Thoughts are one of the common channels that people process on, but this can be a problem if the reason you are processing on it is because all of the other channels have been killed off as survival strategies. You are likely to learn quickly who your heavily cognitive clients are. You will hear in how they talk about their distress and their problems. You will hear it in how they talk about what their recovery should look like. There will be clues in Phase Two. The problem is that EMDR therapy is a somatic psychotherapy and a lot of what is transformational about it comes from deep and present-based noticing. Noticing, not thinking, is the bright yellow line in the center of the EMDR road. What are clients with complex trauma noticing in EMDR sessions that we have observed that were productive? They are noticing distress for much of the session. Distress.
The thought channel is where many people with childhood trauma retreated to. Doing so allowed them to function. The body was made irrelevant because it didn’t hold information helpful to survive their traumatic niche. They retreated to thoughts to develop competency in things that they could master. To have jobs, lives, and independence. The thought channel isn’t bad, but if it’s the only channel that you have, then what are emotions? They are just thoughts about feelings. What is distress? It’s a difficult cognitive exercise. Clients who are somatically disconnected may report some helpful insights in EMDR therapy, but if we think of EMDR therapy as three core tasks: activation, deep present-based noticing, and bilateral stimulation, two of the three tasks may be offline. If it works, it works the way a tricycle missing two of its wheels works. Whatever EMDR therapy is, it’s not a power think-think session with bilateral stimulation. If the problem is a lack of embodiment, we need to help clients become embodied enough to notice. We need to make the body relevant again and then safe enough to notice. Typically we do this by having experiential learning that demonstrates the relevance of embodiment. I explore somatic dissociation as a survival response and challenge it as “simply how I am” when there is evidence that you were born with the capacity to express with your whole voice and your whole body when you were not okay. Not feeling is something we often learned later as an attempt to survive. If we learned it, we can learn new things.
Not all difficulties with cognitive-only processing come from people who are disconnected from the other channels. Clients will be overly active on the thought channel because that is what we have told them for 140 years that therapy was… going to talk to someone about it. EMDR therapy is different than how we have tried to process or carry our traumas before or in other ways. It works because it is different. We need to help clients understand that EMDR therapy is an experiential psychotherapy. That may feel vulnerable. We can’t easily control experiences with nearly the ease that we can control language. Experiential healing can be exhausting and may open up things that we have little language for. EMDR therapy is a bottom-up psychotherapy. I need to help you get in your bottom if you would like to try to heal in this way. That takes some time.
In EMDR therapy, there is plenty of room for thought. After we have noticed the target memory long enough, it starts to connect with the client’s fund of relevant and existing adaptive information. A lot of that information is cognitive. “I’m seeing how I’m just a kid in this memory and it’s not my fault.” Notice that. Thoughts are often an essential part of healing in EMDR therapy, but the shifts in belief about yourself and the world happen to you as a function of present-based noticing. Memories are not blocks of a Jenga puzzle we purposefully put in the right order. That’s not how we play Jenga and that’s definitely not how we do EMDR therapy well.
365 Questions About EMDR With Complex Trauma 