EMDR With Complex Trauma

While it is possible that the client may be underestimating the amount of adaptive information or that a different positive cognition might be present enough to eventually resolve that memory, a VOC of one is often worth additional exploration. A VOC of one does seem to be a canary in the coal mine, indicating an absence of the very adaptive inform

Dissociation inside EMDR therapy is often a symptom of overactivation. In these cases, overactivation is the problem. Dissociating from overactivation is not the problem.

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.

When it works, EMDR therapy facilitates the linkage of stuck information into existing adaptive information that is already present somewhere in the client. EMDR therapy is an information processing therapy.

The territories covered by productive and tolerable may change from week to week, depending on the type of week that your client had and the amount of energy that they have today. That is also okay.

Our goal in the session is to resolve the memory that we initially selected. We selected the memory on purpose as a reasonable memory to try to metabolize today. Resolving that memory will likely cause multiple adjacent memories to resolve through generalization. Generalization is a process in transformational trauma therapies where memories that a

The following list contains some of the places where clients get stuck in deficits of accessible adaptive information: It is not safe for me to feel / I can’t show my emotions I am responsible for what happened when I was a child The bad things happened because I am bad I should have known the bad thing would happen I didn’t stop it, so I am respon

Attachment figures can be cross-gender and even cross-species, but they really need to be something that the client, as a child, would have found nurturing and comforting.

If something bad happened to you that you don’t remember, I hope that some part of you can appreciate what I know for sure about it: that whatever happened is already over. It is not happening right now. If something does emerge, we can work on it and resolve it. We can use multiple different strategies to do that. I would like to start working on