Show Notes
• The Impulse to Want to Avoid Causing Harm
• Working with Trauma is Like Working with Lava
• Confessions about Difficult Sessions
• Most Basic Training Programs Can’t Train You to Work Effectively with Severely Complex Trauma in EMDR, You Will Need to Learn the Nuances of this On Your Own, But There is an Enormous Amount of Help Out There
• Normalizing Mistakes and Missteps
• The Real Risks of Not Doing Trauma Work with Clients
• We are the Only Professionals on the Planet that Can Do This… Whose Job it is to Do This
• It’s Like Everything Else… You Learn to Do This by Doing This
• The Really Good News About EMDR Therapy: It Breaks in a Very Limited Number of Places
• When Clients Struggle, There is Information in that Struggle
• You can Dip Your Toe into Every Phase of EMDR Therapy
• You will Develop More Trust in the Process
• You will Get Better at Intuiting when the Client is Stuck and Strategically and Effectively Intervening
• Not Everyone is Prepared to Do EMDR Therapy Right Now: We Can Help them Prepare
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.