Integrating Psychodynamic Object Relations

• Accelerated Learning and Positive Templates by Francine Shapiro, 8/4/97
  
  

The area of integrating EMDR with psychodynamic theory and practice started as somewhat of an oddity four years ago but now has developed roots and is starting to flourish. Anyone who "listens with the third ear" recognizes the profundity and purity of the content and speed of the accelerated information processing of EMDR. Processing is free association in hyperdrive.

In response to Dr. Shapiro's comments on positive templates, much of the work my colleagues and I have worked on pertains to addressing the status and interaction of the client's internalized objects. These are imagos which have been internalized by the client developmentally from early childhood from the positive and negative aspects of parents or caretakers, as well as perceptions and images of self from the different stages of childhood. For our adult clients, the impact of their actual interactions with these significant others has long ago faded in psychological importance compared with those of these internalized objects, or part-selves. The abusive parent has been transmuted into an abusive self-object which inflicts pain on internalized child/victim self-objects. This undermines the client's successful functioning, especially in intimate relations with others where these internal conflicts can be externalized and played out with someone in real life.

EMDR is highly effective in eliciting these self-images ("imagine what your self punishing self would look like" then using eye movements to elicit and clarify these self-images) as well as helping the client change the interactions between the abusive self-ojects and the victim self-objects, at times by fostering a verbal negotiation where each states what it needs and what it can provide for the other.

Of crucial importance for attaining self-soothing which can be developed towards object constancy, is the reinforcement of the clients self-image as a competent, and possibly parental, adult. This competent adult-image can be accessed to support and heal the victimized child-image, which is another way of saying helping a person take care of their own emotional needs. Some individuals who have been severely abused, especially by both parents, are bereft of any images of themselves as adult or competent. Unless an individual is completely nonfunctional in every sphere of life (as found in the long term psychiatrically hospitalized) the building blocks of a positive competent, adult self or part-self can be found and constructed.

For example, the therapist asks the client, "In what ways are you able to be a competent adult? Are you able to work and support yourself? Do you competently take care of your basis needs? Are you able to have frienndships?" Whatever areas of competency that exist are ferreted out and the images of these activities installed with EMDR. When this building process has gone on sufficiently, the client is guided to bring together the most meaningful (to the client) installed images to be integrated together, again with EMDR processing. The positive, real aspects of the client's engagement with the therapist can also be integrated into this positive, competent self-image as well as the aspects of the clinician which the client identifies with. When the client has been able to create a competent enough internalize self-image, she or he then has an self which can begin to protect or soothe the abused child-self. This competent adult-image can also serve as mediator between the different self-images.

My colleagues and I have always been able to construct these competent self-images with any clients who are not totally vegetative and accordingly been able help clients make gains where EMDR appeared to hit impasses. When used in a longer term EMDR modality, staying with one protocol session after session until resolved (this can take months) we have found that recovery has been accomplished, of course with all the other group and programmatic supports needed by these individuals, with survivors of extreme and prolonged childhood sexual and physical abuse.

• EMDR and Object Relations by Francine Shapiro, 8/12/97
• More Ideas on Integrating EMDR with Object Relations (Separate Selves) by David Grand, RCSW, 12/4/97