The EMDR Podcast

Helping the Predictive Brain Update Bad Memories Turns out, the story that we’ve been telling ourselves about the neurobiology of trauma doesn’t make sense anymore based on what we have learned the past twenty-five years about brain evolution, function, structure, memory reconsolidation, neuroplasticity, and the predictive brain. How we understand perception of our external world and internal worl...

When Complex Clients Insist on Doing EMDR Processing Immediately Clients often urgently need to heal. Their lives are probably unmanageable and they may have significant relational, occupational, or functional stressors that need urgent attention. We can align with that urgency. However, urgency is not a substitute for preparation. If you have a complexly traumatized nervous system, your recovery...

Full text of this podcast is at the EMDR Podcast and EMDR365.com

EMDR Therapy shifts how you think about yourself and the world related to the memory we are working on. Why does it do this? Because that’s a lot of what healing is. Healing shifts how you think about yourself and the world, as well as lots of other things. Wounding is experiential learning and vast regions of our nervous system are organized around meaning-making in the foreground, midground, and...

A summary of why attachment wound targets in EMDR therapy are a uniquely difficult place to start.

The full text of this episode is available on the EMDR Podcast here: https://emdrpodcast.com/2023/12/13/lettingthingsgo/ The script for the videotape approach mentioned in the podcast is here: https://emdrthirdweekend.com/posts/videotape-approach-script-with-complex-trauma-phases-three-and-four

A child's toy metaphor for the need to adjust your interventions to the nervous system you are working with.

When a SUDS of One, Two, or Three May Not be Ecological You are technically correct, quoting Dr. Shapiro in EMDR Therapy when you say that a SUDs of one can be ecological if it “sounds right.” Shapiro's example of an Uncle who died. Shapiro worked with really healthy people and what’s in a one with her clients may be different than what’s in a one or a two with clients with really complex trau...

You May Do the Least Reprocessing with the Clients Who Need it the Most

Full text of this episode is at: https://emdrpodcast.com/2023/11/29/parts-work-is-central-to-emdr-therapy/

• The Impulse to Want to Avoid Causing Harm • Working with Trauma is Like Working with Lava • Confessions about Difficult Sessions • Most Basic Training Programs Can’t Train You to Work Effectively with Severely Complex Trauma in EMDR, You Will Need to Learn the Nuances of this On Your Own, But There is an Enormous Amount of Help Out There • Normalizing Mistakes and Missteps • The Real Risks of No...

There is so much to say here. Broad overview. Each point could easily be a chapter. Very little of this is mine, the metaphors are mine, but this is a collection ways of seeing that are helpful for me in understanding where clients get stuck in reprocessing, why, and what might be helpful in getting them unstuck, and what we subsequently do with that information. When clients encounter difficultie...

Many new EMDR therapists misunderstand where the magic is in EMDR Therapy. Trainings and training practicum experiences often send the impression that simply following the script is likely to result in memory resolution with the vast majority of clients. EMDR can be seen as a kind of magic wand that allows us to go up to almost any person and “dink” their memory. Some trainees may be left with the...

A shocking amount of talk online about EMDR and grief goes against everything we know about both. This episode highlights effective ways to use EMDR with grief-saturated targets.

In EMDR Therapy, the pathway for healing is that stuck information has to connect to right now adaptive information.  The process that facilitates that linkage is the Eight Phase Protocol. You can connect almost any old and stuck maladaptive information into right now existing adaptive information. But, a lot of what we know about complex trauma is that clients lack adaptive information.  They wer...

Understanding the Difference Between A Complexly Traumatized Nervous System and a Non-Pervasively Traumatized Nervous System Via the AIP Lens In the AIP model, the difficult stuff has to connect with right-now existing adaptive information.  One of the key things that we appreciate about complex trauma is the large size of the trauma and the typically small amount of adaptive information that the...

Client and therapist agendas are frequent blocks in EMDR Therapy reprocessing.

Using age, space, and topography to find an individual representative memory related to a presenting issue, theme, current trigger or emotional state. • Identify a negative cognition. • What age do we need to work related to that theme and negative cognition? • Home, school, or community? • Where (what room) in that space do we need to work? • Where in that room or space (what chair at the table)...

Introduction to the next handful of episodes.

Many clients with complex trauma will come to us convinced that they have already failed mindfulness and that they are about to fail EMDR.  Some of the approaches that I have seen to teaching mindfulness to clients assume a non-pervasively traumatized nervous system. Which is simply something we should not assume. Many approaches throw the client into the deep end of the present, the body, or noti...

Trauma has the potential to promote disconnection from the present, from experience, from the body, from the self, and from more full engagement with the broader world.  These responses were in the service of survival. They may have been essential.  Sensory grounding is a go-to resource in trauma work because our senses bring us home.  They can help bring us into the “safety” of the present when w...

Full script for this is at: https://emdrthirdweekend.com/posts/dip-your-toe-in-approaches-to-body-scan

In this podcast, I propose a very simple modification to your calm scene mindfulness exercise when clients have struggled with exercises like this: outsource the calm scene to a YouTube video.  We may be able to use the video as a bridge resource.  Bridge resources are accommodations to standard resources that take into account the difficulties that clients may have with visualization, focus, self...