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.
Sometimes consultees will ask why a particular cognition that clients have worked on across multiple sessions isn’t showing up in how they broadly believe about themselves and how they actually live. The consultee may say, we have successfully worked on three different memories around the belief, “What I need doesn’t matter,” and they still don’t believe it broadly about themselves. How much wounding has this client had, where the take-home message was that cognition? Hundreds of experiences? Thousands? Tens of thousands of individual experiences that redundantly placed and reinforced that reality of the world? Saliently learned information in the service of survival isn’t meant to be shifted easily. That wouldn’t be evolutionarily wise. A parent who has the capacity to treat you as though your needs don’t matter will do that consistently. There are 154,000 hours in childhood and those hours may contain an enormous amount of salient, somatic, and deeply redundantly-placed learning.
It is entirely possible that you can work on a handful of memories with some clients with complex trauma and the broad belief about themselves may start to soften. That is remarkable. But for many, processing a handful of memories isn’t nearly enough disconfirmation to shift a whole cosmology. Three hours isn’t enough to offset the bedrock reality of 154,000 hours. But keep at it. And by that, I don’t mean endlessly hammering away at that individual cognition until it is fully resolved. In fact, to make good progress with it you may need the client to work in adjacent memory contexts and other categories of learning for a while. Return it. Check in on it. And the first clues probably aren’t going to be the client coming to session and telling you that they have arrived and the positive belief suddenly feeling true. You may see the emergence of a new belief in small things. You may hear the client reporting, almost offhand, that they set and defended a boundary with someone who has never respected theirs. When broad change happens with complex trauma, it often happens slowly, because the learning that we are trying to change isn’t small and limited, it is global and cosmological and has been reinforced across many developmental eras.
The fact that EMDR therapy can help shift such deeply held beliefs at all is a testament to how transformational trauma therapies can create learning experiences whose lessons can ripple through the client’s internal cosmos. The fact that sizeable chunks of this work can be done in dozens of hours and offset hundreds of thousands of hours of learning is remarkable.
Working on first, worst, and future templates is likely to resolve a whole cognition for relatively healthy people, but relatively people aren’t your clients. We’re trying to die on the wrong hill when we expect people with complex trauma to recover with the speed and ease of healthy people. We trained you to practice with fidelity in ways that work well for healthy people. To work effectively with clients with complex trauma, we need to be reminded that rapidly and quickly are the wrong adverbs. There is nothing rapid or quick about recovery from complex trauma, regardless of the approach. The learning from complex trauma never was meant to be changed easily. That’s not about you. So, be kind to yourself. Be patient. Start somewhere. Work somewhere. Come back to it when you can, when life circumstances settle. Work somewhere else. Come back to that. EMDR therapy is an incredibly effective way to work with clients with complex trauma, as evidenced by the fact that broad recovery is possible at all in this approach. We need to be advocates for people with complex trauma. We need to be advocates in our own organizations. We need to be advocates when someone is trying to gaslight us about what complex trauma is and how easily people should be able to recover from it. We need to challenge when we hear EMDR being described as an ultra-brief approach to psychotherapy when most of this world’s wounding is of the complex type.
The world took its time with us when it set about wounding us. Healing is going to take its own time. We should understand and advocate that.
365 Questions About EMDR With Complex Trauma 