Yes, we want to let things go where they go, unless sound clinical judgment with this client suggests that’s not a good idea. Clients with complex trauma don’t have memory networks with only a few bad things in them. Each network of unprocessed information can be like a bundle of 5,000 matches. If you light one, many adjacent memories want to come. Again, with healthy people, let them. They have a boat big enough to land every fish in their oceans. But many clients with complex trauma, especially in the very beginning of their processing journey with you, the more memory content they touch, the less likely any of it is to move. Back to the canoe metaphor. If the client is connected to five sharks and three whales, they are going to land nothing.
When first starting with clients with really complex trauma, I’m not encouraging the client to let things go where they go. I assume that there will be a substantial amount of distressing content in this memory. We have our hands full. We have a little boat of adaptive information and we have selected a memory that feels tolerable. If other memories want to come, I instruct the client before we begin to let me know before letting that memory in. If they let me know, I’m going to check the time first. If there is not time in this session, then the answer is going to be to container. Then, I ask myself, how is the client doing with what they are already connected to? If the client is really struggling with the memory we started with, I’m not going to promote them connecting to another one at this moment. We container and return to target. That’s okay. Out of all the memories in all the networks of difficult experiences, we selected this memory to work on today because it felt like a tolerable place to start. Does it make sense for it to then to connect to everything based on what we have already reviewed about clients needing to stay present, working inside their window of tolerance, and in ways compatible with their right-now fund of adaptive information? The door of awareness is the client’s door. Not everything that knocks is it sensible or wise to let in. And, of course, it wants to come. It wants to come so strongly because the body is probably already feeling really congruent with it: the body pulls other memories like a magnet. But our goal is to resolve this one memory.
Tom, won’t these memories just float back to other and bigger things? They probably will if you promote that. Every memory with clients with complex trauma has a floatback. Every abandonment is built in part on prior abandonments. That does not mean that we can’t start with more recent or present stuff. If we couldn’t, Shapiro wouldn’t have told us repeatedly that present is a legitimate place to start with clients with complex trauma. Sometimes it makes sense to identify a memory and simply put a fence around it for a while. Just for a while. Keep the other monsters out of it. Just for now. When the client is able to resolve memories like this well, we can start to remove these constraints. Let things go where they go. But this is a really sensible way to start with people who hold a lot and also hold very little of what is needed for them to heal in EMDR therapy. I want clients to resolve something in one of our early reprocessing sessions. They need successes. I want them to start at the intersection of productive and tolerable. With clients with complex trauma, if this work isn’t tolerable, it isn’t safe. I will also point out that everything I just said is how you would have worked with complex trauma prior to your EMDR training. What you know about complex trauma must inform how you do EMDR therapy, not the other way around. Selecting tolerable targets and working with them in ways that don’t promote overactivation is solid clinical work. Don’t let anyone give you shit about it.
365 Questions About EMDR With Complex Trauma 