book says, she's "a frightened little girl left alone in the dark." Her reaction is automatic, disproportionate, and completely out of her control. Mark: That is... unsettlingly relatable. The idea that a single, forgotten moment from childhood is secretly pulling the strings on my biggest life decisions. It’s like finding out there’s a ghost in your machine. Michelle: A ghost in the machine is a great way to put it. And Shapiro’s work is all about showing us that not only is the ghost real, but it’s a ghost we can actually talk to. The book makes it clear that these aren't just psychological concepts; they are neurobiological realities. Experiences are physically stored in networks of neurons, forming what we might call the unconscious mind. Mark: So when people feel 'stuck' or say 'I don't know why I keep doing this,' this is literally what's happening? An old program is running on a loop? Michelle: Precisely. And it can be anything. The book gives another example of a clinician in training who felt bothered by the sound of his daughter's voice saying "Daddy." Seemed random, right? But during a practice session, it floated him back to a memory of being six, when his mother told him his father had lost his job and they had to move. He started to cry, and his mother told him, "Now, now, be my little man. Don’t upset Mama." Mark: Oh, wow. So he learned right then: 'my feelings are a burden.' Michelle: He learned that his emotions were dangerous and needed to be suppressed. And that unprocessed rule from childhood was being triggered by his own daughter's innocent expression of need. He was running on automatic. Mark: Okay, I'm sold on the problem. My brain is a buggy computer running on old, corrupted software. How do we fix it? What is this EMDR thing, really?

Michelle: This is where it gets really fascinating. EMDR isn't just talk therapy. You don't just discuss the memory. The goal is to get the brain to finally process it. To do that, Shapiro developed a method that uses what's called bilateral stimulation—most famously, guided eye movements. Mark: The eye movement thing. That’s the part that always sounded a bit strange to me. How does waving your fingers in front of someone's face fix deep-seated trauma? Michelle: I get the skepticism. In fact, the book acknowledges that even though EMDR has been proven effective, there are still open questions about the exact mechanism. But one of the leading theories is that the eye movements stimulate the same kind of information processing that happens during REM sleep. Mark: REM sleep... when you're dreaming. Michelle: Right. During REM, your brain is busy sorting through the day's experiences, making connections, filing things away, and stripping the emotional charge from events. It’s the brain’s natural healing and learning state. EMDR seems to kickstart that same process while you're awake and focused on a specific traumatic memory. It allows the frozen memory to finally connect with all the adaptive, logical information stored in other parts of your brain. Mark: So you're basically forcing the corrupted file to link up with the healthy parts of the operating system, so it can be repaired and saved correctly. Michelle: Exactly. The memory of the thunderstorm can finally connect with the adult knowledge that "I am safe now," "I can handle being alone," "My parents loved me." The negative charge is neutralized, and the memory becomes just a story, not a live wire. Mark: That’s wild. It's like they found the one corrupted file and just... fixed it. Can you give me a really powerful example of this in action? Michelle: The book has a story that gave me chills. It’s about a Vietnam combat veteran named Tony. More than a decade after the war, he was living in isolation, suffering from severe panic attacks. The sound of a plane flying overhead would send him diving for cover. He was skeptical of therapy but desperate. Mark: I can't even imagine. What was his 'touchstone memory,' as you called it? Michelle: In therapy, he eventually shared a memory from the war. He was a medic, running across a battlefield to deliver plasma. A rocket exploded nearby, dislocating both of his arms. He was in agony, but he kept going and delivered the plasma. But when he got back, his commanding officer, instead of praising him, blamed him for the deaths of two soldiers because of the delay. Mark: Oh, that's brutal. So he has the trauma of the explosion, the pain, and then this profound sense of failure and betrayal on top of it. Michelle: A devastating combination. That was the memory they targeted with EMDR. They had him hold that memory in his mind—the explosion, the pain, the CO's words—while doing the eye movements. And after processing that single memory, his panic attacks disappeared. Mark: Just... gone? Michelle: Gone. He reported a month later that when planes flew overhead, he no longer dove for cover. He just thought, "Why don't they just get out of here?" A normal annoyance, not a life-threatening panic. The unprocessed memory was transformed from a source of terror into a learning experience. He had done his best in an impossible situation. Mark: That's incredible. It sounds almost too good to be true. Is everyone on board with this? Has there been pushback? Michelle: Absolutely, especially in the early days. As the background info on the book notes, there was a lot of debate in the psychological community. Some critics argued that the eye movements were just a distraction, a kind of therapeutic theater. They questioned the theoretical underpinnings. Mark: So how did it become so mainstream? Michelle: Through overwhelming evidence. Study after study demonstrated its effectiveness, especially for PTSD. Now, as we mentioned, it's recognized and recommended by some of the most conservative and evidence-based organizations out there. There are even brain imaging studies showing physical changes in the brain after EMDR. One study mentioned in the book found that the hippocampus, the brain's memory control center which shrinks in people with PTSD, actually showed an average 6% increase in volume after just 8-12 sessions. Mark: It's literally regrowing parts of the brain. Michelle: It's rewiring the past on a biological level. It's not about forgetting what happened. It's about changing how the memory is stored, so it no longer runs your life.

Mark: So the big takeaway here isn't just that the past affects us. We all kind of know that. It's that the past is physically stored in us, in these little frozen, corrupted moments. And we now have a way to go in and thaw them out, to defragment the hard drive of our mind. Michelle: Exactly. It shifts the entire conversation about mental health from "What's wrong with me?" to "What happened to me?". Your anxiety, your depression, your destructive patterns—they aren't necessarily a sign of a character flaw or a permanent defect. They might be a completely logical, though painful, symptom of an unprocessed experience. It’s not a moral failing; it’s a processing error in the brain. And that's an incredibly empowering perspective. Mark: It really is. It makes you feel less broken and more like there's a problem with a clear, technical solution. Michelle: And while the book is clear that for deep trauma, you absolutely need a trained professional, it does offer some simple, safe techniques people can use for everyday distress. One of the most well-known is the "Butterfly Hug." Mark: The Butterfly Hug? Tell me more. Michelle: It's a self-soothing technique. You just cross your arms over your chest, so your fingertips are on or below your collarbones. Then you just gently and alternately tap your hands, left-right, left-right, like the flapping of a butterfly's wings. It provides that bilateral stimulation we were talking about and can help calm your nervous system when you're feeling anxious or overwhelmed. Mark: That's a really practical tool. Simple, but based on the same principle. It makes you wonder... what little, forgotten thunderstorm is running your show? Michelle: That’s the question the book leaves you with. It invites you to become a detective of your own mind, to look at your outsized reactions and ask with curiosity, "What older story is this really about?" Mark: A powerful and hopeful way to look at our own personal ghosts. Michelle: This is Aibrary, signing off.