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.
Perhaps becoming more aware of “the body in therapy” is an idea you have heard lots about in recent years and with which you agree in principle? However, as a potential therapy client or even an interested professional, you still don’t necessarily feel you have a complete hold on – why and how does the body actually matter in therapy?
Orienting is a skill you already have (because it’s hard-wired into your nervous system). But you can learn to strengthen or recover it during stressful times to help to communicate to your brain and body that you are safe during times when stress and overwhelm take you back to traumatic memory or forward in anticipation of something difficult.
Orienting helps you to focus on your external environment and lean into cues around that tell you where you are now, is safe.
The popular grounding technique of tuning into the five senses uses orienting to bring you into the moment:
Name
5 things you can see
4 things you can hear
3 things you can feel
2 smells and
1 taste
You could also try:
👀 Look around you and name one item to the front, one behind you, one to the left and one to right. Add extra detail if you like by going up then down.
✏️ Choose an object nearby and describe it in detail to yourself
🤚🏽 Reach out and touch the nearest wall or surface. Place both hands on and describe the feeling in detail.
👣 Take your shoes off and stand on the earth.
Psychology is full off fancy words for natural, inbuilt strengths which we can use to our advantage. I love uncovering the brilliance in our systems. As always, these strategies are even more powerful when they’re happen in the presence of another.
My childhood best friend and I used to ask each other “can you smell your nose?” then we’d curl the tips of our noses round into themselves and genuinely investigate 🥰 I still do it sometimes and find it really soothing.
What orienting strategies do you already use or could you build on now you know the idea behind it?
Compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, humans have a unique capacity to imagine: using the evolved “thinking” brain, we can remember, make up scenarios that haven’t happened yet, and even visualise and experience things in our minds that could never be.
In this place lives great potential for creativity with which great things can be achieved: we write songs, make art, design buildings, travel into space. But there is a darker side to this creativity; when this access to abstract thinking escapes the present moment, it also has the capacity to plunge us into regret, fear, self-consciousness, anger and hatred.
Thinking in this way is primarily based in the frontal lobes of our cerebral cortex. As such, this part of the brain has grown much larger in humans than in other mammals. In this region, most of our conscious thought, higher-order thinking and executive functions (like planning, coordination and control) occur.
When we allow this part of the brain to run the show – to tell the rest of the body what to do – we can call it TOP DOWN functioning.
At this point in history – most human cultures are driven by top-down behaviour. We assert control over our bodies and our lives based on our ideas about the right way to live – the right way to be. Some great outcomes from this include reflection, understanding and wisdom. But when top-down functioning is relied upon, our bodies become mere interruptions: machines to be maintained, producing symptoms to be managed.
We learn to shut down some of our basic physiology. We direct ourselves (and our children) not to move, to breathe in certain ways, and not to feel, or at least to feel less, more quietly, with rules and restriction. This might sometimes be conscious – supressing a laugh or a cry, to hold still or to focus for longer than feels comfortable. But these habits also filter into less conscious habits like over working, over-eating and prejudicing those around us who look or behave differently to us.
Our brains find various ways (strategies) of muting or over-riding sensation. We come to operate in a kind of “sleep mode” which tells the body to be quiet and not disrupt the important work of the brain.
When more ancient brain structures and the rest of our bodies initiate behaviour – we can call this BOTTOM-UP functioning. Here we rely on information from the present, we interpret sensation and communication via our highly tuned nervous-systems using our inbuilt capacities for detection. When we practice this via mindful awareness of our body, we become aware again to the full range of information via sensation, and that listening becomes the basis for re-awakening bottom-up informed awareness and behaviour.
Its not that one is better and one is worse. They are both EPIC. Its more that we need to embrace balance – a healthy creative partnership between body (including brain) and mind.
When we practice mindful awareness of our body, we become aware again to the full range of information via feeling and sensation, and that listening becomes the basis for re-awakening bottom-up informed awareness and behaviour.
For lots of good reasons, some people are more able to feel their bodies than others.
A gentle route in is through your breath. I sit still, close my eyes, put a warm hand on my chest and follow my breath wherever it goes… in then out, at the pace my body dictates.
If that feels comfortable, I then broaden my attention by following the breath to different parts of my body (like riding on a train) and then I “jump off” the breath, landing in other body sensations.
Perhaps then I stay for a while with my heart beat, some shoulder tension or a sense of openness in my back.
I vividly remember a conversation with my Mum at a really early age about something I didn’t understand in school, and she encouraged me to ask more questions “If you don’t get it, it’s likely that others won’t too”.
There are many pathways via which emotional experience can impact our physical health but experts in this area separate the physical impacts of stress (when it’s prolonged or chronic) from the (less understood) impacts of trauma (especially on the developing) system.
Intuition and evidence tell us that our physical and mental health is influenced by a complex interaction between genes, germs, injury, aging and EXPERIENCE but do we fully understand and accept the links between emotions and biology?
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