Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Leigh McCullough.
The author relates her circuitous journey of becoming a psychotherapist, partially from the family ethic of helping others in need, but even more fundamentally from learning, on her grandfather's knee, to study character in the human face. She links those experiences to her love of studying and doing research with videotapes of therapy patients.
This article uses characters in popular films to demonstrate the theory and application of short term dynamic psychotherapy (STDP) in the treatment of performance anxiety. The reader is taught to identify affect phobias that are hypothesized to underlie performance anxiety. Similar in function to external phobias, affect phobias or internal phobias involve the avoidance of feelings (e.g., fear about feeling anger, shame about showing grief, pain about closeness), which thwarts adaptive responding and generates numerous behavioral problems. STDP treatment focuses on the restructuring of defenses, conflicted affects, and attachments. The resolution of the affect phobia requires systematic desensitization of affective responses (i.e., exposure and desensitization of underlying conflicted feelings). When patients learn to access adaptive forms of feelings, performance anxiety can often be resolved.
This article represents a process of preliminary search and discovery regarding the active mechanisms in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) when used in Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (STDP). Patients' (N = 7) responses to EMDR interventions were categorized as either "trauma" or "resolution" responses and examined in relationship to (a) the number of EMDR sets, (b) patient Global Assessment of Functioning Rating (GAF) scores, and (c) raw change in Subjective Units of Distress (SUD) ratings of severity of traumatic memory and Validity of Cognition (VoC) ratings of positive cognitions before and after EMDR sessions. Further subcategorization and development of the broad categories of trauma and resolution were recommended and may be useful in shedding light on how change happens in EMDR. This study was exploratory and attempted only to identify possible variables for further study. However, the results show potential relationships among variables that merit further refinement and study. Research questions generated from this study are discussed.