EMDR FORUM ARCHIVE, 2000
Re:Integration of alters when working with EMDR
Sandra Paulsen Inobe, PhD · 12/15/02 at 1:41 PM ET
Sorry my response was obscure. What is so evident and intriguing in the post that struck me as important was that yes the emdr naturally brought down dissociative barriers but more that she hadn't done every snippet of trauma work that could be done and the integration was still effective and beneficial. I always talk about how prematurely taking down dissociative barriers is what causes emdr disasters, when they occur. Here, a disaster didn't occur and it was healing for her. One way integration can occur is to first "vacuum" out the trauma with EMDR and then the walls can either come down spontaneously or we take them down with a quick procedure, using EMDR ("walks coming down, walls falling away"). Another way is for the walls to come down WITHOUT doing the trauma work first. In being careful, we usually talk about not taking walls down prematurely. But the problem is, there can be so very many traumas and digging them all up can be like having a great many surgeries. For the people for whom it isn't necessary to do all the trauma work, like the one who posted, it is another route. Determining whether a person needs to get ALL (or how much) trauma detoxified, or whether they don't is the key here. Preventing destabilization and maintaining safety is very much the highest priority. Somebody will figure out a kind of "algorithm" for determining the best path for a given person, and that will be a happy day. I wonder if the original poster has comments here?
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