EMDR is not a magic wand.
Something happens in EMDR foundational training that confuses some people, including for people who know very clearly what complex trauma is because they have spent hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands of hours with clients with complex trauma. Of all the people in the world, community mental health therapists know what complex trauma is. We learned more in the first week of our internships about this population than most people will ever learn.
Many of us have spent more face-to-face time with people with complex trauma than we have spent with our children, partners, or with any other single thing in the whole world.
And somehow, we leave EMDR trainings having fallen for a version of ease.
Nothing is easy with complex trauma. You already knew that.
Nothing makes complex trauma brief. You already knew that.
Working with clients with complex trauma is almost always hard. You already knew that.
EMDR therapy is an effective way to work once the needed things are in place, but in no universe are we using words like brief, easy, or magic with clients with complex trauma.
And I’m seeing the client one hour in a week. There are 168 hours in a week and I’m seeing the client at most for one of those.
Once we are working, what will we need to work on? We will need to work on everything. How old is your client? 46?
How many years, around the clock has their nervous system been in survival mode? I’m guessing for most of them.
You’re seeing the client one hour in 168 and I’m telling you it’s probably going to take several years of focused work for this client’s nervous system to mostly reset. That’s if the client is doing amazing reprocessing session after session. When I say that, I often see my consultees deflate a little bit.
But, here is the good news. In fact, understanding this is how we are going to rescue ourselves as a species and as it’s how you will have a career that you actually want to inhabit.
All of the learning in childhood from all the things that happened and all the things that didn’t is deeply and redundantly placed. It was reinforced in bad marriages and every other form of subsequent adversity a human can possibly experience. Redundantly placed and repeatedly reinforced. It’s not meant to be changed easily. It’s the learning that allowed them to survive. It’s salient. It’s in the marrow.
Clients have been in their trauma, 24 7 for decades. Reliving it, recreating it, killing off to try to avoid it (while also sleeping in the same head and bed with it).
And what do we DO with that client with a complexly traumatized across 46 years? Do you know what 24 x 7 x 52 x 46 years is? It’s over 400,000 hours of life, of learning.
What are we going to do?
We are going to see this client for about an hour a week.
If you see them for three years and you can get them started, get them processing, you can largely reset their nervous system. And when you do that, do you how much time you have actually spent with the client across those three years? Their whole recovery has taken less than the hours in one week in their whole life. The idea that clients can reset 400,000 hours of difficulty and wounding in a single human week is itself remarkable.
That’s what I mean when I say that EMDR therapy is an efficient and effective way to work. There is really good news here. In less than one week of actual time, many clients whose lives have been defined by wounding can redefine. With their unburdened nervous systems they can go out into the world and figure out who they are, what they are worth, and how they deserve to be treated. Spread over years, it doesn’t feel brief, or effective, or like magic.
Rewind to what you knew before you fell for the idea that EMDR is a magic wand. There is magic in it, it’s just not what you thought. I’m trying to help you find it so that you don’t give up, dying on the wrong hills. Everything that you already know about complex trauma will make you a better EMDR therapist. Let what you know about this population shape how you do EMDR therapy. EMDR is not a machine and we’re not in the business of cramming people into machines.
We need to stop selling ease, because people hear the wrong things. We need to stop selling EMDR therapy as a brief approach to psychotherapy in a world where most brokenness is of the complex type. It’s brief for healthy people, but any therapy that is any good at all is brief for healthy people. Most trauma is of the complex type. You can do EMDR therapy well with clients with complex trauma, once you can get them started. Getting started is a whole other bucket of stuff that this book is also about.