Phase 2 can look very different for each person. It depends on what your background is. There are a number of capacities you need to be able to reprocess memories safely and effectively.

So again, looking at your foundation and what is needed for you to be successful in the reprocessing phases.

• You must have enough core stability to feel safe in letting things change.

• You need to have a good relationship with your therapist so that you can let them support you, especially if difficult memories come up.

• You need to be able to dual focus. This mean you have to be able to stay in present time while recalling past experiences, so you reprocess a memory, not relive it. It also means you have to be able to do two things at once. Internally watch the old memory while moving your eyes during reprocessing. This takes some practice for many people.

• You also need to be able to let whatever happens happen. This means that if you have emotions come and go you allow that to occur. If a physical sensation gets worse, you can just observe and let it change. When other memories come up you just observe them so your innate wisdom can do its job.

• There may be other skills or capacities you will need as well. So, you may need to do some or extensive resource development. Everyone is different.

• You will need to stay in window of tolerance: be able to bring a memory to mind with enough disturbance for reprocessing to occur, and not get overwhelmed by the memory(ies) so reprocessing can occur. This means you will need a variety of tools for self-regulation if a lot of upset occurs. Since you continue to reprocess in between sessions you may need these tools to support you as reprocessing continues.

• You will need to be able to give your clinician enough information both during reprocessing (without going into detail), and what happened between session. This allows them to know where to guide you next.

  • EMDR is not talk therapy, so you have to give BRIEF feedback so your therapists knows where to guide you next.

  • The longer you talk you will lose where you left off physically and emotionally, and restarting the eye movements may not work as well.

  • Your prefrontal cortex can be very good at going into defensive/protective mode and you lose the moment of change.

  • With EMDR therapy the longer you talk the less you get done.

In Phase 2 I use various tools to prepare someone for reprocessing. The tools I use helps both myself and my client see what internal resources they have and build in anything that is missing. If there has been extensive trauma it may take quite some time to complete Phase 2. I help people build a core sense of self and stability so they will be able to reprocess memories. Many people experience improvement in their circumstances with Phase 2 work before getting to the reprocessing. These same tools are often helpful if someone gets stuck in reprocessing.

Some of the skills and internal resources you will develop in Phase 2 will use slow eye movements to strengthen your experience of the resources. For me, I am looking for clients to have the “felt sense” of the resource, not just an imagination of the resource as it is often a fantasy reality of the resource and is not embodied when allows the resource to show up spontaneously.

For instance, let’s say you would like to be able to feel more confident when disagreeing with someone. If you have the “felt sense” of feeling confident when you engage with somone who may disagree with you, you may find yourself spontaneously not taking in their upset or discomfort because you are feeling more confident in speaking up. Sometimes you may not notice a change, but others may comment or compliment you in handling things differently that you were not even aware of. There really is not force of effort once a resource is embodied. (That is my body-centered psychotherapy training talking.)

Slow eye movements will strengthen and enhance experience. We only use it with positive or neutral resources. We do not want to link into anything negative in this phase, so we go slow.

This gives you the opportunity to become familiar with eye movements and learn how to dual focus. Dual focus is literally doing two things at once. Moving eyes while paying attention to what you are experiencing internally. Notice the attention is on your internal experience not what the eyes are seeing or looking at. The other part of dual focus is to be able to look at and notice your internal experience while staying in present time. This is not about going back in time and reliving a memory. That is what talk therapy does, and it is often retraumatizing. Looking at the memory from present time is what disrupts how it is stored.

Once you have completed Phase 2, you return to Phase 1 for treatment planning.

You will choose a Presenting Issue to address and Create a Reprocessing Plan for that Presenting Issue.

One of the things to know about the phases is that you will be revisiting them. They do not go in order 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 and you are done. You will be moving around them until all of your Presenting Issues are resolved, meaning your symptoms will no longer be present.

Phase 1: History Taking & Treatment Planning

When you start therapy, your therapist needs to do a Biopsychosocial history to identify:

• What have you come to therapy to resolve?

• What your life experience has been like. Your life experiences create how you perceive and experience the world.

  • Developmentally, starting from in utero, there are many very important activities and experiences that form a core stable foundation. If you do not have them or they have been breached the core foundation is not stable. You are missing resources not available to you for negotiating even simple things in life: focus, attention, impulse control, skills in math & reading, sensory integration, emotional regulation. This is like building a house. If you build the house on a swamp, it will eventually collapse under pressure. If you build it on a strong, stable foundation it will support you.

Visit “What Does Your Foundation Look Like?” for more information.

• What has your ability to be and feel connected to others been like.

• Do you have a sense of safety and security?

• Can you identify what you need, and can you get your needs met?

• Have you experienced losses? How many and how far back in life?

• Have you experienced physical, emotional or sexual abuse. How often and how far back in life?

• Have you experienced medical trauma? When, what kind and how often?

