IEMT in a client with bilateral esotropia.
What is IEMT?
Gavin Bowtell is a practitioner of IEMT in Chigwell, Essex. He is registered with the Association for IEMT Practitioners.
IEMT stands for Integral Eye Movement Therapy. As an IEMT practitioner Gavin uses a precise set of eye movements to allow clients to reprocess thoughts and emotional with amazing speed. Helping clients to live more fully in the moment, having moved them away from troubling thoughts and memories of the past, or worries and concerns about future events. You can read more about IEMT here.
What is the effect of IEMT upon clients who have ocular impairments? Since IEMT works by directing eye movements it is reasonable to ask whether IEMT will be effective in clients with ocular motility impairment.
Practitioners will be aware that ocular disease will render IEMT an unsuitable therapy for a number of clients.
Clients with Diseases of the Eye
Clients with diseases of the eye or eyes are not usually considered suitable candidates for IEMT. This is to prevent exacerbation of the condition or degeneration to structures of the eye. The Association for IEMT Practitioners issues the following guidelines:
“Ocular Disease: Until there is sufficient medical evidence to suggest otherwise, eye movement work should not be be used with any individual who has any active or current ocular disease process. There are no exceptions to this. Such conditions include conjunctivitis, glaucoma, history of detached retina and recent trauma such as “a black eye.” Problems such as a “lazy eye” and poor focal vision are not necessarily a contra-indication unless there is an active and concurrent disease process underlying it.” In this instance IEMT was not contraindicated.
The client was Male aged 50. Presenting with work based anxiety and with ocular impairment namely strabismus with monocular vision and absence of smooth pursuit eye movement.
Strabismus is a common problem of ocular misalignment. Most often seen in children, and common at birth. Strabismus is observed when both eyes do not face the same direction along vertical or horizontal axes. Strabismus can result in double vision and impaired depth perception.
In adulthood strabismus can occur as a result of brain injury, stroke, Grave’s disease, and Guillain- Barre syndrome among other causes.
In children the condition is often rectified by the uses of exercise, corrective lenses or surgery. 
This client has was born with a variation of strabismus in which both eyes are turned inwards known as bilateral esotropia. Attempts were made whilst an infant to correct the sight but these failed. Aged 8 the client was offered a third surgery to realign the eyes, as the previous surgeries has provided limited success. This was declined because of a 50% chance that the surgery would cause strabismus in the opposite direction.
As a result of the esotropia the client had developed monocular vision. Usually this is understood having only one eye, or vision in only one eye. In this client both eyes function, though with a degree of astigmatism, hypermetropia and presbyopia, but they function separately.
The client can see only out of one eye at a time. This is alternating esotropia.
When working with a client with fairly normal ocular motility it is clear to the IEMT practitioner that the client is fixated on the fingers. In alternating esotropia it is not always very easy for the practitioner to know which eye is fixating on the fingers during the movements. In fact some clients will switch between one eye and the other as the fingers of the practitioner move out of the area of monocular vision of one eye, into what would normally be the binocular field of vision and then back into the monocular field of vision of the other eye and again in reverse.
This can, and in the case of this client did, result in a lack of smooth pursuit eye movements. Indeed it can appear that that the client can only perform anticipatory saccadic movements – the eyes moving to the end of the axis upon which the practitioner’s finger is travelling before the finger reaches the end of the movement.
Whilst asking the client to close one eye and follow the finger would have allowed the practitioner to know which eye was fixated it would only have reduced the client’s field of vision. Instead the practitioner used a motion created by the flexion and extension of the index and middle fingers (vertical waggling) that allowed the client to fixate more easily upon the fingers and track the movement. Close observation of the client was required to see the point at which one eye took over fixation and tracking from the other. To see this more clearly sometimes required the reversal of the movement of the fingers along the axes (going back) to allow peripheral vision in the non fixated eye to detect the movements in engage pursuit.
The result of the single session was entirely satisfactory for the client. His workplace anxiety around dealing with a particularly obnoxious colleague in the past, and fear of future events was fully resolved allowing the client to continue to work happily and find resourceful strategies for working with that colleague and similar people.
For an article on “Origins of Strabismus and loss of binocular vision”. Click this link Esotropia for an article on esotropia.
Gavin Bowtell is a registered hypnotherapist in Chigwell, East London.
Hypnotherapy appointments are available face to face, and some other session via Skype.
Gavin’s Essex Hypnotherapy practice is within easy reach of Hainault, Grange Hill, Loughton, Buckhurst Hill and Epping.
Gavin is registered as an accredited Stop Smoking Therapistwith the Central Register of Stop Smoking Therapists.
Many clients come for hypnotherapy from London, Enfield, Hertfordshire, Kent and further afield – Scotland the USA and even Brazil!
As a professional hypnotherapist dedicated to obtaining the change you want and need, Gavin also makes use of other tried and tested techniques. Besides hypnotherapy Gavin also uses NLP, and WSN Counselling & Coaching.
Gavin is a certified practitioner of OldPain2Go and Slim via Hypnosis, an IEMT Practitioner, and an advanced practitioner of BWRT® – BrainWorking Recursive Therapy. Gavin was also the first certified practitioner of Level 3 WSN in the world!