Laney Rosenzweig

Laney Rosenzweig says she can aid a client to erase the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder caused by trauma.
A West Hartford native, Rosenzweig has been a licensed marriage and family therapist (LMFT) for more than 22 years. She began her career at the Wheeler Clinic in Plainville, first as a crisis worker and then in the adult out-patient unit and the substance unit. She still serves at the clinic in the employee assistance program.
As a therapist, Rosenzweig has always worked in areas of the field that often involve trauma. Several years ago, she took a training course in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), a form of psychotherapy developed to address trauma-related disorders.
While using EMDR with a client, she veered from the proscribed protocol, focusing the discussion on the client’s specific problem, rather than allowing the client to free-associate about the problem. Rosenzweig calls her method Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART). Both EMDR and ART use eye movements thought to be similar to those used in Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep. The use of eye movements enhances processing of information during therapy and Rosenzweig says that using the eye movements with the more directive techniques she has developed has worked “amazingly well.”
After trying her method on a number of clients, she found that she could often help a client eliminate trauma-related symptoms in one hour-long session. Rosenzweig says the therapy often works in half that time when used with children for trauma, anxiety, depression, and it has even worked on a child with psychogenic seizure disorder. The child had one session of ART and has had no seizures in the past year.
ART is one of five therapies chosen for a two-year research study on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), funded by a $2 million Department of Defense grant and administered by the University of South Florida (USF). Rosenzweig has trained 12 therapists who have worked so far with 10 soldiers diagnosed with PTSD. The initial study was funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMHSA), with results indicating that symptoms of PTSD subsided after an average of three sessions.
Rosenzweig has written a 130-page manual with interventions for all types of problems. “If you have a memory you don’t want to live with, the use of ART can aid you in eliminating negative images usually within an hour,” she says. “Our slogan is ‘Keep the knowledge, lose the pain.’ You will have the full memory intact in the narrative side of the brain, so you will know what actually happened, but you will not have the images of the memory, and it’s the images which hold the pain.” The client can choose a different set of images to replace the distressing images.
Rosenzweig likens what she calls Voluntary Memory/Image Replacement to what happens when one gets a tooth filled. “If you have a tooth that hurts and the dentist puts in a filling, you’re not upset that the filling material isn’t you,” she says. “If you replace a nasty memory with a better one, all your symptoms often disappear because there’s nothing to trigger them. You’re not replacing the whole memory, but a subset of the memory – just the images. It’s what happens during REM sleep: we’re deleting and adding memories, and cleaning out our computer. I’ve found a way to trigger that process.”
Rosenzweig has used ART with victims of physical and sexual abuse, with those suffering from depression, eating disorders, firbro-myalgia, and phobias and with parents of autistic children. She has trained numerous licensed therapists and is seeking more trainees.
Her dream is to bring ART to Israel, to help soldiers with PTSD and civilians suffering from the trauma of terrorism and rocket attacks. She is currently discussing a therapist-training program with the director of an Israeli center for at-risk youth.