EMDR With Complex Trauma

Clients generally do well with tackling specific phobias in EMDR therapy. Snakes, mice, and spiders are good places to start. The phobia of flying in an airplane (with floatbacks and future templates) is productive.

Clients often do not get pervasively healthier until we are able to rescue the child from that horrible childhood loneliness and the meanings that have become attached to it.

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

Interweaves invite a change in perspective. If a client is stuck on the thought channel, switching to the body sensation is a channel change, but it is also a perspective change. Imagine a car repeatedly runs into an obstacle head-on, backs up, and then hits that object in the same way over and over. Now, imagine a passenger observing this gets out

Try to get ahead of it the moment frustration at voids in memory appears. It is helpful to remind the client that they do not need to remember in order to heal. We can ask questions like: “When you think about the part of the memory that is missing, what are you noticing in your body?” Processing any somatic imprints is an effective way of working

We are working with the information accessible at the time of the trauma and the information that is accessible to you right now. The degree to which the parts systems are similar to each other or different depends largely on the nature of the experiences that you have had since the trauma. We are wounded through experiences and we heal experientia

Future templates leverage past work, often without taking much session time or the client reporting substantial distress, to help the client visualize, experience, and navigate a future scene more effectively. Future templates create instances of learning for subsequent experiences to connect into. We heal when we have disconfirming experiences. Tr

When there are deficits in childhood attachment, we can generally assume that there may be difficulties with the most adult client parts being able to solidly connect with child parts (which may be an essential pathway in client healing).

The language I have used for this is: “When I am asking you to notice, and the bilateral stimulation is happening, I do not want you to think about the memory. I do not want you to think about the memory if I am not right-now asking you to think about the memory. Just notice deeply what is happening in your right-now nervous system and digest what