EMDR Therapy targets the brain’s information processing system. During treatment planning, EMDR Therapists work to identify memories that are inadequately processed and maladaptively stored. Once these target memories are identified they are targeted for reprocessing following the EMDR Therapy standard protocol.
EMDR Therapy works by briefly exposing clients to the traumatic or adverse memory, while taxing the working memory with bilateral stimulation and orienting the brain to the present. This essentially moves the disturbing and stuck material along until it is adaptively processed.
Francine Shapiro’s has described the Adaptive Information Processing Model (AIP) this way: “the AIP model is the concept psychological self-healing, a construct based on the body’ healing response to physical injury.” She explains, “the brain much like the body is geared towards a state of mental health.”
When a new EMDR provider begins their training, they are introduced to and instructed toward a focus on disruptions in the information processing system. Most basic EMDR Therapy and other advanced EMDR trainings heavily focus on the inadequately processed and maladaptively stored memories. More specifically, how these disruptions to the normal informational processing system inform and impact on our daily lives. This, however, is not the complete picture. In my work as an EMDR Trained Therapist, Facilitator, and Trainer; I have realized how important it is to find, celebrate, and strengthen adaptively processed and stored experiences in our memory networks. Francis Shapiro saw these as the basis of health. Per Shapiro (2018) and in our work, they help provide an anchor for our work.
As we work with clients, it is vitally important to enhance new adaptive experiences. We should build on the work with these experiences by also enhancing embodied adaptive memories. These adaptive experiences offer us an opportunity to grow the client’s mastery of trying new skills and having more positive interactions with themselves and others. The outcome should be a positive felt sense that they experience in their body. When I am training new EMDR Therapists, I often say our goal is to have our clients feel in their bodies what is adaptively thought in their brains. We try to build a sense of internal congruence. By spending time finding and enhancing adaptive experiences we can increase mastery and resilience for our clients today and in the future.