Re:emdr/depression

I'm glad you already understand about the no-case-consultation rule I go by here.

In general:

- EMDR can cause preexisting pockets of unresolved emotion about earlier events to come to the surface during or after EMDR processing. It may or may not be clear what the emotion relates to.

- Depression likely always has some kind of biological correlate -- that is, depression lives in our bodies, so everything that happens in our mind happens in our body and likely with a biological shift of some kind, but that hardly proves that the biology CAUSED the shift.

- It would be a curious chemical imbalance that has a sudden onset immediately following an EMDR session.

- The challenge for managing emotions that are triggered by EMDR boils down to this: to resolve the old stuff, we have to access it, including the uncomfortable emotions. We can't resolve the uncomfortable emotions if the intensity is so great that it is overwhelming. That means we have to titrate it (fancy term meaning, manage the dosage or intensity of it). If depression or sad affect is so severe as to be imobilizing, antidepressants may make it manageable. EMDR needs some amount of the original uncomfortable emotion to "sink its teeth into", however. To target it, you have to feel it.

- There are other methods available to titrate affect, including the use of imagery (such as, having a volume control knob to turn the intensity down to manageable level, or put it on a screen so it feels more distant).

-- EMDR therapists are trained to not be spooked by a client's experiencing of intense emotion. Emotion isn't a bad thing after, it is only a problem if it is too painful or overwhelming. Part of the results of EMDR is to own and resolve the emotion, come to terms with it, usually, seeing it through a slightly different frame of reference. We can't do it without diving into the affect though.

--Finally, most emotions that arrive suddenly after an EMDR session pass within a few days. One caution (my usual broken record caution for therapists), is that therapists should NEVER fail to screen for a dissociative disorder in ANY client before conducting EMDR. Period. Highly dissociative clients can be profoundly destabilized by premature use of EMDR, and that is entirely unnecessary and avoidable.

End of general comments for today!

Sandra Paulsen Inobe, PhD
Fair Oaks, CA

Replies:

Re:emdr/depression, by Lindsay Smith, 09/04/01 Re:emdr/depression, by Sandra Paulsen Inobe, PhD, 09/05/01

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