When someone doesn’t have anyone in their life to listen to them with compassion, attunement is a trauma-focused intervention in the service of survival. However, our clients also need to heal.

The question I ask is simply, “When you were young, who was really and consistently there for you?”

It may not be wise or kind to ask the client to stand in a small canoe in the ocean and yank violently until the fish is landed. This is an invitation for snapped fishing lines, flipped boats, or injuries. We want to show the client how to land memories well and with as little unnecessary distress as possible. I want the client to activate some and

From Bruce Ecker (2024) comes a very simple concept. Humans heal when we activate a difficult experience and immediately have an experience that disconfirms the expectation in the bad memory. We must deeply experience the disconfirmation and not simply have a cognitive awareness of a mismatch. It is the experience of the disconfirmation that is

Carrying trauma necessitates survival strategies. The same cultures that wound us construct obstacles to healing. They dictate our options for survival and recovery. They instruct us on how we should best carry the wounds they give us.

You can do these resources with your clients, and they will not always “work.” This is not your fault. This is a more sensible and sensitive way to introduce resources to clients with complex trauma, but this work is always difficult and is often highly non-intuitive for their nervous systems. Still, in this complex dynamic of trying to resource

I suggest that in any given session, we target memories that are at the intersection of what is productive and what is tolerable on that day. Productive means that the client would receive a clear benefit from working on it. Productive could also mean that the resolved memory would support current stability. Working on the memory could be

result of difficult past experiences or learning. A symptom-based treatment plan that anticipates the need for a comprehensive Phase Two; anticipates further exploration of specific target memories related to the presenting issues; includes a plan to target (currently unnamed) central memories implicated in the development and maintenance of the

EMDR therapy often requires that clients sit for long periods with substantial distress. Most clients process this distress somatically by slowing down, being present with it, and noticing it deeply. This is a difficult task for people who may have survived their trauma by staying ahead of it, not slowing down, avoiding, and not noticing.