EMDR FORUM ARCHIVE, 2000
Re:ABreaction
Sandra Paulsen Inobe, PhD · 02/22/02 at 12:09 ET
The term "abreaction" is used slightly differently in EMDR circles than in the mental health community at large. Originally it referred to an abnormal reaction of emotional intensity. It was usually considered desirable to avoid inducing an abreaction in a client. As trauma work developed in the last decades, abreactions were deliberately evoked in clients in order to ventilate and detoxify trauma. Typically, hypnotically induced abreactions required considerable jumpstarting. In EMDR, the term is used to refer to those emotional reactions, whether intense or mild, in which it is evident to the observing therapist that the EMDR processing has accessed a pocket of emotional or somatically held material which is being released in the EMDR. It may take the form of weeping, sobbing, writhing, or less dramatically, minor facial twitches, jerking of extremities, or almost any other emotional or muscular release. In EMDR processing, abreactions are nothing to be concerned about per se. We just keep sailing through them, because they tend to resolve when the pocket of material has been evacuated. If the emotionally intensity is too great, there are imaginal procedures to titrate or reduce the intensity, such as imagining the memory on a screen, in black and white instead of color, or other distancing techniques. Sometimes an extreme abreaction that doesn't resolve or is highly intense may be evidence that the therapist has violated a cardinal rule of EMDR processing,namely, to screen for a dissociative condition prior to initiating EMDR. In dissociative clients, it is often necessary to do considerable preparation in terms of stabilization, containment, mediation, and fractionating or dividing the work into bite size pieces. So that's an abreaction from an EMDR point of view.
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