Re:Attention Divided and Conquered

I agree - this matter of attention titrated or dissociated is at the very heart of EMDR both in terms of when it works and when it gets stuck. Probably for exposure too.

Maybe one reason tactile and auditory stim is more tolerable for some is because of gentleness of it, translated to not as likely to penetrate dissociative barriers AND not as noticeable to therapist.

When someone is using eye movements, if I see their eyes fixate (meaning they likely just dissociated or checked out), if needed I'll stop and ask them to look into the conference room in the minds eye (switch to ego state theory and therapy here). And there, visible in the conference room, on the periphery of consciousness, will be a visual representation of whatever is being dissociated.

This means that the material that was previously being processed in the present first person ("I FEEL") is now not "present" (that's the work used in dissociation theory) but is "conscious" ("he/she/it is over there now and it feels"

EMDR can't fully work if it is only conscious and not present. It has to be partially fully owned "I had this happen to me, I feel it, know it, the pain is mine, the truth is mine".

When things are dissociated, they sometimes cannot be tolerated in conscious mind at all (so they are outside the conference room). Before the material can be fully experienced and processed and owned, a half-step is to see it in conscious mind, so a cognitive interweave is utilized, like, "how old were you then? See how small her arms were? Whose responsibility was it" and THEN, as a result of tolerating it in conscious mind, it becomes tolerable to experience in the present ("I was very small. I didn't know what to do. I was an innocent child").

This conversation is the very heart of much of EMDR, ego state therapy, hypnosis, dissociation and exposure. All turn on the use of attention in these states of mind.
Qualifier: Cognitive interweaves often involved getting a shift briefly to "in conscious mind"

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