Hello, welcome back to the EMDR Doctor podcast. I'm Dr. Caroline Lloyd, and welcome to episode 38. Im feeling a little bit metaphorical today so we are going to explore some ways of thinking about trauma and about EMDR.
EMDR therapists love the classic train metaphor, which explains the actual process of doing EMDR, so I will touch on that one briefly in a minute, but before that I want to explore how we think about trauma with a couple of metaphors, and this links a little bit to last weeks episode about why we need to rake over the past.
Sometimes I like to phrase it this way: in Australia, most of us grow up spending lots of time in our back yard pools as kids - we have a great tradition of swimming and water play, and one of the favourite pastimes is just hanging out in the pool, is to take a beach ball, blow it all the way up so its full to bursting, then just hold it under the water. Sometimes if you are holding it down and you lose concentration it escapes and bursts up to slap you in the face. All your family laugh and then you might try holding it under the water with one hand, or your feet, or try sitting on it or whatever.
So if you think about trauma as being that beach ball - you can easily hold it down out of sight under the water if you are concentrating on it, but if you get distracted, you'll lose your grip and it will pop up and slap you in the face. If you have more than one beachball, its gets trickier, you really have to concentrate in order for them to stay hidden under the water. If you have 3 big beach balls, its a real effort, if you have four, likelihood is that at any time, one will be popping up to slap you in the face. The more traumas we have, the more they resurface and get hard to control. And if we are distracted, they pop up more easily, like if we are tired, hungry, have exams or a job interview, if the kids are playing up, whatever it may be, it is harder to concentrate on holding those beach balls, that trauma, under the surface. We might have an eruption where all the beach balls, all the trauma pops up and we are surrounded by it, we have to get it organised and back under the surface, needing lots of energy and concentration so we can have a smooth surface again. And so when I talk about the trauma slapping us in the face, I mean those outbursts of anxiety, of rage, panic attacks, flashbacks, verbal or physical harm to others or self harm, spitting the dummy, despair or overwhelming sadness, overwhelm, agitation, dissociation even, binge drinking or eating. All these are ways that trauma can reveal itself.
So where does EMDR come in? So with each EMDR session, we let a beach ball come up to the surface, we open the valve and let a little bit (or a lot) of the air out. The beach ball goes a little bit flat, its easier to get a hold of, easier to manage, to hold under the water, and as our trauma memories lose a bit of their power, they are less likely to escape and slap us in the face, easier to keep under wraps so we can enjoy the day. We can work on emptying one beach ball at a time, or take a little bit of the air and pressure out of each beach ball, work a little bit across the different domains of out traumas, and make them all a bit more manageable. When we have done enough EMDR, done enough work, and let all the air out of the beachball, it doesn't matter if we hold it under the surface or not, its never going to pop up and slap us again.
So the other metaphor that I really love is the wheelbarrow metaphor. Everyone has a wheelbarrow that they trundle through life. Some people's wheelbarrows are empty, some full of big boulders, rocks, pebbles and sand. Some people just have sand, you could say this is the small t traumas, just millions of them, but a wheelbarrow full of sand is just as heavy as one with a few big rocks. Just as heavy, just as hard to push that barrow along the track of life. And when the track gets slippery, or uphill, that barrow becomes harder to keep pushing along. We will be pushing it uphill if we are going through a tough patch in life, like if we are getting divorced, or have young kids, experiencing family violence or have exams or ill health, lots of different reasons for our path to get harder in life.
And ultimately, if we want that barrow to be easy to push, we need to remove the rocks. We need to do EMDR on those big or small trauma memories. If we do other therapies, maybe like CBT, that might help us in knowing the pathway to follow, giving us clarity around where to push the barrow and what exactly is in there that's making it heavy. DBT gives us more skills to manage trauma, a bit like building our muscles to better manage the barrow, the insight we get through psychodynamic psychotherapy might give us the understanding of how the rocks got there, or tell us how to avoid adding more rocks to that barrow, avoiding future landslides.
But ultimately we need to remove the rocks or sand from the barrow, we need to do trauma resolution work, like EMDR, to lighten our load.
When we start working on those traumas, those rocks or boulders or sand, each one we take out, each memory we resolve, will make the barrow that bit easier to push. Each one will make a difference, but we might just not notice it until the barrow is half empty. It might not be easy to push that barrow until we have nearly emptied it of rocks, especially if we are pushing it uphill, like if we are going through a difficult patch in life, but every rock that we take out will help us on our journey.
So those metaphors help us understand the trauma burden, and how we need to do the trauma work and how it helps us.
And what about the process of EMDR - what's a great way to explain that process? Well, we love the train metaphor - that as we do the bilateral, and your EMDR therapist has asked you to just observe what comes up, and let your brain go wherever it needs to go, we can describe the EMDR process as a bit like sitting on a train, and watching the scenery - lots of different flashes of memories may come up and you just watch them out of the window of the train. Then sometimes the train goes in to a tunnel, and everything becomes dark and feels hard, there might be a lot of sadness or difficult emotion, but the only way to get through the tunnel is to keep going, keep on accelerating. We don't want to stop in the middle of the tunnel, because then we are stuck there, so we just need to keep on observing out the window, and the end of the tunnel will come along soon. We can control how fast or slow the train goes, and we can stop and hop off the train, just depending on where we want to end up.
The other way people often describe the process of EMDR, with noticing all the memories or memory fragments that come up into consciousness, is like flicking through a catalogue. It may be a very general Target style catalogue, with a broad range of memories in it, or it might be a very specific catalogue, that only has like blue pencils in it, only memories of a very specific nature, from a specific theme, or particular memory network, but as we flick through, we observe those pictures or memories, keep on flicking through until we get to the end of the catalogue, then we can put it back on the shelf, put those memories away neatly, and get on with our lives.
So that is two common ways to describe the experience of and EMDR session.
And at the end of the session, I always let people know that they will keep on processing those memories for some hours, maybe 12-48 hours, they may feel tired, like a hangover, and their thoughts may be swirling a bit like a snow globe, you know when you would give those snow globes a bit of a shake as kids, all the tiny snow flakes would whirl around, and it can take a day or so for them to settle, until you can see the picture clearly again. Just give yourself some time and space and quiet to let those snowflakes settle.
I hope that's helpful, I hope that gives you some other ways to think about trauma, the EMDR process and the post EMDR effects. I will talk to you next week, until then, take good care, bye for now.
