Re:Infancy Issues

The thorniest EMDR cases are those in which the client seems to have attachment issues related to very early trauma, betrayal, abandonment.

It is indeed challenging to find appropriate targets, and to contain the client's sometimes overwhelming sea of pain related to early feelings of abandonment, etc. Strategies EMDR therapists use include first working on containment, stabilization, safety, resource development. Sometimes we find more adult ego states that will offer soothing in the mind's eye to forsaken very young child ego states. Sometimes we proceed targeting these early "memories", being ever mindful of the fact that memory encoding is even less perfect in the earliest years than later (and later it is still fraught with sources of inadvertent distortion).

There are no controlled studies regarding any of these strategies, but creative therapists and courageous clients are proceeding to try to find ways to make up for these unmet early developmental milestones.

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