My videotape approach script from the book, EMDR With Complex Trauma, is here: https://emdrwithcomplextrauma.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/c39.pdf
As we have seen in other episodes, trauma in many memories or when held in many nervous systems doesn’t want to come out in small and digestible pieces. That’s part of what trauma is. It’s not meant to be felt small. Yet, the distress that comes into awareness in EMDR therapy needs to come in tolerable, noticeable, and ultimately digestible chunks. If it doesn’t, clients probably have defenses to manage what comes next, whether that is panic or shutdown. One of the most difficult ways to do EMDR therapy is on the edge of or beyond the client’s window of tolerance.
In her chapter on complex trauma in her main text, Shapiro mentions that you can use the videotape approach from the recent events protocol to help “fractionate” the memory into smaller pieces. I’ve provided my script for doing that attached to this podcast and I’d like to describe what we are trying to do in it. Again, don’t do this with healthy people. Do EMDR therapy exactly the way we trained you. Modifications like this when they are not needed or are done because the therapist can’t tolerate a healthy client feeling big things will likely prevent the client from accessing their associative memory networks in ways that are most helpful. However, if you are working with someone with a small window of tolerance we need the distress that comes to ripple inside of that. If that’s our goal, it does not make sense to activate this memory in Phase Three by going into the worst part it first. But it seems to me that we should do some type of Phase Three. The approach as I have outlined it makes modifications to Phases Three and Four only. The rest of Standard Protocol is done as normal. As you can see in the script that I’ve provided, we are careful not to strongly activate the memory in Phase Three. For instance, it asks about how big this memory has been in your whole life span on a 0-10 scale (which is less activating than how we traditionally get the SUDs).
As we move into Phase Four, we simply ask the client to identify in their own awareness the beginning and the ending of the memory, then ask them to play the memory from the very first frame. As soon as any distress comes, we instruct them to let us know with their hand and we immediately ask them to close the memory channel. Then, they start tapping and noticing. What we are doing here is asking them to take a little bite, ten notice, notice, notice, notice, until the distress in that bite is largely metabolized. We then ask the client to play the video forward to find the next piece of distress. Something remarkable happens most of the time when using the videotape approach. When the client does arrive at the worst part, there is usually much less distress in it than the client anticipated. This is because they noticed their way to it. Like a machine that is eating away at the foundation of a mountain, when you get to the peak of it, the whole mountain starts to collapse. It’s elegant and much more tolerable. We’re not done with Phase Four until the client can play the whole memory and there is no distress on any channel. Often, this involves multiple playing throughs of the memory. You don’t need to constantly check the SUDs. Just notice the distress when it appears until the client can’t find any when playing the video. After that, check the SUDs and clean up any debris. Then move to Phase Five using standard protocol.
With event trauma, clients can work on much larger events than they might be able to tolerate otherwise. This approach will not save you from the big existential loneliness that comes when working on attachment wound targets that tend to bring everything to a halt like quicksand. What it will do is allow you to get stuck in the quicksand of it slower, which may allow you to use attachment or parts interventions sooner to help the session wind down in more tolerable ways.
Again, the videotape approach doesn’t give you a bigger boat of adaptive information to land a bigger memory. It lets you reel the fish in using strategies that can keep the boat from flipping or keep your line from snapping.
There are sometimes, not all of the time, when we need to work on an event trauma memory that is larger than I’d recommend. But the client needs to tackle it. At these times, I’m likely to use the videotape approach. It will significantly increase the chance that the client will resolve that memory in a session or two… assuming there is enough adaptive information present somewhere in the client’s nervous system. To be clear, this is a restricted protocol approach. Shapiro says that you can do things like this with clients with complex trauma when sound clinical guidance requires it. Give it a try. My hunch is that it’s a game-changer with many of your most severely traumatized clients. And as soon as you no longer need it and clients can tolerably resolve memories without it, remove constraints and let things go where they go for the broadest range of generalization possible.
365 Questions About EMDR With Complex Trauma 