The 50th anniversary of the last of the large offenses brought by the Arno, over the centuries, in Florence, occurs these days.
Memories and emotions return by scrolling through vivid and in rapid succession in images and words, at times still cracked by the emotion, of the witnesses of that catastrophe and of those who have been called or voluntarily came to intervene to save the city, its inhabitants and its works of art.
And “The flood of emotions, 50 years later” is the title of the Convention held in Florence at the opening of the cycle of commemorations and attention was immediately focused on the role of psychology in the processing of trauma.
The flood is a tragic event, which leaves the indelible signs of profound emotions in the inner life of those who find themselves living it, as it happens for other great traumatic events and natural disasters.
In the conference he took care of the flood that hit Florence and Tuscany in 1966 precisely looking at the emotional consequences in the people who found themselves living that cataclysm.
The difficulty of managing the post-traumatic disorder (PTSD), the memory of the trauma, the fear, the extraordinary skills and the incessant work of the “mud angels” and the ability to rework.
The EMDR treatment has been made in a particular way, as a path of psychotherapy that works on various psychopathologies and problems linked to both traumatic events and more common but emotionally stressful experiences and its applications in emergency and evolutionary ages.
For years, in fact, behind the scenes of catastrophic events, war conflicts and serious emergencies in Italy and in the manner, psychotherapists have specialized in the EMDR treatmentwhich inaugurated a new dimension of psychotherapy, acting on the memory of the trauma with a specific therapeutic method of alternating bilateral stimulation of eye movements which is particularly rapid and effective.
The ocular movements of the EMDR, similar to those of REM sleep, and therefore completely natural, reactivated the brain self -healing capacity, which finds the resources to metabolize the traumatic event.
Neurosciences are now able to show us how in people with a history of psychic trauma there are typical pathological alterations against some brain structures: the frontal cortex, which no longer exerts its physiological inhibition on amygdala, which for this reason is hyperactive and contains unplosed information; the hippocampus; The front and rear cing and the insula.
With the improvement of neuro-physiological detection techniques, it was also possible to investigate the functioning and effectiveness of therapeutic interventions. From a meta-analysis of numerous studies on the subject, “winning” came out, as regards the Treatment for PTSDcognitive-behavioral therapy focused on trauma and EMDR.
Precisely on the EMDR there have been numerous efficacy studies that took into consideration neurobiological substrates and everyone highlighted a normalization of the cerebral activity associated with a remission of the typical symptoms of the PTSD.
Dr. Pagani of the Institute of Sciences of Cognition published in 2012 a very interesting study conducted by the CNR in which the effectiveness of the EMDR treatment It has been tested through the electroencephalographic measurement in an “ecological” context, or in the study of the therapist during the session, minimizing the invasiveness of the measurement tool.
The interesting data that emerges from this investigation is the trend of brain activation during the therapy: during the first session the regions of the trauma with emotional value (visual areas and the limbic area of the brain) are activated) accompanied by very disturbing sensations; In the intermediate phase of the treatment different regions are activated, with cognitive value, and the disturbing sensation decreases; During the last session, cerebral regions (frontal and temporo-parietal) are activated with an associative value, in which all information is processed and integrated and the trauma regions are no longer activated. At this stage there are no longer the disturbing sensations.
The prefrontal cortex regains its inhibitory role by reducing the activation of the amygdala, and in general the brain anomalies typical of the PTSD show a surprising turnaround following the EMDR treatment.
These results suggest that the elaboration of traumatic events moves from areas that ‘develop’ the pathological images of trauma to regions of the brain with a cognitive and associative role, whose activities allow to regulate the memories of the traumatic event and to eliminate and control the negative emotions linked to it.
And so the research continues to study and show us the potential of psychotherapy and above all of the human brain in facing and elaborating the suffering of the traumas to which inevitable we are exposed throughout our life.
To heal, our mind puts its resources in place and traumatic events are not deleted but reworked in an adaptive way, allowing us to go on often with additional resources of awareness and ability, which become an important traumatic “growth” and then face other difficulties.
For this reason, as in this moment, in which we are affected by earthquakes, wars and great migratory movements of refugees, an increasingly recognized and important role is assuming adequate and valid psychotherapeutic intervention in the event of emergencies and collective disasters that affect entire communities, children, adults, elderly, rescuers and law enforcement agencies, which can bring people and regain the ability to regulate emotions and anxiety.
What happened cannot be changed, but the memory can be transformed by freeing precious resources for the healing and well -being of the person and the community.
