The memory channel in EMDR therapy is a completely legitimate channel that a client might notice on, but if that’s the only channel of the client’s awareness I’m going to be skeptical, especially if I’m not hearing things shifting and changing. I think that we can all agree that EMDR therapy is not narrate the memory with bilateral and the memory will move in an adaptive direction. The guidance that we endless give in check-ins is “notice that.” Where is the present-based noticing?
Clearly, clients need to engage with the memory channel. Most of what they are noticing in an average EMDR session is the distress that is generated when glancing at the memory. With clients with complex trauma, I want the client to glance at the memory, then notice, notice, notice, until that piece of activation is digested or largely digested. Once the distress in that bite is good, let’s go back to the memory and take another bite.
There are several reasons why a client would think that EMDR is narrating the memory with bilateral stimulation. The bilateral stimulation is the most culturally weird part of EMDR therapy and many people who don’t understand what EMDR therapy is view it largely through the lens of its weirdest ingredient. Most EMDR therapists appreciate that bilateral stimulation is part of what makes EMDR therapy effective, but bilateral stimulation without activation and deep present-based noticing is unlikely to be transformational. Also, telling the story of the trauma is how trauma therapy has been understood the past 130 years, since Freud and Breuer told us that’s how we heal. Some semi-modern approaches to trauma treatment still involve telling the story of the trauma until you can tell it effortlessly. That’s what resolution means from those perspectives. In short, some clients do this because that’s what they think you are asking them to do. Show them how to be present. Show them how to activate, but not overactivate. Show them how to notice things in their bodies and other parts of present awareness.
If you have instructed the client clearly on how to do their role in the EMDR dance and they keep narrating the memory only with seemingly no activation or present-based noticing, there may be other reasons why they are doing it. If the client is too shut down, somatically dissociated, or can’t activate distress in the memory content, that only really leaves two channels of noticing left: thoughts and memory. If the client can’t activate and notice that activation, they are likely to revert to the only channel where information is coming into the nervous system. The memory channel without activation and present-based noticing probably isn’t going to be transformational in the ways that we are accustomed to seeing with clients in EMDR therapy.
When something seems off in processing, especially early in a session, there are two initial things I tend to ask myself when I’m trying to make sense of what I’m seeing. 1) Is the client activating and is the activation from the memory that we selected? 2) Is the client noticing the activation in their right-now nervous system? For many clients with complex trauma, these are helpful questions as we are starting to form our interweaves when we want the client to move down the highway, but they seem to be circling a Taco Bell.
The memory channel and the thought channel are important and vital elements of EMDR processing. Be skeptical when they are the only channels and the content coming in them exclusively doesn’t seem to bring shifts and ultimately resolution of the wounding. Again, EMDR is a somatic psychotherapy and noticing, not narration, is its center.
365 Questions About EMDR With Complex Trauma 