The Somatic Protocol: From Xanthippe to EMDR

In 1987, a psychologist named Francine Shapiro was walking through a park in Los Gatos, California, when she noticed something strange. She had been thinking about a series of disturbing memories, and as she walked, her eyes began moving rapidly back and forth. When she stopped and checked in with herself, the emotional charge of the memories had decreased. She did not understand why. She went home and began experimenting. Over the next several years, she developed a clinical protocol called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, EMDR, which has since become one of the most extensively researched trauma treatments in the world.

What Shapiro discovered was that rhythmic bilateral stimulation — side-to-side eye movements, alternating hand taps, or auditory tones delivered to alternating ears — activates the brain’s information processing system and allows traumatic memories to be metabolized. Her word for it is “digested.” Unprocessed memories, she found, are stored in the nervous system in their original state-specific form: the images, the physical sensations, the emotions, and the beliefs all encoded together, frozen in time. When the processing system is activated through bilateral stimulation, the frozen memory begins to move. It links up with adaptive information already stored in the brain, the negative affect discharges, and what remains is learning without distress. The memory no longer controls the body.

This is a remarkable clinical achievement. But it is not a new discovery. The technology Shapiro stumbled upon in a California park has been encoded in the human body for at least three thousand years.

The Weeping Woman

In the opening scene of the Phaedo, Plato’s account of the death of Socrates, the philosopher’s wife Xanthippe is found sitting beside him, holding their child. When the disciples arrive, she begins to cry out. Plato’s narrator, Phaedo, tells us she said “the sort of thing women usually say.” Socrates turns to his friend Crito and issues a calm command: “Let someone take her home.”

Xanthippe is led away “crying out and beating herself.” The Greek word is koptomenēn, which means to strike rhythmically. She is beating her chest. This is not theatrics. It is a somatic protocol. Greek women had performed this ritual for centuries at funerals and in moments of acute grief: a rhythmic, bilateral percussion of the chest that gave the body a way to process what the mind could not contain.

Nicole Loraux, in Mothers in Mourning, documented how the Athenian state systematically restricted women’s funeral lamentation beginning in the sixth century BCE. The threnos, the ritual lament, gave women considerable power over the rituals of death. The city saw this power as dangerous and moved to suppress it. Gail Holst-Warhaft, in Dangerous Voices, traces the same pattern: women’s laments were legislated out of public life because they gave women a social and political authority that threatened the masculine order of the polis.

The suppression was not accidental. It was policy. And it culminated in the scene Plato describes. When Socrates sends Xanthippe away, he is not merely removing a distraction. He is completing the project that Athens had begun a century earlier: the expulsion of somatic processing from the space of rational discourse. The weeping woman is removed so that the men can talk about the immortality of the soul in peace, uncontaminated by the body’s grief.

The Hero’s Protocol

But the protocol was not exclusively feminine. In Odyssey 20, Odysseus lies awake in his own palace, disguised as a beggar. He watches the slave women consorting with the suitors who have occupied his home. His heart erupts. Homer says “the heart barked within him,” using a word reserved for the sound a dog makes. Odysseus responds with a precise physical action: he strikes his chest. The Greek is stēthos de plēxas, “having struck his chest.” Then he addresses his own heart directly: “Endure now, my heart; you endured something even more dog-like than this before.”

This is the same somatic percussion that Xanthippe performs. Odysseus strikes his chest to contain the surge of rage and grief. He then accesses an older memory — the night in the Cyclops’s cave — and uses that memory of prior endurance to stabilize the present crisis. The body processes the emotional charge through percussion, and the mind follows by linking the current distress to a prior experience that was successfully survived.

This is, in clinical terms, exactly what EMDR does. The bilateral stimulation activates the processing system. The traumatic memory links up with adaptive information from prior experience. The emotional charge metabolizes. What remains is the capacity to act rather than react.

What Shapiro Rediscovered

Shapiro’s Adaptive Information Processing model holds that the brain is hardwired to process disturbing experiences toward resolution. Under normal conditions, the system works on its own: something upsetting happens, the brain processes it during sleep and waking life, and within a few days the emotional charge diminishes. Shapiro describes it plainly: “You’ve basically ‘digested’ the experience and now have a better sense of what to do. That’s the brain’s information processing system taking a disturbing experience and allowing learning to take place.”

But when the experience is overwhelming — when the system cannot metabolize it — the memory gets stored in its original, unprocessed form. The emotions, the physical sensations, the beliefs, and the images remain encoded together, frozen. Years later, a stimulus that resembles the original event triggers the whole package. The person does not merely remember the trauma. The person relives it, because the memory was never processed out of its raw state.

The EMDR protocol addresses this by creating what Shapiro calls “dual attention”: the patient holds the traumatic memory in mind while simultaneously tracking an external bilateral stimulus. This dual focus — one foot in the past, one foot in the present — allows the processing system to engage without overwhelming the patient. Shapiro uses a metaphor: the patient is on a train, and the trauma is the scenery passing by. The patient observes the experience rather than being consumed by it.

The instruction to the client is striking in its simplicity: “Just let whatever happens, happen.” Do not fight the memory. Do not analyze it. Do not try to make anything specific occur. Let the processing system do its work.

This is the therapeutic version of a position that the ancient Greeks understood as the middle ground between action and passivity. The patient is not actively fighting the trauma, which would be retraumatizing. The patient is not passively collapsing into it, which would be flooding. The patient occupies a third position: undergoing the experience while maintaining the structural integrity to let it move through.

