Are You Trying to Put Your EMDR/Mindfulness Clients Through a Machine?

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.