Accelerated Resolution Therapy is a evidenced-based approach to treating trauma.  During ART sessions, the therapist guides the client to replace the negative images in the mind that cause the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress with positive images of the client’s choosing. Once the negative images have been replaced by positive ones, the triggers will be gone. Nightmares and repeated intrusive thoughts will stop. ART also combines the enormous power of eye movements to allow voluntary changes in the client’s mind with well-established therapies like Gestalt, Psychodynamic Therapy and Guided Imagery. Within the ART protocol, the eye movements, along with other ART enhancements, make these therapies work much faster and more effectively. Among the things ART can deal with are OCD, Eating Disorders, Generalized Anxiety and Generalized Depressive Disorders. ART can deal with traumas often associated with Dyslexia but also go beyond that to improve reading.

The effective components of ART have been sifted into four major tasks that therapists aim to accomplish (Waits et al., 2017). These include facilitation, learning, change, and closure.

1. Facilitation involves building rapport and providing tools, skills, and information necessary for the client’s success. These will help clients remain engaged and manage symptoms of distress throughout the treatment process.

2. Learning is the core of ART. It includes either directly or indirectly accessing and confronting fears, maladaptive behaviors, sources of distress, and negative emotions.

3. Change is the primary goal of all therapies. This task requires that clients recognize past distortions, identify solutions, develop hope for the future, and minimize negative sensations, thoughts, and feelings.

4. Closure/Sustainment is summarizing the work accomplished during treatment empowers the client to manage future challenges and sustain relief from distressful symptoms.

ART and EMDR have common elements in that they are both effective treatments for stress, trauma, and anxiety; use eye movement and body scans; and provide the client with a high degree of autonomy (Van den Hout & Engelhard, 2012).

However, EMDR uses a free-associative and open-ended guidance, while ART gives clients specific instructions and uses a series of explicit procedural steps. It also gives the therapist more opportunities for verbal direction, which imparts a sense of mastery more quickly than EMDR (Hernandez et al., 2016).

ART uses rescripting to positively change traumatic images while allowing the client to keep factual knowledge of the event. Where ART focuses on rescripting one stressful event each session, EMDR revisits the same memory as many times as necessary (Dunsmoor, 2015).