The Digestion Metaphor

Shapiro consistently uses the language of digestion. The processing system “digests” or “metabolizes” the dysfunctional residue from the past. Unprocessed memories are like undigested food: they sit in the system, causing inflammation, reactivity, and pain. When the system is activated and the memory is properly processed, what is useful is absorbed and what is not is discarded.

This digestive model maps directly onto what Homer describes in the physics of the soul. The thumos, the organ of feeling that sits in the chest, is described as a sealed vessel where grief accumulates and is compressed. Pain “strikes down into the deep phrenes.” Anger “falls into the thumos.” The mortal soul does not discharge these contents the way the gods do. It retains them. And through the pressure of retention, something new is forged: character, weight, value, what Homer calls the “iron thumos.”

The difference between Shapiro and Homer is not the mechanism but the goal. Shapiro wants to discharge the stuck memory so the person can function without distress. Homer describes a soul that metabolizes grief into permanent structure. Both models agree that the raw material must be processed. They disagree on what processing produces. For Shapiro, the product is relief. For Homer, the product is substance.

This is not a contradiction. It is a spectrum. The trauma patient whose memories are frozen in unprocessed form is not undergoing Homer’s forge. The trauma patient is stuck in the intake valve with no processing capacity at all. EMDR restores the basic function of the system: the ability to metabolize experience. What the person does with that restored capacity — whether they pursue relief or depth — is a question EMDR does not ask and depth psychology does.

The Suppressed Technology

The timeline is worth stating plainly. For centuries, Greek women processed grief through rhythmic somatic percussion — striking the chest, tearing the hair, performing the threnos in a communal ritual that gave the body a structured way to discharge and integrate overwhelming emotion. Beginning in the sixth century BCE, Athens passed laws restricting these practices. Solon’s funeral legislation limited who could mourn, how loudly, and for how long. By the time Plato wrote the Phaedo in the fourth century, the suppression was complete: Socrates sends the weeping woman away so philosophy can proceed.

For the next twenty-four centuries, the Western intellectual tradition followed Socrates. The body’s grief was treated as an obstacle to rational thought, a sign of weakness, a feminine disorder to be managed or medicated. Charcot studied women’s “hysterical” convulsions at the Salpêtrière. Freud built psychoanalysis on the diagnosis of hysteria. The body’s attempts to process its own trauma were pathologized as symptoms rather than recognized as protocols.

Then, in 1987, a woman walking through a park noticed that her eyes were moving.

Pat Ogden, in Trauma and the Body, describes the clinical consequence of two millennia of suppression. Traumatized individuals, she writes, develop “automatic obedience” and “mechanistic compliance” — submissive behaviors characterized by nonaggressive action and helpless compliance. She insists that this must be recognized as defensive behavior rather than conscious agreement. The body learned to stop processing because processing was punished. The threnos was outlawed. The weeping woman was sent home.

What Shapiro’s clinical data demonstrates is that the body never forgot the protocol. When bilateral stimulation is introduced — whether through eye movements, hand taps, or auditory tones — the processing system activates as if it had been waiting. Memories that have been frozen for decades begin to move. The emotions discharge. The body remembers how to digest what it was forbidden to feel.

What This Means for Recovery

Anyone who has sat in an ACA meeting has heard the first trait of the Laundry List: “We became isolated and afraid of people and authority figures.” The adult child’s relationship to authority is defined by the same automatic obedience that Ogden describes in trauma survivors. The capacity to feel, to protest, to strike the chest and cry out — the things Xanthippe did at the door of the cell — has been trained out of them. The thumos, the organ that should process grief into substance, has been sealed shut.

Stanley Milgram’s research on obedience to authority found that a single individual has little way of knowing that defiance is a natural and appropriate reaction to being abused. The horrified reactions of others are needed to define the abuse as painful and intolerable. This is what the ACA meeting provides. It is what the threnos provided. It is what Xanthippe was performing before Socrates sent her away: a communal, embodied, rhythmic acknowledgment that what is happening is real, that the body’s response is correct, and that grief deserves to be processed rather than suppressed.

EMDR does not replace the fellowship. It does not replace depth work. But what it restores is the basic somatic function that twenty-four centuries of Western philosophy tried to eliminate: the body’s capacity to process its own experience through rhythmic, bilateral engagement. The technology is ancient. The suppression was cultural. The rediscovery was clinical. And the fact that a woman walking through a park in 1987 accidentally recovered what Xanthippe was doing at the door of the Phaedo in 399 BCE is not a coincidence. It is the body remembering what the mind was taught to forget.

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Cody Peterson is the author of The Shadow of a Figure of Light (Chiron Publications, 2024) and a contributor to Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche.

Sources Cited

• Holst-Warhaft, Gail (1992). Dangerous Voices: Women’s Laments and Greek Literature. Routledge.
• Homer. Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. Penguin Classics.
• Loraux, Nicole (1998). Mothers in Mourning. Trans. Corinne Pache. Cornell University Press.
• Milgram, Stanley (1974). Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. Harper & Row.
• Ogden, Pat (2006). Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy. W.W. Norton.
• Plato. Phaedo. Trans. G.M.A. Grube.
• Shapiro, Francine (2001). Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing: Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures. 2nd ed. Guilford Press.
• Shapiro, Francine (2012). Getting Past Your Past: Take Control of Your Life with Self-Help Techniques from EMDR Therapy. Rodale.