Somebody with trauma should try a trauma-focused therapy such as EMDR before treating their nightmares directly.

What these subjects mean

EMDR Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing: a trauma therapy in which the patient recalls a memory while moving their eyes from side to side. Recommended as a first-line PTSD treatment; whether the eye movements themselves do anything is still argued about.

Psychotherapy Treatment by conversation between a therapist and a patient, and the arguments about what in it actually does the work.

Trauma What overwhelming experience leaves behind, and whether it is stored in the body, the memory, or the loop between them.

What Scott Alexander actually said

Scott Alexander 16 Jun 2022 Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten

I would recommend that anyone who thinks they're suffering from trauma (eg PTSD) try a trauma-focused therapy like EMDR before trying to address nightmares directly, unless the nightmares are overwhelmingly worse than all their other trauma symptoms.

↗Peer Review: Nightmaresastralcodexten.com
16 Jun 2022

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The APA's trauma treatment guidelines should be ignored, because they rest only on trials of therapies too brief to have worked.

Alexander says somebody with trauma should try a trauma-focused therapy such as EMDR before treating the nightmares directly. Shedler says the APA’s trauma guidelines should be ignored because they rest only on trials of therapies too brief to have worked — which is the category the recommended treatment sits in. One is following the guideline and the other says the evidence under it does not hold.

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