What is IFS-informed EMDR?
Hopefully you arrive at this blog with a basic understanding of Internal Family Systems (IFS) and Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapies, separately. If not, I warmly invite you to read both prior blog articles to access these individual introductions.
It’s helpful to know a little bit about what EMDR is before deciding whether or not it could be the right therapy for you. In order to understand what kinds of presentations/problems EMDR is most suitable for, first it’s important to discuss some of the basics about how traumatic experience gets stored and stuck, according to the theory underpinning EMDR.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a model of therapy which understands the human psyche as an “internal system” made up of multiple parts, very much like an external family or system. The Internal System includes a Self, Protective parts, and Vulnerable (or exiled) parts.
One that I come back to time and time again, is neural networks in the brain, as well trodden paths.
If we’ve been used to feeling, thinking or acting in a certain way, based on what made sense to us when we were much younger, we might very easily (likely without awareness) just always feel, think or act in that way, because that “way” has a well rehearsed pattern, very literally wired into our chemistry.
We might begin to recognise that that response is unhelpful but even then it can be really hard to catch it before it plays out in our reality.
Well trodden paths are much easier to walk. Even when they don’t feel good, or cause us problems in the longer term, they are our automatic response and while we might dislike the route, it’s comfortable, like a smelly old shoe.
In therapy, often my work is to help someone identify that old pattern.
Importantly we explore and understand why it began – because there is inevitably an entirely sensible function, even to the most complicated “patterns” and responses.
Then we spend some time spotting it together as it happens, perhaps between sessions, or perhaps between us.
We work out how someone might want to swap their old patterns, for newer, more helpful ones. Responses that are more appropriate to how life is now.
Then we practice walking the new path. This can be so hard because the path is far less accessible. There may be brambles and bracken, nettles and fallen down trees. Initially it takes MUCH more energy than the old path. In this work you are literally creating new neural pathways, but they are far less automatic. This is the hard work of therapy.
A client recently created his own twist on this idea by talking about making new paths in the snow. He said that therapy was like someone holding a hairdryer ahead of him 🤣.
I loved that. It can get a bit sparky 🔥 but mostly I hope, the experience is one of someone walking alongside you, helping to navigate, and guide you back to your goals when you are inevitably distracted by the old.
Your stress response is working for your safety but for many of us – the pressures of everyday life can feel like “stress” is the constant state.
Ever feel like you’re caught up in old patterns of thinking, feeling and doing with no clue how to escape? Here is a helpful analogy we use often in therapy:
What if what underlies these distressing experiences was less often understood as a mental illness, and more often recognised as an adaptive response to adversity, social inequality and the associated stress and trauma?
It can be helpful to know that your reactions, behaviour, emotional responses and thought patterns in any moment will likely occur much faster than you can control with any positive thinking or snazzy distraction technique. Its really helpful to have strategies available, but the truth is, your experience is determined much less via conscious choice and much more by your early experience and the way your nervous system learned to respond to the world.
Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén