I am generally skeptical of adaptive information when it shows up too quickly, too strongly, or when it does not appear as the shadow cast by a substantial amount of distress. EMDR therapy typically is a dive into distress. Some clients seem to pivot out of the dive the moment they break the surface of distress. This is important information to obs

But in this approach, we say: “Throw the bean bag up into the air and catch it. I only want you to think about the bad memory while the bean bag is in the air.” The bean bag serves as a timer that limits exposure to the memory content. Also, in order to catch the bean bag, the client will need to visually track it. Tracking it taxes focus and may h

Much of the healing that happens in EMDR therapy around attachment wounds occur on a bridge of empathy where information from the most resourced client parts metabolizes the memory information brought by the child parts.

EMDR sessions are not a power think-think session. If we approach healing in EMDR therapy too abruptly or with too much agenda, healing will run from us. When healing comes, it comes to us slowly and as a byproduct of deep present-based noticing. There is nothing to figure out. The right thoughts come to us as a function of healing. We don’t create

Doing EMDR therapy well requires the capacity for the client to feel worse for a little while.

awfulness. This obsession among trauma therapists with the “problem” of dissociation is highly troubling. It gets blamed for everything. It is a symptom of problems. It is also a reasonable and understandable survival response. My own dissociative impulses were some of the most creative and sensible adaptations that I made as a child and young adul

Nearly all of the transformational EMDR sessions I have observed involved the client spending much of the first half of the session observing somatic distress.

While your Phase Four scripts may not capture this nuance, the SUDs is an evaluation of the amount of distress that remains in the memory that you started Phase Three with only. It does not matter that you have had a lot of similar wounds in your life. Those other memories aren’t our right-now target. It does not matter, from the point of view of t

It can be productive to start reprocessing around the end of a past intimate relationship several relationships ago.