Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART) is a proprietary mental health modality developed by Laney Rosenzweig, MS, LMFT in 2008, over the course of more than a decade of clinical development and ongoing improvements and adaptions. Early research results showed that veterans resolved all clinical PTSD in 1-5 sessions with an average of 3.5 sessions. A single trauma can often be resolved in one ART session.
When your brain experiences trauma, the traumatic images bypass the logical part of the brain (the pre-frontal cortex) and go right into the part of the brain responsible for emergency reactions (the limbic system). Therefore, trauma events are stored in a problematically persistent way that causes flashbacks and uncomfortable sensations. It is these images and sensations that cause triggers, not the actual facts of the event(s).
ART is distinguished by its focus on erasing negative traumatic images and associated sensations from the client’s mental view with its “Voluntary Image Replacement.” We utilize eye movements shown by research to be connected to a relaxation response in the brain. The therapist uses hand gestures to calm down the sympathetic nervous system which quickly removes hypervigilance.
Many people think that when you imagine something from your past, it stays in one place in your brain and is remembered the same way. However, when you recall a memory, you are actually recreating it, pulling together elements from different parts of your brain and reconstructing it entirely. This allows for a window of opportunity to make conscious changes during ART’s eye movements — changing images and their accompanying sensations and creating new solutions and perspectives. A memory can, at will, be altered, strengthened or weakened.
To view Laney’s TEDx talk on ART, or for more information, go to: www.ARTworksNOW.com