EMDR Forum Archive, 1999
Re: an article that may be of interest
Sandra Paulsen, Ph.D. · 4/28/00 at 4:12 am ET
I just remembered a client I worked with who illustrates an important twist on this subject. The woman gave consent to use her case as a training case, and Shapiro has used it in workshops and talks. I worked for 14 sessions with a woman who presented for something that she felt was likely to be emerging traumatic memories of sexual abuse, and she feared it was incest. You see, one of the snippets of flashbacks she had been struggling with was the picture of her deceased father's angry face. She would see this picture at the same time as she struggled with troubling anxiety symptoms and physical symptoms suggestive of sexual abuse. She said, "I think I was sexually abused and I'm afraid my father did it". I provided a careful informed consent that included cautions about possible sources of distortion in memory. That is, I always tell people that human memory, including during EMDR, is subject to various possible sources of distortion. I told her that we can't use EMDR to determine what happened in the past, only to resolve current symptoms. Throughout our work on her anxiety, sadness, anger, assertiveness and physical symptoms, I maintained my stance of therapeutic neutrality as fostered in EMDR training as well as the rest of my careful training. At no point did we probe for abuse, rather, we targeted her immediate symptoms in the present moment. What emerged in the course of her processing were not only physical symptoms, various ego states relevant to feelings of powerlessness, anger, sadness, and so on, but also pictures and knowledge about what she described as a childhood molestation by neighbor boys. I remained neutral. At some point mid processing, she recalled that her father had entered the shed in the yard where she had been molested by these older neighbor boys, during the molestation incident. Her father shouted angrily, "get out of here!" to the boys, in protection of her. She had apparently been so ashamed she'd dissociated or repressed the whole thing until it emerged about 30 years later. I didn't tell her what was real. She ended up with clarity about what had happened (to her satisfaction - I never did take a position about it). She experienced great relief that she could now remember her deceased father without this nagging half memory of his face and the question of his complicity. All of her presenting problems remitted and the gains were maintained on 6 month follow up. In sum, if one targets present day symptoms, and maintains a neutral therapeutic stance accompanied by cautions about possible distortions, clients will process through their material with or without increased clarity about the past. With their symptoms resolved, however, they end up pleased with the results. Symptom resolution, not memory dredging, is the goal. Some clients will gain clarity as a by product of the processing, but it comes from them, not from the therapist.
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