Attention Divided and Conquered

Good question....I was noticing that I think people are using the same words in different ways at different times, and I'm not sure what the answer is even if we are all using the same words the same ways. Here goes....

DISTRACTION & DISSOCIATION
Someone introduced the word distraction to describe his/her experience as a client of being able to not be present in the work. I would likely use the word dissociate to convey that meaning, but I wouldn't necessarily mean a dissociative disorder, just checking out or not being present experientially to own the thoughts, emotions, body sensations, being processed in the EMDR. Eye movements cease when this checking out occurs, so in eye movement bilateral stim you can see that the client has checked out.

DISTRACTION PER SE
However, the poster may have meant distraction as in distracted by a passing noise externally, which would serve to completely interrupt processing, and would not just divide attention the way dual attention stimulation does during processing.

DUAL ATTENTION
In EMDR parlance, dual attention is generally used to mean that the attention is deliberately and continuously (during processing sets I mean) divided between 1) the material being processed and 2) the external stimulus, whether it is bilateral stimulation (eye, tactile, auditory) or not bilateral (like fixed attention). Then there is the subtext about whether fixed attention actually has subtle eye movements, compared to another kind of fixed attention - don't think we settled on a vocab here satisfactorily, if that distinction exists as I think Ulrich Lanius suggested.

DIVIDED ATTENTION IN NEUROPSYCHOLOGY
As an aside that I find fascinating, the neuropsychology literature has many references to dissociated mental processes, and they aren't referring to dissociated memories due to psychological trauma, but rather to any cognitive process in which attention or other process is divided, usually perhaps for reasons of organic injury (I'm not sure I remember this exactly right but its close).

DUAL ATTENTION -->BILATERAL STIM
So the question on the table (setting the aside aside) is whether dual attention (or that special case of dual attention, bilateral stimulation) helps to titrate affect so that people can tolerate it. Those of us who find that bilateral stim is needed, find that it tends to titrate affect for many and itself tends to induce association of previously dissociated material. For some it overwhelms and floods so we have to add other affect titration methods. Most of those involve imagery, which some people might call a form of hypnosis.

DIVIDED ATTENTION IN SELF HYPNOSIS, DISSOCIATION
Dissociative disorders occur when people learn to chronically use self hypnosis or divided attention to escape from unbearable experience. In those cases the division appears to occur along channels such as affective, cognitive, behavioral or somatosensory channels (visual, olfactory, auditory, tactile, gustatory). They learn to divide their attention and then they do it alot. Trouble is, the dissociated material remains put away and frozen in its raw unprocessed form until it is processed. This is the same for PTSD, which some people consider a dissociative disorder.

So how interesting that we talk here about dual attention to titrate affect in order to integrate or associate dissociated experience that was laid down in separate tracks or channels using divided attention. Dual attention to cure divided attention.

AFFECT TITRATION LEADING TO ASSOCIATION (RE-ASSOCIATION)
Bilateral stim feels clinically to me like the way one adjusts the tension on a sewing machine. You can't stitch two things together if the tension isn't right, and you can't associate dissociated material unless the affective tension is right. The stitches will be too loose (flooding) or too tight (dissociation). Somehow when the bilateral stim is adjusted right, you get speedily stitched, reassociated elements of experience. And resolved symptoms.

Disclaimer: The above description is largely consistent with the AIP theoretical framework Francine offers, but not entirely. It certainly is not linguistically identical. She doesn't talk much about dissociative phenomena however, I do.

Replies:

Re:Attention Divided and Conquered, by Cahill, 10/30/02 Re:Attention Divided and Conquered, by interested client, 10/31/02 Re:Attention Divided and Conquered, by Sandra Paulsen Inobe, PhD, 10/31/02

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