Show Notes
What Do Container Resources Do?
Long story short, containers help you expedite the process of returning difficult content to the limbic brain. Library metaphor. Containers very often are a cognitive strategy or intention not to engage with something right now. A container can also be a somatic strategy, because if we only address the cognitive aspects of rumination we may be leaving a lot of distress in the body, which can reactivate the mind.
Containers are also a helpful ritual in pivoting away from activation. It’s a ritual that signifies something to parts. However, the reasons why we need to container matter. Many, many, problems with containment come from the assumptions that clients make about what containment means… what it means to current functioning, what it means for their past, and what it means for their recovery. For example, many clients say “wait a minute, Tom… I have locked this stuff up all of my life… I come to see you to get it all out… and you’re telling me to do something I’m coming to you stop doing.”
Again, we need to explain that the reasons why we container are very important. All of these are good/healthy/adaptive reasons for containing something that has been activated:
We have been trying to solve the problem using strategies that have a very long history of being ineffective (rumination, allowing lots of memories/cognitions/themes to connect)
Now is not a good time to try to resolve the problem or issue
The issue is intruding on our ability to function at the present time
The problem is actively contributing to current instability
We would like to exercise control over what is getting our attention in the current moment
Adaptive containment is ultimately about client agency… deciding on purpose what to attend to in this moment and what to defer, because we are not wired to attend to everything past/present/future in every moment.
Containment is the beginning of stability.
Ultimately, we want to emphasize that it’s okay to container because we have a plan to resolve this issue in an effective way at a later date (a transformational psychotherapy)
Ways that are not a good idea to use in containment, since parts may react to the implications of these approaches (although clearly these are preferred methods by some parts):
Diaper Genie
Rocket
Incinerator
Trash can
Explosive
Containment is one of the best adaptations of human evolution. The limbic brain is a container. I tell my clients that the reason we’re not all in the psychiatric hospital all of the time is because of the containering qualities of the limbic brain. We are information processing systems and when we encounter information that we cannot assimilate because we were too shut down, too overwhelmed, or lacked the needed adaptive information at the time, it is helpful to have a place to put it until we can try again to assimilate it. Clients often come to us with a lot of ambivalence about carrying a lot of containered experiences. On one hand, they have been consciously and unconsciously trying to process (or at least manage) this information using incredibly ineffective strategies likely all of their lives. One the other, they have visceral experiences (all of them bad) from trying to purposefully interact with containered information. Containering isn’t a neutral activity. Asking a client to simply let go of information that is both existentially salient and intractable is not a neutral ask. Everything we container, past interactions with container, past strategies to try to process trauma, and the fact that we are carrying stuff that needs containment are all implicated in what makes purposeful containment difficult for many clients with complex trauma.
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.