ļ»æEp 69 - Flying Blind - ways to help unspeakable shame. Blind to therapist protocol in EMDR therapy
āHello, and welcome back to the EMDR Doctor podcast. I'm Dr Caroline Lloyd,
These last few weeks I have been busy reading and researching about Shame, for my upcoming webinar on the 4th June - exactly 2 weeks away nowā¦ if you would like to join me please hop on my website emdrdoctor.com.au and book in via the For Therapists menu.
Iāve been down some fascinating rabbit holes, as we do when we get a bit interested in a subject, in fact today I was researching BDSM and the link to shame and history of CSA, but that is not what I am talking about today!That particular piece of the puzzle may or may not make it in to the webinar, I havenāt decided on that yet!
But one powerful tool that EMDR therapists have, aside from ājustā EMDR, which is an awesome treatment for Shame, by the way, if we take EMDR one step further, then the Blind to therapist protocol is what we need.
Sometimes, Shame is just too big, too awful, too excruciatingly uncomfortable to use talk therapy upon. Shame can be unspeakable. Sometimes clients just canāt describe in words, what they have been through, maybe what they have done, or witnessed, or known about. And in this circumstance, the Blind to therapist protocol is absolutely ideal. We donāt need to spend weeks or months or even years, as some therapies do, just to get to the stage where the client can give a verbal narrative of the event or circumstance. We can hop in to the effective treatment, and get the client some relief from the awful mire of shame.
So what is the Blind to therapist protocol? Basic EMDR protocol, just without the therapist knowing what the client is working on. Sound simple?
So we set it up with asking the client to hold the picture of the event in their minds, we ask them to identify the negative belief about themselves - we may be able to help them with this, itās likely to be something along the lines of āIām bad, Iām shameful, Iām disgusting, Iām not worth helping, I donāt deserve to be here, I donāt deserve to be aliveā
Now I probably should add in a little bit here about that last negative belief - as a therapist we do have a responsibility to assess for suicidal risk, and this is important here, but please donāt let the awareness of this get in the way of doing the effective therapy. Of course you will know your client well, and please donāt take my words as being individual supervision or consultation, as I donāt know your client, but please be aware that this NC may not be about suicidality, it may be about the pain of Shame.
So we set up the picture which is blind to therapist, the NC which we will likely know about, the PC which is essential to establish with this protocol, and we might find that the PC is something like Iām OK, Iām human, I can cope, I can live with this, I did my best.
So we have the picture, the NC, the PC, the emotion which is likely shame, the body sensation and the SUD, all of those are explicit, just the picture or event is unknown to the therapist.
And then we process! With the feedback, we can ask - is it changing? Is something new coming up, or just check in with the level of distress.
So this has been a bit of a technical podcast with lots of detail for the EMDR practitioners listening, but I do think that this can be helpful to clients listening, if you are really concerned about processing a memory that holds a lot of shame, and you donāt want to disclose to your therapist. If you want to try the Blind to therapist protocol, you can always ask your EMDR therapist to listen to this podcast!
I will just mention some other uses for the Blind to therapist protocol - we can use it with people who have confidentiality constraints - police officers, therapists, doctors, lawyers, people in the armed forces. Confidentiality can be a really difficult thing to navigate, and prevents a lot of people getting adequate care for difficult memories, so this is ideal for them.
Vicarious trauma avoidance - some clients will not tell you details about traumatic events to protect you from ācontaminationā from their experiences
Cultural issues - avoiding amplifying distress of āfellow nationalsā, or not wanting to cause dissent
Communication barriers - like stammering, or word finding issues, or Autism/ADHD exhaustion in filtering or finding the ārightā words, aphasia
Translator confidentiality - to avoid information accidentally being leaked or shared
The downside of the Blind to therapist protocol is that the therapist canāt assist the client so much if they get stuck on something, as itās harder to pick the adaptive information the client needs if we donāt know where they are. But essentially, we can and do trust the clientās adaptive network to have some adaptive information to help work through, and there are some lovely elegant blind interweaves that we can use to help in a general way. If you owed like some specific advice about this, then book in for some supervision with me, via my website.
Essentially, group EMDR is a blind protocol, as we cannot know the event our clients choose to work on, so every time we are working with EMDR in a group, we are using a blind protocol. Which can be hard to get used to, if you commonly work in the 1:1 space.
So therapist discomfort can be a bit of a hurdle to use the Blind protocol. If youāre a therapist listening to this, please be brave and try it - if we get over our initial discomfort at not knowing the details of the session, we can help our clients process some really painful and shame- holding memories, and this can be just incredibly helpful to the client. So be brave!
āIf you haven't tried it yet, then I would really encourage you to try it. If you want to try it, , working with a friend or a volunteer first, that can be a really nice way to just to, um, dip a toe in and get to know the protocol a little bit more. So be brave is the take-home message to EMDR therapists who are thinking about using the blind therapist protocol. It's really helpful.
So if you require a little bit more assistance in implementing this in your practice, feel free to reach out for consultation or supervision via my website, themdrdoctor.com.au.
And if you would like to learn more about shame, I am holding a webinar in a couple of weeks, as I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast. So this webinar- I hope will be very helpful to people, to therapists who may have trouble identifying shame, may have a little bit of an aversion to it themselves, may be stuck in collusion with their client to avoid working on shameful issues, and thus may feel stuck in their work with their clients. So I would love to teach you some more about working with shame, help you with some practical suggestions and help you understand the role and the function of shame in our inner life. So feel free to hop onto my website, emdrdoctor.com.au and book in for the webinar happening in a couple of weeks on the 4th of June. And it will be available, if you're listening to this podcast sometime later, it will be available as an on-demand webinar.
So I hope this has been interesting or helpful to you in some way. I will talk to you again next week. In the meantime, take good care. Bye for now.
