By Carsten Dernedde. Michelle Griffiths-Reeve and Joe Kearney
Mike Rivers, Chair, welcomed us to the first in-person CPD and Networking Event in Ely since 2019 in the Ely Beet Club, a venue of many past such adventures.
With Carsten Dernedde lined up for the end of the morning and Joe Kearney ready for the afternoon, both looking into EMDR and the Body, Jo-without-an-E Gresham-Ord kicked off the day with her talk of EMDR and walking which has been a big part of her EMDR journey. A few in the audience had dabbled with it but blocking beliefs come easily to mind.
A chance encounter with an Australian psychologist was the first time Jo encountered an enthusiast for walking EMDR, and with Covid forcing us all to make choices about social distancing, Jo gave herself a push and chose walking – experimentally at first, and not yet in the best physical location. Her feeling was that it would particularly suit highly complex patients.
Jo uses the standard EMDR protocol with tweaks. She took us through the eight-phase protocol and the adaptations she has found most useful, with history-taking including a risk assessment and consent form and resourcing/phase two preparation beginning indoors and carrying on outside..
Jo described how she meets clients in the car park or close to where she’s chosen to place the walking session, starting the walk once targets have been selected, and using bursts of brisk and purposeful walking alongside the client for about 20 metres a go as the processing takes place.
In phase four, said Jo, be mindful you are walking, really noticing the foot connecting with the ground and pausing to take a breath and check in between sets. It’s up to the therapist to scan for walkers, dogs, and Jo spoke of how warmly patients appreciate that feeling that they are being kept safe.
There was a discussion about grounding, which Jo found easy in a wood where one can for example just lift the gaze with natural interweaves such as noticing a squirrel. People, she said, don’t get distracted as much as one might think, and on the contrary, the woods make the work easier.
Jo recommends taking time on site before meeting clients for real to find a half-hour circuit that allows variation.
Among Jo’s tips and tricks for this work she suggested setting a timer, carrying tissues, and checking the weather forecast. Distractions, she said, aren’t really distracting – they reinforce dual attention.
She then presented two case studies, the first a “high-flier” patient (given how most present would speak of clients, Jo apologised for using the term) whose dissociation and abandonment feelings had been difficult to spot.
Jo tried every item in her richly-stocked EMDR toolbox to widen this Individual’s window of tolerance, to no avail. “She was desperate, and I was determined”.
Within two sessions of switching to walking EMDR, the nightmares reduced and there was, said Jo, no dissociation during any of the walking sessions.
The walking sessions that cleared the trauma took three months out of a total of two-and-a-half years of therapy, enabling the emergence of memories of surgery the patient had as a child, as Jo credited the effect the walking on her own intuition for why she was able to identify the final piece of the puzzle.
Jo feels taking much of her EMDR practice outside made her a better, more innovative and also more effective therapist.
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After being inspired to take our EMDR outside and get walking, Carsten Dernedde followed Jo’s talk by connecting us to why EMDR is body work. As he succinctly put it, “the body speaks, but it mumbles, and therefore we can only listen with the body”.
To connect us to our own bodies and illuminate his points, Carsten started with an exercise where we all stood up and brought our awareness to current state, breath, building energy in our system, and finally had us all swaying and connecting with everyone in the room.
Resonance with fellow therapists was achieved and highlighted Carsten’s point that it is this dynamic between us and our clients that enables the use of EMDR to move them towards a state of safety and social engagement.
Carsten’s talk highlighted how separateness from others underpins much of the distress that is brought to therapy, and how EMDR is capable of changing these fixed long-term memory proteins into new adaptive forms by activating them in the working memory system where they become malleable and open to BLS.
Here it is the therapist’s ability to resonate with the client whilst imparting a sense of safety that the client’s system can use to reprocess adaptively. Their bodies are talking, and it is our job to listen, even when we work online, Carsten noted, as our bodies don’t need much information to resonate with each other.
As bodily-present therapists, we experience our clients’ images, and sample their emotions. Carsten highlighted how it is this connection with the client’s experiences that provides us with the intuitions we have that often lead to creative interweaves and to playful ways to generate social engagement and safety for our clients to move towards.
Carsten also noted how the subtleties of language play a role in the effectiveness of our interweaves. Noting that the language of time is always that of physical space, he encouraged us to use language such as “how much distance would you need to…”
With humour, laughter and anecdote, Carsten connected us back to why EMDR is body work, and how we can and must listen to the mumbles of our client’s bodies.
Understanding the impact of clients’ nervous system responses was the theme highlighted by Joe Kearney in his presentation. As Joe is both an EMDR and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, he has incorporated somatic elements into his work with clients.
Introducing his topic, he drew attention to the value of learning the vocabulary of sensation and also of taking account of our intergenerational genetic inheritance. When we ask clients ‘where is that in your body?’, their answer may be describing sensations that they are aware of through kinaesthetic, proprioceptive, vestibular or the autonomic nervous system channels.
He noted that people we work with may have a problematic relationship with their own bodies, due to societal expectations. As he said: the ongoing challenge is to mind the gap between what is and what will never be. The history of the client’s nervous system and its experience in the first 1000 days after conception offers a window into their presenting issues.
Joe went on to present practical body related actions which could make it easier for clients to process their traumatic and difficult memories.
He focused initially on the Orientation and Startle responses which are frequently not addressed when dealing with stress. He then took Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn and Flop nervous system reactions and demonstrated ways by which EMDR processing could be augmented by certain body actions and activities.
Joe emphasised that helping the body complete an action which it could not do at the time to assure survival lay at the root of all these nervous system reactions and that finding ways to support the body to complete these actions moved the therapy process forward.
When processing is stuck, a body intervention can often resolve the difficulty. Future templates that involve the body can be very productive. Specific body exercises can strengthen clients who have boundary issues or have experienced a boundary rupture through a traumatic event. Helping clients come out of Freeze and Flop states can prove difficult to deal with.
Joe suggested that we need to help clients mobilise their bodies in very small increments as a vast amount of energy is being contained and a sudden release may trigger people back into a dissociative state again. As the body “mumbles”, to quote Carsten’s presentation, working with the body needs to be slow and spacious.
We need to be prepared to take time for clients to become familiar with sensations and their body responses both when pressured and when at ease.
Joe’s session included several group exercises and, had time allowed, more would have been included. His post-session resources included a presentation on the Eight Phases of EMDR and further suggestions as to how body actions can be incorporated into each phase.
And finally, as this is the first time we’ve ever, in the 10 years the East Anglia Regional EMDR Group has been running, had a photograph of all of the Steering Committee together, herewith for the record is what we all look like!
