EMDR Pre-treatment Yoga for Complex Trauma

Yoga practice has shown benefits in treating multiple physical or mental disorders (Barnes, Bloom, & Nahin, 2008; Khalsa, 2004; Ross, Friedmann, Bevans, & Thomas, 2013) and has recently been evaluated for PTSD. We identified six randomized controlled studies measuring the effect of yoga in women (mostly) who experienced childhood violence (see table). With the exception of one pilot study (Dick, Niles, Street, Dimartino, & Mitchell, 2014; Mitchell et al., 2014), all studies show a significant reduction in PTSD symptoms compared to the pre-treatment period and compared to the control group (waiting list group). In particular, it was shown that this reduction in symptomatology was comparable to that of other commonly practiced psychotherapies, such as the exposure techniques of Behavioural and Cognitive Therapies or EMDR, and comparable to pharmacological treatments (Van Der Kolk et al., 2014). Prolonged yoga therapy would also significantly improve dissociative symptoms (Price et al., 2017). However, all these studies tested the effect of yoga therapy in isolation, without associating it with conventional and recommended treatments for trauma. However, given the fields of action of the yoga listed above, we think that it could be the ideal tool to prepare (in the pre-treatment phase) the work on traumatic memory. We believe that the combination of yoga therapy and EMDR would work in synergy to reduce complex PTSD and achieve a higher success rate than these individual approaches. In this work, we will use a yoga technique adapted to the treatment of psycho-trauma called "trauma sensitive yoga" (Emerson, 2015).