I don’t know, it depends. I’m answering this question based on how I like to work with clients with complex trauma. There are many more considerations than I can cover in this short podcast, but I’m going to point at some of the other territories that you should consider.
When working with reasonably healthy clients, I do EMDR exactly the way we train you. There is no reason to do otherwise. But, when working with clients with severe trauma, I want to work at the intersection of what is productive and what is tolerable. And in the initial target memories, I’m putting much more emphasis on making sure that the memory is tolerable. I want the client to test the fishing gear, the boat, and get comfortable with the waves before trying to hook a big fish. This is really consistent with Shapiro’s guidance and sound clinical practice based on everything that we know about complexly wounded nervous systems. What that means is I want the client to resolve their first few targets with relative ease. I almost never start with first or worst of any category when working with clients with severe trauma. If you do, that’s fine, but the question answered in this podcast is going to become relevant with many clients when you do. When memories resolve, there is information in it. When memories don’t resolve, there is information in it. You witnessed it. What is that information communicating? Maybe not anything off or wrong.
Yes, it’s absolutely okay for a memory not to resolve in a single session. In fact, that is inevitable sometimes if not often. But is it shifting at all? Is the small shift worth the effort? How many times in a row am I going to target the same memory and we don’t see anything shift? Probably only once, absent a compelling reason otherwise. There is information in that for the very clients that I’m most worried about decompensating. It’s really hard to target the same memory over and over with no shifts or signs of progress. Again, with clients with complex trauma, my goal is to work productively and tolerably. Continually targeting the same stuck memory doesn’t sound like either.
Why is that memory requiring that many sessions and why is that the memory… why is that the hill the one we want the client to die on? Are there really compelling reasons why that’s the memory that we need to keep unsuccessfully targeting? It could be that there simply isn’t enough adaptive information in the client’s nervous system for that memory to resolve. You can target it all summer. If there isn’t enough adaptive information, you don’t have a boat big enough to land that fish. You can keep discovering that. But if that is the problem, my suggestion is that you work somewhere else that might be more productive and more tolerable.
Attachment wounds, particularly the first big one are notoriously difficult targets. I don’t suggest that clients start there. I want them to resolve some event trauma targets first to make sure that the gear works. But, when we get to our first attachment wound memory, I anticipate that they are going to get stuck. We bring attachment resources in when they get stuck so that the session can end without a lot of embers. It may take three or four sessions for an initial attachment wound memory to resolve, but we saw that coming and had resources in place to manage it. And we decided that right now is the time to have that battle. That’s a big difference from a random memory taking all summer to resolve and we don’t know why things are going so slowly.
Other than lacking adaptive information and the molasses-like nature of initial attachment targets, why would it take many, many sessions for a memory to resolve? Blocking beliefs? If so, what is your plan to provide corrective information? A part doesn’t want you working on that memory? What are you making of that information? The client keeps having a shut-down response in session? Maybe we should try to work on targets that aren’t covered by the blocking belief, that your parts can consent to, and that a shut-down response isn’t going to be necessary.
With clients with complex trauma, you have options. Lots of them. But if you are hammering away at a memory largely because you started there and you want the client to resolve it, that doesn’t really sound like a good reason to keep knocking on a door that is not opening. Go knock on a door that opens, you may find that door leads to territories that are very productive in resolving bigger things.
365 Questions About EMDR With Complex Trauma 