When selecting a memory or experience for reprocessing we are often looking for the “first or worst.” That is, what experience represents the first time we experienced our negative reactions or in all the times we felt those reactions what experience was the worst. Once we have identified these touchstone memories we can begin re-processing and allow our brain to guide us to a adaptive resolution.
Here are some helpful steps to identifying important material to process:
• Identify some situation recently that upset you or is still bothering you. A situation where you recognize that your response is not matching up with the activating event. (Using a TICES Log to record the experiences is often helpful!)
• When you think of the incident what is the most disturbing part?
• What image in the memory represents the worst part of the event? For example, was it the way the person looked? Or that they walked away? Or their face?
• When you hold the emotion or image in your mind what comes up for you?
• Where do you feel it in your body?
• What negative thought goes along with it?
• Now hold together the image and the negative thoughts and feel the emotions in your body.
• Holding that thought, think back to your childhood and locate the earliest memory where you felt or thought that way.
• Ask yourself, on a scale from 0-10 where 0 is “no distress” and 10 represents “the worst distress you can imagine” how distressing does the old memory feel to you now?
• Write down the memory in a notebook across from the recent event.
As we are working together remember it’s ok for our targets to change. Sometimes we start with one memory and find later that our brain has led us to a more important memory/experience that needs to be reprocessed. As always in EMDR, you are the one in control and it is your brain that is doing the healing and knows what it needs.
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