EMDR’s Resourcing Tool: A Support in Challenging Situations

All of us have difficult conversations or tough people that we need to face at some time in our lives.  It could be a confrontative conversation with a boss, a tense conversation with a spouse or family member, or walking into a stressful or anxiety-inducing situation.  For an addict in recovery, you might notice triggers that propel you into a desire to act out in your addiction.  For those with trauma, re-engaging with a person, place, or circumstance that is associated with your trauma may lead to fear and anxiety as it brings the memory flooding back.

How can you walk into these challenging moments with a greater sense of confidence and courage?

EMDR, or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, is a commonly used treatment for PTSD and complex trauma.  Part of the process of EMDR involves bringing awareness to past traumatic memories, which can feel scary or uncomfortable.  Because of this, before the processing of memories begins, you’ll be prompted to create what are called resources.

These resources associated with EMDR are not only effective for preparing you to face uncomfortable, scary, or painful memories.  They can also help you prepare for everyday moments of distress in the present and future.

What are resources?

Resources are places, people, feeling states, animals, objects, etc. that you hold in your imagination to create an internal emotional shift.  For example, a commonly used resource is peaceful place visualization, in which you imagine a place that feels calm and peaceful for you.  Other resources can include supportive figures in your life, such as a nurturing caregiver.  You may also find resources in character qualities or traits you display or have observed in others.  By connecting to these resources in an imaginal capacity, you can connect to the emotional and physical experience of them. 

In EMDR, we couple the imaginal connection to these resources with bilateral stimulation (BLS).  These could be the back-and-forth eye movements associated with EMDR but could also involve tapping alternate sides of the body.  In her book Tapping In, Laurel Parnell teaches strategies to “tap in” these resources using BLS, and much of the resourcing work in this article comes from her work.

Resources are important in EMDR because they can increase your confidence when facing memories, as you know you have your resources as support available to you internally.  In everyday life, resources can help you transition out of a traumatic memory or painful situation.  They can be accessed in your imagination in the present when you notice yourself beginning to spiral into negative self-talk, distressing emotions, or self-destructive behaviors.  They can prepare you for future situations in which difficult emotions or experiences might arise.

How to Find Your Resources

Now that you have an idea of what resources are and when you might need to use them, let’s explore using your imagination to create some of the resources. 

Peaceful, Calm Place

Bring to mind a place that feels peaceful or calm to you.  It can be real or imaginary – a beach, a river, a forest, a room in a secluded cabin – whatever works for you.  Notice what you see, hear, smell, taste, and feel in that place.  Connect to any emotions that arise or sensations you feel in this imagined place.  You’re trying here to connect to the emotional experience: the right-brain, felt sense of the place.  What’s most important isn’t getting the imagery perfect but connecting to the emotional experience of peace or calm that the place evokes.

If you notice your mind going toward the negative and/or your emotions head in that direction, remember that this is your personalized place.  You can control the weather, who is there, whatever you need.  Alter your imagined place until it truly feels peaceful to you.  If that is too challenging based on triggering factors related to that place, consider switching to a different place.

It might be helpful to journal through this or other resources to further solidify the connection to this visualization.  You can read through this journal later to re-connect to the sensations.

Supportive Figures

These three types of supportive figures (nurturing, protective, and wise) are based on Dr. Laurel Parnell’s resourcing work in her attachment-focused EMDR approach.

Nurturing figure

Imagine a person, animal, or symbol that carries a nurturing quality.  It can be fictional or real.  You don’t have to imagine that figure nurturing you: instead, be able to observe a nurturing quality to it.  Pay attention to the sensory experience of observing that nurturing and notice how it feels in your body and the positive emotions it stirs up for you.

Protective figure

Like the nurturing figure, imagine a real or imaginary person, animal, or symbol that carries a protective quality.  You can pull ideas from movies or books.  Remember, you don’t have to imagine that figure protecting you, but instead be able to observe a protective quality in it.  Pay attention to the sensory experience of observing or receiving that protection and notice how it feels in your body and what positive emotions come up for you.

Wise figure

Finally, the wise figure is the last imaginal, supportive figure.  Here, imagine a person, animal, or symbol that you consider to be wise.  Pull the image to mind with as much detail as you can.  When you have a sense of that wise figure, observe the emotions and sensations associated with receiving or observing wisdom.

Supportive figures as a team

Once you’ve identified one or several figures in these categories, you can imagine them together with you as a team.  As you become aware of the presence of each figure, observe how to feels to have all of them on your team, backing you up. 

Character qualities

When you consider the challenge of accessing memories and/or facing difficult moments in the present or future, what resources or qualities might you need to be able to face them?  For example, if you’re considering facing a feared situation, perhaps you’d need courage.  If you’re trying to remain sober, you may need willingness and resolve.  If you are having a challenging conversation with your boss, you might need steadfastness and confidence.

Whatever the character qualities you identify, look back through your life and identify times when you have expressed or embodied that characteristic.  If you can’t think of a time when you’ve displayed that characteristic, consider someone you know or a scene you’ve observed (real or fictional) when you’ve seen that character quality on display.  As you bring attention to that image or scene, observe how you feel and what sensations come up for you, again with a focus on the positive.

Now, imagine yourself in the situation you’re fearing, carrying that character quality with you.  How would you feel?  What would change in your body language?  How might it affect what you say or do?

Container

You may find that when distressing feelings, imagery, or sensations come up, they tend to overwhelm and take over.  This can be true when processing memories, but it can also be true when thinking about entering into feared situations.

In this visualization, imagine a container of some sort, like a steamer trunk, plastic organization box, a chest with a lock, a drawer, etc.  Bring awareness to the physical characteristics of the container by identifying sensory imagery that goes along with it.  You’ll be using your imagination to place negative internal experiences into this box, so feel free to add a lock, chains, or other items that help to make the container feel like it can securely remain closed.

Then, when you’re experiencing negative emotions, fears, memories, or sensations, imagine yourself placing that material into the container to be addressed later.

How to Tap In Your Resources

With any of the above resources, simply visualizing them can bring a sense of greater peace, support, or strength.  To ramp up the power of that experience, however, you can take advantage of the brain’s natural system of strengthening through adding bilateral stimulation in the form of taps.

When you have the picture, emotion, and sensation of the positive resource in your mind’s eye, slowly alternate tapping each knee or the outside of your thigh 6-8 times slowly.  Notice if the feelings evoked by the resource increase in their positive charge.  If so, take a pause, and then do another set of 6-8 taps.  Continue this rhythm until the feeling gets as strong as it can.

You can also try tapping using the “butterfly hug”, in which you cross your arms over your chest and alternate tapping each shoulder slowly for 6-8 taps.  For a demonstration of what this looks like, watch this video.

For more support on this practice of tapping in resources, look into the book mentioned above, Tapping In by Laurel Parnell.  In this book, she gives more detailed instructions and more ideas for resources you could tap into for these difficult moments.

How to Cope With a Trauma Response: Part 2

In Part 1, we discussed how trauma responses are intense physical and emotional sensations that seem to come out of nowhere, but are often related to a trigger of a past traumatic experience.  They can be confusing and bewildering, causing a fight-flight-freeze response to arise.  They toss you out of your window of tolerance and lead you to feel uncertain about how to respond.

The first and most important step covered was how to respond to the initial impact of the trauma response.  Calming your body’s reaction to the trauma needs to happen before you can engage in critical thinking about what led to the response and how to address it more adequately in the future.  Detailed in more depth in Part 1, these calming techniques included:

• Breathing and grounding strategies to calm the nervous system

• Coping thoughts to remind yourself of distance from the traumatic experience

• Distraction techniques to focus your mind elsewhere until the intensity of the emotional response recedes

Now, we’ll get into more depth on how to approach your trauma response with curiosity instead of criticism and learn more about yourself and your needs through this exploration.

Identify the traumatic event that triggered your response.

In some cases, it is easy to connect a past traumatic event with a current trigger.  An experience in combat, a spouse’s betrayal, or physical abuse from a caregiver are all examples of experiences that may resurface in a flashback.

With other experiences, it’s more challenging to identify the trigger or what might be intensifying the experience.  As an EMDR practitioner, I often prompt my clients to connect the dots by identifying the emotion they’re feeling, where it is located in their body, and any thoughts associated with that feeling.  Then, I ask them to let their mind go back to other experiences in their life where they’ve had a similar response.

Sometimes, what comes out of that exercise may feel unrelated to the trigger, but let your mind make those connections and be curious about what it finds.  The purpose of this exercise is to validate your experience and help you understand that you’re not crazy: this is a trauma response.  If you notice this experience brings up even more emotional intensity, mitigate it with some of the self-soothing, coping thoughts, or breathing practices discussed earlier.

Ask yourself what you needed then.

