Show Notes
In EMDR Therapy, the pathway for healing is that stuck information has to connect to right now adaptive information. The process that facilitates that linkage is the Eight Phase Protocol.
You can connect almost any old and stuck maladaptive information into right now existing adaptive information.
But, a lot of what we know about complex trauma is that clients lack adaptive information. They were too busy surviving to figure out who they are, what they value, how the deserve to be treated… and they need enough of it for the difficult stuff to connect to.
The Boat and the Whale Metaphor
The boat is the amount of the needed adaptive information that is have accessible right now. The fish that you want to hook and land is the trauma. You cannot land a fish bigger than your boat. However, you can get a bigger boat by catching smaller fish. You can also build a bigger boat through developing relationships—including the therapeutic relationship, through parts work, through resourcing, by expanding the window of tolerance, through psychoeducation [particularly psychoeducation about what it means to be born human], and through a wide assortment of other means.
Implications of this metaphor:
If we can only land what we have space in boat to fit, we should consider both the size of the memory (as best we and the client can intuit) and the amount of accessible adaptive information.
If we have adaptive information the size of a canoe and this is the first time we are in the ocean, we should consider testing the gear before we go trying to hook whales. It is really easy to capsize in a canoe.
Developmental trauma targets, targets about identity, and targets where we’re the abuser in the memory tend to be the whales of memory, particularly when we’re first starting.
If the client has a small boat, we will be lucky to land whatever we hook... even if we are trying to catch something small. If the client is already connected to a mid-size shark, does it make sense to also hook onto multiple whales and multiple other sharks? Again, our boat size does not change based on what we hook onto. The boat size we launch with is the boat we have. Clients overheat on the memory channel in EMDR when too much memory content is coming into awareness or when that content is coming in at an intensity beyond our capacity to metabolize through noticing.
EMDR Therapy was not particularly developed for complex trauma. It was developed using people who have adaptive information the size of cruise ships. And how did they get that cruise ship? By life Phase Two resourcing them really well. If you have adaptive information the size of a cruse ship, I know that you can hook and land almost every fish in your ocean. That’s the privilege of the non-pervasively traumatized… your ocean is not filled with monsters. People in canoes… their oceans are filled massive monsters. Finding something small enough to land in your existing boat with complex trauma can be a challenge.
The Mount Everest Metaphor
Shapiro says that if we tackle the mountains of memory first, everything after that will feel like a small hill. And, she is right if you have adaptive information the size of mountains. Again, clients with complex trauma have very little adaptive information. You cannot metabolize a trauma the size of Mount Everest into adaptive information the size of a walnut. You simply can’t do it.
Also, if you’re not an Olympian, Mount Everest is a terrible place to start. The are over 200 dead bodies on Mount Everest right now because it’s too dangerous to remove them. And, if you need to tackle Mount Everest, you had better tackle some smaller hills then some smaller mountains first.
To be fair, Shapiro acknowledges that with complex trauma we do want to work with smaller and more recent memories first, but many people graduating from EMDR foundational trainings misunderstand the nature of the magic that is EMDR.
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.