When to Encourage Memories to Connect: Complex Trauma and the Problem of Too Much Memory Content
The EMDR PodcastShow Notes
Understanding the Difference Between A Complexly Traumatized Nervous System and a Non-Pervasively Traumatized Nervous System Via the AIP Lens
In the AIP model, the difficult stuff has to connect with right-now existing adaptive information. One of the key things that we appreciate about complex trauma is the large size of the trauma and the typically small amount of adaptive information that the difficult stuff must connect with and metabolize into. Again, back to the boat metaphor. If client’s have adaptive information the size of a canoe, we really need to be careful about what they hook. You can’t land a fish bigger than your boat. Clients that are really healthy, but who have had some trauma have adaptive information the size of a cruise ship (the privilege in
The Field and the Municipal Dump Metaphor
There is another metaphor that I like here related to following memory content or maybe taking a restricted approach to memory content. Imagine a space about the size of large sports stadium. The field of this sports stadium is the entire lifespan of the client up until this point. Almost all of it is clear and open. But even as we survey the field, there are some piles of things. If this is the client’s system that we are working with, we want the client to just walk around the field and pick up things, sort them a little, and put them in a knapsack. We don’t want to micromanage that. The client can walk around, form connections, knapsack the needed things, and everything in that knapsack can be resolved. If we over intervene, we are interfering with the client’s work.
Imagine another stadium and this is the stadium of the complexly traumatized. Except instead of piles of things, it has been used for 46 years as a municipal dump. In fact, old garbage bags, mattresses, food disposal, packaging, are piled so high that the whole inside of the stadium is filled to the highest seats at the very top of the stadium. Now, we’re going to drop the client into the 37th yard line and put them 25 feet down, with a knapsack. Do you see the problem? Everything connects to everything else there. There is the impuse to try to knapsack it all, but there isn’t the means. And this is one of the things that is really unfair about being on the receiving end of other people’s stuff for decades. The mistake we make is that we consistently underestimate how much there is and the client can only carry what the client can carry.
What’s the Problem with Too Much Memory Content Coming In?
They very quickly get outside of their window of tolerance. If you want to have a big window of tolerance, start with having a really good life. Absent that, it’s a lot work. Other podcast episodes cover how the ways that we help clients develop a bigger window of tolerance often ask the client to sit with things that go (or feel like they go) directly against their survival strategies.
Deciding:
First, Time
Two, How are You Doing, Distress-Wise, With the Current Content
Is the Memory Adjacent or Feeder?
Conclusion
Regardless, when you do initial reprocessing, you are going to have information even if that information is clarifying about the narrowness of the client’s window of tolerance.
We can’t move it all at once. We can’t move everything that needs moved right here right now. Clients need to know this. One of the things that really sucks about being someone who is carrying all this stuff that was done to you is that we have to be both the jail to this stuff and the jailer. Memories don’t get paroled when a riot is happening. We have to work intentionally. And we start by starting. One piece, one purposeful and careful step, at a time.
More from The EMDR Podcast
Helping the Predictive Brain Update Bad Memories Turns out, the story that we’ve been telling ourselves about the neurobiology of trauma doesn’t make sense anymore based on what we have learned the past twenty-five years about brain evolution, function, structure, memory reconsolidation, neuroplasticity, and the predictive brain. How we understand perception of our external world and internal worlds and has changed profoundly. There is growing consensus around the core idea that our nervous system is predicting and constructing our reality for us. And while this has some really disturbing implications related to things like our felt sense of free will and our illusion of objective observation, it has potentially remarkable implications for how humans might heal. Predictive processing might be able to do what no other theory of mind has: explain how we construct reality and possibly even our own selves. Central to this understanding is the role that prediction error plays at all levels of abstraction. And for the purposes of what I’m talking about now, the vast majority of predictions and prediction errors occur outside of direct consciousness and awareness. Prediction errors are central to perception, memory formation, learning, movement of all types, and every experience imaginable. We can think of consciousness, awareness, experience, and our own identities as floating on top of our predictive system the way a foam mat floats in a pool.
When Complex Clients Insist on Doing EMDR Processing Immediately
Full text of this podcast is at the EMDR Podcast and EMDR365.com
EMDR Therapy shifts how you think about yourself and the world related to the memory we are working on. Why does it do this? Because that’s a lot of what healing is. Healing shifts how you think about yourself and the world, as well as lots of other things. Wounding is experiential learning and vast regions of our nervous system are organized around meaning-making in the foreground, midground, and background. Healing is also experiential learning. Broadly, in EMDR therapy and other transformational trauma therapies, it is not that difficult to help clients shift an individual memory and the cognitions associated with it.