Once you recognize the event that triggered the negative reaction, you can then reflect on what needs might have gone unmet or what threats were occurring that left you feeling unsafe.  For example, in an abuse situation, the need may have been for protection or escape.  In a major car accident, safety and help may have been the primary needs.  For a betrayed partner, empathy and connection may be needs they’ve experienced when dealing with addiction.

It may take some digging to get at the core needs you feel here.  Often, they aren’t right at the surface.  It may help to take a look at your reaction to the trauma: if your immediate response to a harsh word or anger from your spouse is to run and hide, this might indicate the escape you needed from an abusive family member.  Once you’re aware of these needs, then you can more easily bring them into the present moment. 

Seek healthy ways to get your needs met.

In some situations, you can easily get your needs met.  For example, if your traumatic experience relates to living with an abuser in the past or a combat experience that occurred several years ago, you can remind yourself that you are no longer in that situation, it is over, and you are safe in this moment now.  This can help increase a sense of safety.  Grounding strategies work well at supporting this need, to bring you into awareness of the present moment and connect you to that sense of present-moment safety.

In other situations, there might be a few more steps you need to take to receive support for your needs.  Perhaps you’re still living in the place of trauma, as when your spouse is a recovering addict and you can’t lean on them for support or trust.  You may have had a traumatic experience at work, but you aren’t able to quit or leave your job, and so you feel anxiety or stress each time you walk through the door into your office.

When you can’t immediately talk yourself down from a lack of safety, consider opportunities to meet your needs in healthy ways.  For the betrayed partner, seek out a therapy or support group or helpful, understanding friends with whom you can talk to receive empathy.  Practice self-validation of your experience and acknowledge to yourself that it makes sense why you would feel unsafe.  Set boundaries in your workplace or in your relationships to meet needs for protection and security.

Consider trauma-based therapy with a trained counselor.

The strategies listed above and in the previous post can help in some situations, but if you notice your trauma triggers aren’t going away, it may be time to consider more formal therapy to address some of the trauma.  EMDR is a method of psychotherapy that directly addresses and reprocesses traumatic events so that they don’t continue to hang around in your mind and plague you with intense triggers and flashbacks.  Good trauma counseling can help you create deeper change to see lasting resolution from the traumatic memories.

Understanding the Window of Tolerance and How Trauma Throws You Off Balance

Have you ever felt out of control of your emotions?  Overtaken by anger or rage?  Swarmed by anxious thoughts and worries? Confused by the intensity of your emotional reactions?

What about feeling shut down emotionally? No matter how hard you try, you can’t seem to feel anything.  You’re disconnected from relationships and others, and you coast through your day feeling numb.

Chances are, if you’ve had this happen to you, you’ve been outside of your window of tolerance. 

What is the window of tolerance?

Coined by Dr. Dan Siegel, the term “window of tolerance” describes the space where your level of arousal (how alert you are) matches up with what is required for you to do.  This window is the space where you can approach day-to-day life most effectively, handling emotions without losing control and making clear-headed decisions with rational thought.

Imagine an average day where you aren’t troubled by too much stress, but you’re still alert and able to focus on your tasks.  Typically, this would place you right in the center of your window of tolerance: you’re not facing anything beyond what you can handle.  You can experience emotions without being overtaken by them and feel safe in general.

Let’s say a minor stressor comes up: you get a phone call from your boss that requires you to do additional work, or an email comes in from your child’s teacher about misbehavior in their class.  That stressor will increase your level of arousal, maybe even to put you at the edge of your window of tolerance, but if you’re still within that window you can handle the stress without getting too out of sorts.

Our brains are designed to handle the ups and downs of emotions and experience by remaining within this window of tolerance.  We may have unconscious coping mechanisms in place that help us handle that stress, or the passage of time brings us back to the center of that window.

The National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine (NICABM) has provided this infographic to help you visualize the window of tolerance.

What happens when I go outside the window?

When a circumstance, stressor, or trigger is enough to throw you outside the window of tolerance, you enter into survival mode.  Outside the window of tolerance, the prefrontal cortex of your brain (involved in impulse control, decision-making, and regulating emotions) shuts down.

If your level of arousal is too high and jumps above the window of tolerance, you’re experiencing hyperarousal.  Usually this is the initial response when a stressor throws you off balance.  Hyperarousal comes from your fight-or-flight adrenaline response, which can show up with increased heart rate, racing thoughts, digestive issues, or hypervigilance in your surroundings.  You might feel an intense wave of anxiety, panic, or anger.  Your emotions can be overwhelming and out of control.