• What medications and supplements are you on? Do you use substances? What, how often and is there a dependency and/or addiction? If you do have a hx of dependency/addiction, for how long and is it current?

  • Some medications block your ability to reprocess.

  • Some drugs and medicinal plants specifically work to block emotions and sensations. This means when you attempt to reprocess a memory the emotions and sensation related to that memory cannot be accessed for reprocessing.

  • There are ways to work with all of this in Phase 2 so reprocessing can be successful.

• How do you take care of yourself (diet, exercise, sleep, etc.)

• How do you handle stress? What tools to you have, do you use them and do they work for you?

• What does your support system look like?

• Can you dual focus? Stay in present time will recalling memories. Observe your internal experience while moving your eyes.

• Can you observe old memories without reliving them.

• Can you allow yourself to move from upset to positive emotional experiences?

• What internal resources you have and what is missing.

• What you will need to be successful in EMDR therapy.

• This helps identify what you will need in Phase 2 to prepare you for reprocessing memory targets, and make sure you have the internal stabilization needed to handle what may come up when reprocessing memories.

Once the history has been gathered and reviewed. It is helpful to create what I call a Master Plan. A Master Plan is where you identify Presenting Issues (what you want to resolve). These could be:

• Negative beliefs: I’m not good enough. I never do anything right. I don’t have a right to exist. I’m a burden

• Patterns of behavior: overreacting when someone gives you feedback, lashing out in anger if someone disagrees with you, wanting to isolate and avoid people.

• Emotional Patterns: Feeling something is wrong with you, powerless, unsafe, like you don’t belong

• Having been abused (physically, sexually and/or emotionally)

This Master Plan is a working document that you can add to as you progress in your EMDR therapy. It is helpful to list symptoms you experience at the beginning of therapy and the Presenting Issues. This way as you work your way through your therapy process you will be able to see things resolve. My clients find this helpful because they can track and see their progress.

People usually have more than one Presenting Issue when they start therapy, so this is a good way to keep track of things and make sure everything is resolved.

Then you move to Phase 2.

If you decide to do EMDR therapy this will help you understand some of what the process is. Things are not linear in EMDR therapy and yet they are in some ways. But people are not linear beings either, as much as everyone in most circumstances attempt to try to make us linear.

One of the things I often say to my clients is that nothing I do makes sense. The things I did that made sense did not work in freeing people from limitations. The things I do that don’t make sense tend to facilitate change. EMDR is one of those things.

It is important to know that once you have the experience of EMDR in the different phases, then the light bulb turns on and a whole new awareness opens up. This includes therapists. When they come to EMDR training they will try to fit EMDR therapy into what they already know. But it does not fit. Other modalities can fit into phase 2 of EMDR therapy but how we conceptualize what is going on the build plans for reprocessing memory networks is very different. Therapists are often surprised and even shocked at how fast things can change when they experience the practicum part of the training.

I often tell my clients, there is a method to my madness and once they have the experience of the different phases and parts of the plans for reprocessing, things will open up in a whole new way.

It is often hard for people to do EMDR therapy because they don’t “understand” it. Most often this comes from the fantasy that they just come to session and the therapist waves their hand in front of them and they get better. This perspective comes from way back at the start of EMDR therapy when it was new and just a technique. It has evolved into a full blown 8 phase protocol. And depending on the person and their extent of trauma, neglect, abandonment, etc., it can take a while to prepare them for being able to reprocess memories. Sometime extensive preparation and specialty protocols depending on the circumstances.

There are many therapists who have taken the EMDR training in the past, and especially in the beginning who have not kept up on the changes. So the information they pass on is no longer accurate. The EMDR International Association encourages EMDR practitioners to repeat the Basic training periodically to keep up on the changes.

The good news about the EMDR community is that we don’t say it doesn’t work we ask how it could work for people with more complicated circumstances. So much had been developed over the decades.

8 Phases

As I mentioned before, EMDR therapy is not a technique. It was when I first learned it (1991). Dr. Shapiro had only been teaching EMDR for a couple of years. Not much was known about it back then, only that it seemed to have promising results.

Dr Shapiro did a really smart thing; she created a newsletter and invited people she trained to send in the results they had with the clients they worked with. To give feedback on what seemed to work and not work with various mental health issues. She also really pushed for research.

Over time it was clear some people had difficulty reprocessing. Reprocessing was overwhelming for people with severe and complicated histories of abuse, neglect, addiction and so on. What I love about the EMDR community is that we don’t say it doesn’t work. We ask how could it work for that population? This is how EMDR as a technique evolved into its own form of psychotherapy. And, how other protocols were developed for more complicated circumstances.

We realized we had to do extensive work to create stability for someone with severe and complicated histories to be able to handle reprocessing. Protocols for building internal resources that can create internal stability.

