Show Notes
In this podcast, I propose a very simple modification to your calm scene mindfulness exercise when clients have struggled with exercises like this: outsource the calm scene to a YouTube video. We may be able to use the video as a bridge resource. Bridge resources are accommodations to standard resources that take into account the difficulties that clients may have with visualization, focus, self-judgment related to the visualization, and allow us to do a version of the resource that lets clients “get to the other side” of the resource rather than falling into the “canyon” of the resource.
What’s important, eventually in a resource, is that the client has a shift in affective state in a way that feels safe and tolerable to their parts. When clients struggle to visualize, a video library of 17 billion videos immediately accessible to the client’s computers, laptops, tablets, and smartphones is a portable resource we should have been teaching for a while. When it comes to calm scenes or calm processes, there is no inherent reason why that experience has to be fully imagined in order for it to be experienced. We want to appreciate the difficulty of the cognitive “ask” of having a client with severe trauma conjure water, waves, sky, clouds, sand, buildings, breeze, smell of ocean air, seagulls, etc, etc. It’s a heavy lift, as has been discovered by many therapists who try to develop an imaginary calm scene with clients with severe trauma.
What are the Goals of Calm Scene?
Help the client develop a brake pedal that can be used in reprocessing and between sessions to help manage and regulate whatever may come up.
Widen window of tolerance. A client that has skills to manage distress may have the ability to tolerate some distress.
Develop and support adaptive information, including agency, adaptive dissociation, and the ability to purposefully disconnect from an activating process. Pivot to something more adaptive.
What are the Difficulties of Calm Scene?
Imagination can be difficult when their heads are running like a jet engine.
Slowing down and not attending to the therapy room can be triggering.
For some clients, positive affect (particularly positive affect in the presence of a therapist can cause parts to respond strongly with a counterreaction).
Classic problem with the calm scene is that abusers show up in imagination.
How Can Outsourcing the Calm Scene to YouTube Help Us?
It may let us do one version of the resource when the client has struggled to do the resource at all.
It may be less dissociative and more focused since what the client is “tuning into” is actually happening (as a video) in the present.
Clients are accustomed to this type of distraction from rumination, so their nervous system probably has already flagged it as relatively safe.
Depending on how it is viewed, it allows us to both “co-tune” into the scene and explore each other’s responses to particular elements of the scene in a more concrete way.
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.