EMDR FORUM ARCHIVE, 2000
Re:emdr and meditation
another client · 09/18/02 at 8:13 ET
Random thoughts: 1) It has occurred to me repeatedly that emdr is very meditative, and that it's use, perhaps, is becoming an experience of enforced and unprepared meditation for many people. Emdr, in itself, is not containing, and I see people responding badly to it as they would if they suddenly began meditating 90 min at a time... (I found John Nelson's book Healing the Split helpful to me in articulating my concerns and perceptions on this point.) The largest difference I see between emdr and meditation is the treatment of "distractions" or "associations" in emdr vs in meditation. If I am meditating I can employ a variety of techniques and attempt to observe what I am experiencing. Emdr tends to involve a level of deliberate engagement with the "distraction". Not knowing much about emdr or meditation I don't know if I am perceiving a difference which does not in reality exist... but, on the other hand, different protocols use bls differently, so there would seem to be an underlying acknowledgement that some experiences should be engaged with vs detached from. The use of rdi, which does function as a container, plays into all this. I would find it interesting what the sequelae of emdr sessions would look like with more rdi, for all patients, not just those deemed dissociative or otherwise fragile. 2)A friend recently introduced me to eft/tft. I recall when NLP was all the rage and there are, of course, other energy/hypnotic therapeutic modalities. What I find interesting is that so many of them use biolateral stimulation of one sort or another, although it may not be identified as such. We know the effects of emdr, as enormous as they can be, are related to bls, although it is not yet clear (at least from what I have read) why this is the case. The attention to body, I guess, in emdr and other techniques, would have an integrating effect irregardless of the mode of bls or whether "bls" was the goal. As for dissociative disorders... body, mind, affect and spirt can be so fragmented and yet so intensified, because they are fragmented... People who have DID seem to have very spiritual parts, very tactile parts... as if the parts, by their dissassocation from the whole, were able to concentrate one aspect of being... and become very very "good at it", for lack of a better description. Parts on sabbatical, so to speak... :) When theses highly developed parts are accessed... through emdr or other techniques, the fallout can be profound, unexpected and difficult. (And intensely blissful, but that's another discussion.) 3) I am unsure how to articulate the thoughts that erupted when I read your words about perpetrator introjects. Suffice it to say, I believe that such introjects can be in control of, or allied with, or against, "enlightened" states. The power of god in the hands of "demons" is a real, and startling, possibility. How a therapist (or client) deals with a "bad" part with such power is a scary question, for all concerned. In the transition from an existence of fragmentation, violence and loss to one of wholeness, a dissociative client (any client) faces very tough questions as to whether or not to embrace, and how much to embrace, that wholeness. The company of demons surpasses that of angels, if you know the demons well... Frankl writes, in Man's Search for Meaning, that the best, the "good" people rarely survive experiences like concentration camps. He identifies himself (a point often missed) as not particularly good, in fact, his acquiesence to camp and nazi policy saved his skin. Perhaps, the best in people, in dissociative clients, does not survive either... Bonhoeffer comes to mind... This is very elemental stuff... and I am going to ponder it some more...
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