EMDR FORUM ARCHIVE, 2000
Re:Neural Circuits Control Eye Movements - Research
Sandra Paulsen Inobe, PhD · 01/24/03 at 7:33 PM ET
An observation from clinical practice, not research, is that eye movements enable us to regulate the use of attention in order to process information, and somehow disengage defensive mechanisms to a degree. Its as if when the brain's attention is regulated by eye movements, the brain cannot also distract itself with defenses and dissociation. Those activities, though they don't necessarily occur in conscious mind, require energy to maintain. When the attention is on, say, a trauma, and the eyes are moving, the processing of that trauma is less likely to get stuck on dissociation/defenses because the attention is being threaded through very directly or speedily. The cartoon that has been in my head about this for the longest time is of a sewing machine, in which the top thread engages is stitching, or processing, and the bottom thread is more passively but vitally involved in the stitching. The tension on tne bottom thread has to be just so or the stitching gets stuck, and turns into a mass of knots if the tension is too tight (dissociated trauma elements, numbing or looping, as we say in EMDR) or if the tension is too loose, you get these useless huge loops of thread (maybe flooding?). Affect titration via attentional regulation??
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