If your level of arousal is too low and dips below the window of tolerance, this is hypoarousal.  This comes from a freeze and shut-down response, often as a reaction to the adrenaline rush of hyperarousal.  Hypoarousal can look a lot like depression.  You might notice lack of motivation, exhaustion, and feeling numb and disconnected from emotions.

How Trauma Affects the Window of Tolerance

If you’ve experienced trauma, whether big T (like a natural disaster or prolonged abuse) or little t (like gaslighting or emotional manipulation that adds up over time), you know that reminders of those experiences can bring you back to how it felt then.  These triggers happen out of nowhere.  A sound, smell, or location can send you into a negative spiral.  Often, these triggers go unnoticed and you’re left feeling anxious, depressed, or some combination of the two without really knowing why.  Other times, these are obvious reminders that trigger flashbacks or physical reactions in your body.

If you have experienced trauma, your window of tolerance shrinks.  The traumatic experience has likely taught you that the world is unsafe and unpredictable.  Triggers related to the trauma also increase emotional response, skyrocketing you out of your window of tolerance before you’re even aware of what’s happening.

Because the window of tolerance is smaller, you’re likely to fluctuate more often through hyperarousal and hypoarousal.  Something as simple as that call from your boss or email from your child’s teacher could send you into an anxious spiral. 

In some cases, when you’ve been outside of your window of tolerance for a long period of time, clinical levels of anxiety or depression can develop. Survivors of trauma may learn to adapt to fluctuations between hyperarousal or hypoarousal by moving toward unhealthy behaviors, such as addictions, to manage their discomfort.

How can I stay in my window of tolerance?

There are healthy alternatives to addictions or other destructive ways of coping that can help you to return to your window of tolerance.

• Breath work and grounding. Bring yourself into the present moment by taking a few deep breaths.  Use a breathing technique like four-square breathing or the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding exercise to help you remember that you’re in the present.

• Check your thoughts. Talk to yourself about what’s going on in the present.  Question whether the feelings of panic or lack of safety are based in factual reality, or if they’re an echo of the past trauma.  Affirm yourself for changes you’ve made and work you’ve done or are doing to heal from the trauma.

• Self-care. When you notice your emotions getting out of control, think of that as a red flag indicating your need for self-care.  This can include things like going for a walk, taking a hot shower, giving yourself a few minutes to breathe, or calling a friend.  Look for self-soothing actions that help you not to be overcome by the emotion and ground you in the present

• Connection with loved ones.  Feeling supported and cared for by your loved ones can serve as an important part of self-care when you’re reeling from a trauma-related trigger.  Connect with your loved ones via phone call, text, or in-person meeting to remind you of their present role in your life. 

Expanding Your Window of Tolerance

The solutions above can be great in an emergency when you find that you’re already outside of the window of tolerance.  But if you’ve experienced trauma and are coping with a smaller window of tolerance, these will only provide a temporary fix.  Luckily, it is possible to grow that window of tolerance with focused work.

• Therapy. Creating space to process and deal with the impact of trauma on your everyday life with a professional counselor or psychologist can help create a buffer for your emotional reactions.  Your relationship and connection with your therapist is the most valuable part of any therapy relationship, moreso than what technique that therapist uses.  Find someone with whom you feel comfortable and safe and who can help you stay within the window of tolerance in your sessions, as healing can’t occur when you’re outside of that window.

• EMDR. As an EMDR-trained clinician, I have seen EMDR change the game with clients who have survived trauma.  EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) helps process and reorganize the traumatic memories in your brain such that they aren’t creating such strong emotional reactions.  This technique replaces the negative narratives and emotions from those memories with a more grounded and centered perspective coupled with positive, affirming words.

• Regular meditation practice.  While the short version of meditation and breathing mentioned above can help in a pinch, regular meditation practice can do wonders for extending the window of tolerance.  Doing regular breath work over time can create a habit that develops into a reflex to react to stress with conscious breathing.

Releasing Your Body from Trauma's Grip: A Review of The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk

If you’ve experienced a traumatic event, you know the symptoms that follow.  It could be physical or emotional pain directly related to the trauma, but also symptoms in response to reminders of the event once you’re physically healed.  You might be dealing with panic or out-of-control flashbacks that pull you into re-experiencing the trauma.  You may have trouble putting words to what happened to you, with gaps in your memory or difficulty placing a beginning, middle, and end to your experience. 

Bessel van der Kolk, in his book The Body Keeps the Score, describes the experience of holding trauma in our bodies both through changes to the structures of our brain and effects of trauma on daily living for those who have experienced traumatic events. 

