I Wanna Do EMDR-Now What?
Which memories do you start with? The oldest.
One of the first questions I get when clients reach out to me interested in EMDR is, “Which memories do we start with?” Perhaps from media or pop culture, and as EMDR is gaining more popularity, it’s understandable that most information about EMDR focuses on the eye movement part. I tell people that, at least in my training, we start with the earliest worst memories and go forward in time chronologically to the most recent worst memory. And sometimes, we even address prebirth intergenerational wounds. But the eye movement part is at the fourth phase, not the first, of EMDR, so there is preparation before hand that often includes making sure people are in a safe physical and emotional state to face their worst memories in a sustained way, introducing mindfulness and relaxation techniques, accessing parts of self and fortifying attachment, defining goals for why reprocessing memories is important, and assessing history.
Another question I hear is, why process memories chronologically when what is bothering me just happened yesterday?
Even as it is also quite somatic, EMDR is quite grounded in a cognitive approach to healing and reprocessing traumatic memories. As Gabor Maté alludes to, trauma is not about the event itself; it’s about the negative sense of self one develops from an incident. In an interview on Democracy Now, Maté (Maté, 2022) said,
Now, you don’t need conditions of war and privation and such drama to give children the sense that they’re not wanted. In this society, a lot of parents are advised not to pick up their kids when they’re crying. That’s enough to give the child the sense that they’re not wanted and not accepted. And so, I was traumatized under very — and the trauma is not that my mother gave me to a stranger. The trauma is what I made it mean, the wound inside, that I’m not lovable and not wanted.
” And, often, these base ideas of self undergird the way current and future ideas of self get “coded” in the body-mind. Which is why, if you process memories from an early age, processing of later and current memories becomes easier and faster. It’s not the only way, however. I’ve trained with specialists in subtle adult autism who have developed eye movement approaches to help clients replace negative associations of self with preferred ways of seeing one’s skills, such as thoughtful and organized, in a given setting that caused anxiety.
Returning to chronological order, at times, starting with early memories seems counterintuitive, and so I remind my clients, “there’s no such thing as wasted processing.” I would caution anyone about jumping into memories before adequately completing the first three stages of EMDR, that would be ineffective, and it can lead to overwhelm on the client’s part. But once the groundwork has been covered, I truly believe no amount of processing, no matter where one starts, is a waste. However, in the long run, the effects of healing will last longer if you start with the earliest memories and move forward chronologically.
Reference
Maté, G. (2022, September 16). “The Myth of Normal”: Dr. Gabor Maté on Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture [Interview transcript/video]. DemocracyNow.org. https://www.democracynow.org/2022/9/16/myth_normal_gabor_mate_trauma_mental
