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It’s a common-enough situation that people bring to consultation… a client with complex trauma is having plenty of activation, but not much resolution, session after session. When we take a representative session apart, and it sounds like the target memory is connecting to lots and lots of distressing content, almost as though the client is trying to resolve a theme across a single or multiple developmental eras. Often, mixed in with all of this there is sometimes a lot of the client trying to figure things out.

We Train You to Stay Out of the Way

In a lot of ways, the therapist is doing what we have trained them to do… stay out of the way and let things go where they need to go. Let them make the connections that they need to make. This is Shapiro’s guidance and there is a lot to be said for it, if you are working with a relatively healthy person. Letting things where they go if you are working with a client with pervasively complex trauma, particularly early in their EMDR reprocessing, has a reasonable chance of sending them straight off a cliff.

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 difficult stuff must connect with and metabolize into. Again, back to the boat metaphor. If client’s have adaptive information the size of a canoe, we really need to be careful about what they hook. You can’t land a fish bigger than your boat. Clients that are really healthy, but who have had some trauma have adaptive information the size of a cruise ship (the privilege in that healthy a system is that they can hook and land every fish in their oceans).

One of the things that Shapiro is very clear about is that there is nothing in the Eight Phase Protocol that will generate the needed adaptive information just because it’s needed. You need to have it an you need to have enough of it. Metaphorically, you’re not going to somehow get a bigger boat just because you have connected to a large fish. You have the boat you have.

A Decision Flowchart

So, when we have identified a target memory and the client is into Phase Four, I want to identify what I’m considering when the client says there is another memory or a group of memories want to come and this is a client with complex trauma.

First, Time

One of the most important jobs of an EMDR therapist is to keep a close eye on the clock. You need to be able to know what time it is. If it is nearly time for closure, we are routing that information into a container 100% of the time. We don’t open what we don’t have time to close. Let clients know this.

Two, How are You Doing, Distress-Wise, With the Current Content

If you are struggling digesting—in fact, choking—on the last few bites of the memory you started with, it makes no sense to try to dump more content down the throat. The best time to let new content in is when we have both the time for that content and the capacity to absorb the distress of it. Long story short, if the client’s body-based SUDs is a seven, eight, nine, or ten, now is not a good time to open up another memory, even if we have the time.

Is the Memory Adjacent or Feeder?

There is a situation where we really do need to pivot to another memory. This doesn’t happen as often as some trainers imply with clients with complex trauma. If the client is working on a conflict with a boss and tells you, “Oh, crap, this isn’t about the boss… it’s about that thing that my Dad said to me when I was six years old,” then we probably do need to pivot to that earlier memory, but we don’t necessarily have to do that today. That a collaborative conversation between therapist and client. I mention this distinction between an adjacent memory (which is coming because it’s stored very closely to the target memory and it has the same body feel) from a feeder memory (which is an earlier memory that is making our target memory distressful). It’s important to be able to quickly sort out the two.

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