I had been working in locked psychiatric programs, social service programs, and mental health programs with people who have a great deal of trauma, neglect, abandonment and worse from early in their lives and throughout their lives. They did not do well with reprocessing. It became my mission to find what could create the internal stability.

There are eight phases in EMDR therapy. They do not go in order. You will be moving in and out of phases as you progress in your therapy.

What do we do in EMDR therapy?

I will continue with describing the phases in the next post.

EMDR therapy is a completely different kind of therapy than you may have encountered before. EMDR therapy is a completely different way to conceptualize what is causing distress in someone’s life. It is not like traditional forms of psychotherapy that focus on trying to change cognitions and behaviors, to change things. EMDR therapy does not try to control or manage symptoms. It is a steep learning curve for most therapists. You have to unlearn what you have learned to be proficient at EMDR therapy. There is much to learn from a very different perspective.

Dr Francine Shapiro, the originator of EMDR therapy, discovered that rapid lateral eye movements while recalling a disturbing memory desensitized the memory and reprocessed memories with similar components at the same time.

She realized that we all have an innate capacity to move towards health psychologically. Just like how our body can heal cuts on its own. When something difficult, challenging or overwhelming happens, as we get through it our innate capacity to heal kicks in. We often learn things from the experience that we can apply to future circumstances.

If you have spontaneously reprocessed a memory, when you recall the memory, it will have less and eventually no physical or emotional charge to it. It will not bring up negative thoughts. It may look faded or distant or black and white. People often report that it is just an old memory and not relevant any longer. These are just some ways people describe the difference in a memory after it has been reprocessed.

Sometimes circumstances interfere with our ability to reprocess a memory organically. For instance, the physical or emotional experience was too overwhelming. Or something interfered with our ability to learn from the experience and apply the learning to the future. Or the same thing kept happening over and over, so we never get over it.

When we have an experience that has a component of a previous memory (sights, sound, smells, sensation, location, similar circumstance, etc.) we will react much like we did in the previous experience.

Essentially past experiences inform present circumstances. What Dr. Shapiro called the AIP Model (Adaptive Information Processing Model). We may react as if a past experience is happening again even if the present circumstance is different. This happens with both positive and negative past experiences. Essentially, we see the world based on what we have experienced in our lives. This is why there are so many divergent experiences of the same circumstances.

We tend to project our experience out onto what is happening in the moment and onto other people. Depending on life experience and conditioning, you may see what is happening as positive or negative.

For instance, you are in a car accident. Every time you drive down that same road you get jittery and fear you will be in an accident. Or every time you see a white truck you start to panic. In this situation the location and the color and type of vehicle is a trigger. You will react as if you are in danger even if that vehicle and circumstance on the road currently are not causing a problem.

Or, why war veterans can have flashbacks of a mission gone bad even when they are state side in a safe environment. There would have been a component of the memory in their environment, a sight, sound, smell, taste, circumstance, sensation that was present during the mission that triggered the flashback. It could have been a simple as the sound of a bird or the wind that was the same in both situations.

I had a firefighter once who reported being triggered every time they drove by the location where they got injured and every time their neighbor put out their recycling. Ok, so the location makes sense but why the recycling? There was no recycling going on at the scene. The sound of the class clinking in the recycling bin triggered the memory of the glass breaking on the windshield of the car that hit him.

The brain stores a memory in different parts of the brain based on its components, sights, sounds, smells, sensation, tastes, location, circumstances and so on. The other than conscious parts of the brain can process billions of bits of information per second so it will associate current circumstances with past information lightning fast. It helps us apply learning to present circumstances but if past memories are not reprocessed it can give us unhelpful responses.

I often tell clients that EMDR therapy is like jump starting a battery in your car. When you get to the reprocessing phases of EMDR therapy, and you start reprocessing old memories your organic capacity to reprocess is activated. You continue to reprocess outside of therapy sessions. You essentially get more for your money since you continue to reprocess outside of your therapy sessions.

It can take a while to get to the reprocessing part of EMDR therapy, depending on your history, internal resources, ability to let go and let whatever happens happen, and your ability to change states from upset to calm. More about the EMDR therapy phases below.

When Dr Shapiro originally developed EMDR it was just a technique applied to upsetting memories. Over time there is much we have learned about EMDR and how it can be most effective. Sometimes people became too overwhelmed when reprocessing a memory, so we had to build in a phase to assess a person’s ability to reprocess memories and prepare them if they are not ready. EMDR therapy is now its own form of psychotherapy.

EMDR therapy is a comprehensive therapy all its own. Originally when it was just a technique. Now it has evolved into a full form of Psychotherapy. Some clinicians are still using it as a technique. Integrating it in with other things they do. This is different than from receiving EMDR therapy that comes from the benefit of its comprehensive approach that allows for other modalities to be used in Phase 2 to prepare people for reprocessing. More on the phases in the next article.