Thomas Zimmerman, Ms.Ed., LPCC, offers EMDR Foundational Training in Cleveland, Ohio, and online. We can also train your whole agency. See: EMDRCleveland.com
Almost everything on the EMDR Podcast located on EMDR’s Third Weekend is organized around the Dip Your Toe In metaphor. So often with new trainees, it feels like as we move to Phase Three and beyond that we are walking clients to the end of a tall diving board and asking them to jump in, without us knowing if the client is over a pool, or if they can-for certain-swim. This whole project shows you how you can dip your toe into any of the eight phases, including the reprocessing phases.
When I meet a client for the first time, I’m never entirely sure what they are brining in. I’m not sure about how much trauma they have endured and I’m not sure about how much adaptive information they have developed since (or despite) that trauma. But, what I do know is this:
The difficult information is going to need to connect to something existing and adaptive.
• In EMDR Therapy, the difficult information connects to existing adaptive information in the right now selves.
• In Flash Therapy, small pieces of the difficult information connects to your right now adaptive state.
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 were too busy surviving to figure out who they are, what they value, how the deserve to be treated… and they need enough of it for the difficult stuff to connect to.
The Boat and the Whale Metaphor
The boat is the amount of the needed adaptive information that is have accessible right now. The fish that you want to hook and land is the trauma. You cannot land a fish bigger than your boat. However, you can get a bigger boat by catching smaller fish. You can also build a bigger boat through developing relationships-including the therapeutic relationship, through parts work, through resourcing, by expanding the window of tolerance, through psychoeducation [particularly psychoeducation about what it means to be born human], and through a wide assortment of other means.
Implications of this metaphor:
• If we can only land what we have space in boat to fit, we should consider both the size of the memory (as best we and the client can intuit) and the amount of accessible adaptive information.
• If we have adaptive information the size of a canoe and this is the first time we are in the ocean, we should consider testing the gear before we go trying to hook whales. It is really easy to capsize in a canoe.
• Developmental trauma targets, targets about identity, and targets where we’re the abuser in the memory tend to be the whales of memory, particularly when we’re first starting.
• EMDR Therapy was not particularly developed for complex trauma. It was developed using people who have adaptive information the size of cruise ships. And how did they get that cruise ship? By life Phase Two resourcing them really well. If you have adaptive information the size of a cruse ship, I know that you can hook and land almost every fish in your ocean. That’s the privilege of the non-pervasively traumatized… your ocean is not filled with monsters. People in canoes… their oceans are filled massive monsters. Finding something small enough to land in your existing boat with complex trauma can be a challenge.
The Mount Everest Metaphor
Shapiro says that if we tackle the mountains of memory first, everything after that will feel like a small hill. And, she is right if you have adaptive information the size of mountains. Again, clients with complex trauma have very little adaptive information. You cannot metabolize a trauma the size of Mount Everest into adaptive information the size of a walnut. You simply can’t do it.
Also, if you’re not an Olympian, Mount Everest is a terrible place to start. And, if you need to tackle Mount Everest, you had better tackle some smaller hills then some smaller mountains first.
To be fair, Shapiro acknowledges that with complex trauma we do want to work with smaller and more recent memories first, but many people graduating from EMDR foundational trainings misunderstand the nature of the magic that is EMDR.