Eye Blinking for Stress Release
According to E. Lynne Waldrip, PhD. therapists have long struggled with the dilemma of breaking down the patient’s repression of deeply-stored trauma in the time allotted to each session; in many cases, trauma has occurred so early as to be undetectable even to the best attempts cognitive psychotherapy can make to unearth it. Rapid Eye Technology (RET), or Eye Blinking, seems to take the patient neurologically to the sites where neural distortions were created during trauma and causes shifts in the neuronal connections, basically undoing the original results of trauma.
What is Eye Blinking?
Eye Blinking, also known as Rapid Eye Technology (RET), allows a person to access a relaxed or alpha brainwave state known as Rapid Eye Movement (REM), which is the body’s own natural mechanism for releasing stress. A person follows patterns in the peripheral vision that further refines the search for the source material in visual, auditory and kinesthetic areas of the brain. While blinking the eyes, this effectively creates an on/off electrical stimulus, intensifying and apparently zooming in on the target neurons, alternately focusing on and discharging the material laid down there.
It is often during the blinking segment that a person experiences surfacing emotions as the electro-chemical debris is released from its long storage. There are often sudden insights experienced during this segment or in the subsequent rest periods, when the conscious and unconscious minds effectively agree that “Ah, that wasn’t really about me after all.” A sort of objectivity occurs, as if the person can now see from a higher perspective.
Studies postulate various theories, but agree that the eyes are connected intricately with the limbic system and various storage areas of the brain—indeed the entire neurological pathway system. When we look up, we’re accessing visual memory or re-creation, when we look to the side we are accessing auditory data, and when we look down we are accessing feelings. Since few people know the original source of most controlling beliefs or emotions, it is profound that Eye Blinking seems to process both the original and every successive experience on the same neuropathway, whether or not the person has been consciously aware of them!
How Can Eye Blinking Release Stress?
Regardless of the theories behind the effectiveness of Rapid Eye Technology (RET), the psychological benefit of eyelid blinking during therapy is dramatic and demonstrable. When blinking is coupled with movements to access various parts of the brain and patterns to assist the release of the trapped energy, the effect is extraordinary. This allows a person to identify, process and re-frame a problem that may have been stuck in the deeper levels of the subconscious for years. Eye Blinking desensitizes the negativity by getting the conscious and unconscious minds processing the trauma and reprogramming the belief we had about the painful situation, memory or event. These old unprocessed negative beliefs keep us trapped in self-defeating programs, behaviors and fears.
According to Dr. Jonathan Winson, neuroscientist and author of “Brain and Psyche”, sleep, at least the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) stage in which there is dreaming, apparently is used by the brain for a unique type of information processing reflected by the dream.
Studies have shown that the reason is that the brain has two distinct memory systems, one of which stores events and episodes from daily life. The other makes judgments and stores them as facts. Eventually the episodic memory clears itself out and sends relevant information to be stored in the other system. This processing routinely happens during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. The problem comes when events are stuck in one system and are not processed at all or are incorrectly processed.
When we allow emotional stresses to be released at the DNA or cellular memory level, healing on all levels takes place.