In his 40+ years of clinical experience as a psychiatrist, van der Kolk has done extensive research on the effects of trauma on brains and bodies of children and adults.  His focus on neuroscience and attachment form the basis of his points in his book.  

How This Book is Organized

How Trauma Affects the Brain and Body

Van der Kolk begins the book giving background information about trauma and how it impacts both the structures of the brain and interpersonal relationships.  He discusses how trauma activates your fight-or-flight response in the amygdala, or emotional center of your brain.  This affects not only how you remember and tell the story (typically more images than biographical details), and it also changes how that information is stored in your brain.

He normalizes traumatized individuals’ difficulty improving, not because they don’t want to, but because of the impact of the symptoms and the weight of self-blame they carry in response.  This can cause physical symptoms and reactions in the body that echo long after the traumatic event has ended.  It can affect their lives as they lose their ability to focus or concentrate, they dissociate or disconnect emotionally, and they have difficulty feeling safe with other people.

“When the subject of blame arises, the central issue that needs to be addressed is usually self-blame – accepting that the trauma was not their fault, that it was not caused by some defect in themselves, and that no one could ever have deserved what happened to them.”

— Bessel van der Kolk

The Impact of Trauma in Childhood

Next he moves on to discuss the impact of childhood trauma and insecure attachment on adults.  He highlights insights from research with children and teens to highlight the detrimental effects of trauma and how it can be reversed.

One insight he shares is that how we cope with trauma as children usually translates into how we cope as adults.  We learn to survive amidst chaos using certain strategies, some of which can include addiction, destructive relationships, or other unhealthy patterns.  Recognizing where these patterns originated can release some of the self-blame you carry. 

“Many traumatized children and adults simply cannot describe what they are feeling because they cannot identify what their physical sensations mean…trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies.”

— Bessel van der Kolk

How to Treat Trauma

Luckily, trauma is not a death sentence, because our brains are designed with healing mechanisms in place.  During this section, van der Kolk highlights several different methods of psychotherapy that can help heal the effects of trauma, such as EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing), yoga, internal family systems therapy, writing, theater, psychomotor therapy, group therapy, and others. 

He speaks about using an approach to trauma treatment that focuses both on top-down interventions (strengthening the control center of the brain with activities such as mindfulness and yoga) and bottom-up interventions (regulating the emotional brain through breathing, touch, and movement).  He emphasizes that revisiting the trauma is an essential part of this process, but it needs to be done when you are feeling safe and grounded in the present moment.  Ultimately, he believes (and I agree) that experiential knowledge is much more powerful than intellectual knowledge, and therapy should incorporate these aspects.

“More than anything else, being able to feel safe with other people defines mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives.”

— Bessel van der Kolk

How to Use This Book

If you are someone who has experienced trauma or helps others who have been traumatized, The Body Keeps the Score will be a helpful resource to put words and explanations to what you feel and experience.  You might discover a completely new perspective on your story of trauma as a result.

Begin with the first section of the book if you are curious to understand how trauma affects the brain.  His anecdotes about individuals who have experienced trauma coupled with images of brain scans illustrate the connection between trauma and the brain.  My guess is that you’ll find your story to be more common than you realized.

In particular, I think the first section of the book is helpful for women who have experienced sexual assault or other violent crimes.  He speaks at length about the freeze response of the brain that shuts down and inhibits the victim’s ability to fight back against their attacker.  This survival response often becomes a source of self-blame after the traumatic event.  Knowing it is a natural biological reality to shut down can lift some of that blame.

If you’re interested in the concept of attachment and how trauma during childhood can affect development, read the middle section of the book, where van der Kolk shares research insights into the impact of attachment on children.  He speaks about the impact of a caregiver’s ability to emotionally attune to their children and respond to their needs so that children can learn to self-regulate.  Children who don’t receive that attunement can grow up to be anxious (feeling too much) or avoidant (not feeling at all).

If you want to learn more about a particular type of therapy to treat your trauma, jump ahead to Section Five of the book, where van der Kolk outlines the different methods of therapy that have been helpful in his experience of treating trauma.  As an EMDR practitioner, I enjoyed how he described the way a typical EMDR session works, as that can give you an idea of what to expect.

Overall, I think the combination of personal anecdotes, research, and hope this book offers make it an invaluable resource for therapists who work with traumatized clients, but also for those who are seeking to heal from their personal stories of trauma.