EMDR With Complex Trauma

Clients can often connect current symptoms to past developmental eras in ways that are helpful but do not necessarily include specific and potentially activating memory content.

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

can be incorporated into the treatment plan. In addition to assessing existing resources that the client may have, it can be helpful to assess for embodiment as soon as possible. I typically do a quick body scan (see Chapter 21: Dip Your Toe In Body Scan) to assess for somatic dissociation. If the client appears to have poor awareness of how stress

Clients with complex trauma rarely heal when they are presented with cognitive information alone. Useful information needs to be metabolized through experience. The interventions of therapy should be structured to promote and enhance disconfirming experiences.

Psychoeducation typically touches on the following categories of adaptive information, depending on the client’s needs and informational deficits: Children are born with needs and cannot meet their own needs. Children are not responsible for what grown-ups do to them. Children who struggle to get their needs met are placed in an impossible position

Returning to the Tricycle metaphor to describe the central features of EMDR therapy, activation is the rear left wheel, noticing the activation is the front center wheel, and left-right stimulation is the back right wheel.

In many ways, noticing is the bright yellow line in the center of the EMDR road. Noticing requires the capacity to slow down and be present. Slowing down is particularly complicated for people whose core survival strategy has been to stay ahead of it. Present awareness is very difficult for many clients with complex trauma because the present is wh

In nearly every transformational EMDR session, the client accesses a specific difficult memory and subsequently has a series of experiences that are different from (or disconfirming of) the expectation in the bad memory.

All of the noticing that is productive in EMDR therapy needs to occur inside the client’s window of tolerance.