EMDR’s Adaptive Information Processing model assumes that there is information in your nervous system that serves you, is true, is supportive of your current developmental niche, and doesn’t make you sick. For some reason, the difficult experiences haven’t been able to link up with that information. EMDR therapy works because of the presence of that adaptive information and the absence of it highly informs why clients with complex trauma struggle in EMDR therapy. What happens in EMDR therapy if clients with complex trauma don’t have much adaptive information? Not much. All of that distress that they notice isn’t for any real purpose if it does not have adaptive information to link into.
What we can assume, based on what we have learned the last 60 years about neurobiology and neuroplasticity, is that the nervous system wants to process information. It’s not too picky about how it receives it. Give it information and it wants to make workable sense of it. A lot of Shapiro’s brilliance is realizing that what EMDR therapy is doing is linking stuck stuff into already existing positive stuff. From a memory reconsolidation point of view, the experience of the stuck information connecting with information that is already inside you is a lot of what is disconfirming (and thus transformational) in EMDR therapy.
Mechanistically, what EMDR therapy involves is tolerable activation of specific content, present-based noticing of that information or activation, and done while the client engages in some form of bilateral stimulation. While this is what the client is literally doing in session, what is happening beneath the hood is that the stuck information and the already-present adaptive information are trying to interact with each other. If there is enough of the needed adaptive information present, it’s likely that the stuck information will be able to link into it and be transformed by it. The problem with EMDR therapy with clients with complex trauma is that it is fully dependent on enough adaptive information to already be present in the client’s nervous system. I use the boat and the fish metaphor often. You cannot land a fish bigger than your boat of adaptive information. And, all of that adaptive information is learned experientially.
So, if adaptive information is vitally important in EMDR therapy, what is it? A lot of it is the information that is different than the learning in the trauma. Much of it is simply what is true about being born human. We are born into need. Other people are fully responsible for meeting those needs when we are young. When they can’t, that’s not our fault. We were born lovable. We were born deserving of attention, attunement, affection, and safety. All of those things are easy to believe when they were modeled in your earliest experiences. They are really difficult to believe if you have had few or no instances of them. Do you know how much magic there is in EMDR therapy with people who have zero adaptive information? There is none. There are no restricted or special protocols that fix that core problem. If you have some dirt in a Solo cup, you can plant a seed and grow something. What you grow in that cup can ultimately grow into a field or a forest. But absent dirt…
Of course, many clients have some adaptive information. Some of us have worked with clients who are able to strongly set and defend boundaries, but may struggle to believe that they deserve nurture and compassion. Adaptive information isn’t one thing. What is needed to resolve one category of wounding isn’t always helpful in the resolution of other types of wounding. There is no dirt capable of growing every variety of seed.
Your assessment of the client’s fund of adaptive information begins at first contact. I ask questions like, “When you were young, who was really and consistently there for you?” I listen carefully to how clients talk about themselves. I try to get an outline of their lifespan in my mind, asking myself “when in this client’s life might they have had opportunities to develop some disconfirming and adaptive information?” Did they go to college, live in another city, live outside the home, what have their friendships and other relationships been like? If they had their own children, what was that experience like? Did it replicate the wounding dynamics of childhood, or was there new learning about human needs as you tried to figure out how to give your child something you didn’t get when you were young? If adaptive information is an essential requirement for EMDR therapy, I’m trying to explore when and where you might have had the opportunity to develop it. The way that we train you largely assumes that you have enough of it, but you can’t assume that with clients with complex trauma.
If they don’t have enough of it, there are very good strategies to help them develop it. And that is going to take some time.
365 Questions About EMDR With Complex Trauma 