When Destiney Lemieux went to her son’s T-ball games, she felt like the open field was going to swallow her whole. The dizziness and anxiety felt horrible. It made it hard for her to focus on her little boy.

Lemieux had been in traditional talk therapy for years as she tried to get a handle on the severe anxiety and panic attacks that had plagued her on and off the baseball field. Then, her most recent counselor, Shellie Cook, suggested she try Accelerated Resolution Therapy, or ART.

ART uses sweeping eye movements and guided imagery to help people deal with trauma, depression, anxiety, pain and other issues. Advocates say even one 50-minute session can help.

“I was very skeptical,” Lemieux said. “It sounded too easy. . .  I was like, ‘Why aren’t people getting better all over the place?'”

Then she tried it.

“(Cook said), ‘Think about it as if you have these cement blocks on your feet. No matter what happens, there’s nothing that can pull you down or take you down. You’re not going to fall because you’re being cemented in,'” Lemieux said. “I went to my son’s T-ball game that next weekend and I had, literally, not an issue. There was not a problem. Nothing. . . . We were driving into the field and I briefly thought ‘You have your cement blocks on.’ Then I was done. I was good.”

Created six years ago by Laney Rosenzweig, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Connecticut, ART is gaining popularity as a quick-hit, no-medication-required therapeutic technique for children and adults. Nearly 240 professionals have been trained in ART.

In Maine, there are two.

Both are in Auburn.

“I’ve been practicing therapy for seven years and I’ve never experienced anything like this therapy,” said Cook, a licensed clinical social worker who co-owns Cornerstone Counseling with fellow ART therapist and licensed clinical professional counselor Jill Willer.

Cook and Willer first learned about ART several months ago while at a training on the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. ART came up in a discussion of emerging therapies.

ART is similar to Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, or EMDR, a 25-year-old therapy technique that also uses eye movements and imagery but mandates less guidance from the therapist and can take many more sessions than ART calls for. It is unclear how many EMDR-trained therapists there are in Maine, but 56 Mainers are members of the EMDR International Association.

Both EMDR and ART leaders speak respectfully of each other’s technique.

Researchers are still studying how EMDR and ART work. But ART’s creator — who based ART from her training in EMDR — believes the eye movements and visualizations help people process traumatic or scary events and ideas and shift them out of the emotional center of the brain, helping to desensitize clients. Creative visualization then helps replace the negative images with positive ones.

“It’s like finding gold,” Rosenzweig said of ART.

Intrigued by the possibilities of a technique billed as both quick and effective, Cook and Willer attended a 16-hour ART training session in Connecticut this past spring. There they tried ART on others and took part in it themselves.

Cook had been skeptical. Firsthand experience won her over.

“It was just amazing. I don’t really know how else to describe it,” Cook said. “It was a very profound sense of relief. I was managing some stress-related things and after just about an hour I wasn’t feeling the same way.”

Cook and Willer began offering ART to their clients a few months ago. Some declined. Others agreed to give it a try.

Joie Crockett, a freelance writer for the Sun Journal, was one client who said “yes.” She was dealing with severe pain in her feet caused by peripheral neuropathy.

“Every single step hurts,” Crockett said. “Imagine having a marble stuck under the ball of your foot, and then throw a bunch of little sharp twigs in your shoe and walk like that. That gives you an idea of what every step is like.”

She was trying to manage the pain without drugs and was somewhat successful. Meditation helped a little, distraction provided some relief.

But it was ART that allowed her to take up hiking again.

“These visions will come up. Like I’ll imagine sometimes I’m walking barefoot on a soft sandy beach and the sand is nice and warm. Or I’ll imagine, like one time, butterfly wings just fluttering on the top of my feet. Or walking on cool soft grass,” she said. “You try to replace the pain images with one of those images.”

ART hasn’t been a cure for Crockett. A session leaves her pain free for a day or so, so she’s learned to do the eye movements and guided imagery on her own for more frequent relief.

For Lemieux, ART sessions have cured some problems, helped others. Her anxiety about the open space of the baseball field is gone. Her fibromyalgia pain has eased. She’s looking forward to tackling her panic attacks and other anxiety using art. 

In a two-hour session with Cook, she now does traditional talk therapy for 20 to 30 minutes and ART the rest of the time.

“This is hope for me. I have hope that some day all these things I’m concerned with won’t be an issue,” Lemieux said.

Although ART leaders say clients only need one to three sessions to be cured of some issues, like anxiety resulting from a bad car crash, it can take more sessions to deal with long-standing and complex issues. But ART proponents say the technique can help clients with even the most complicated issues faster than can traditional therapies alone.

Excited by the prospects, two other Cornerstone counselors plan to train in ART this fall. Cook and Willer will go for advanced training. 

“I think it’s a pretty exciting tool to be able have, especially to give people relief so quickly,” Willer said. “That’s what people are coming to counseling for; to be able to move past and through things.”

ltice@sunjournal.com

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