Attachment-focused EMDR (AF-EMDR) is client-centered and emphasizes a reparative therapeutic relationship using a combination of (1) Resource Tapping™ (Parnell, 2008) to strengthen clients and repair developmental deficits, (2) EMDR to process traumas, and (3) talk therapy to help integrate the information from EMDR sessions and to provide the healing derived from therapist-client interactions.

AF-EMDR extends the use and benefits of EMDR and bilateral stimulation for use with clients who have been typically less responsive to traditional EMDR protocols, due to acute or chronic relational trauma and attachment deficits. Those deficits include the effects of childhood physical or sexual abuse, neglect, early losses, birth trauma, medical trauma, parental drug or alcohol abuse, caregiver misattunement, secondary trauma, and the cumulative effects of all. These clients often present in therapy as depressed, with relationship difficulties or problems at work. They don’t feel fully alive. Childhood trauma has impacted their sense of safety and capacity to form close emotional relationships in adulthood.

Present hurts can sometimes trigger past trauma. When a person experiences a hurt — whether it’s a physical kind of pain or an emotional pain — and that hurt is reminiscent of an earlier hurt, they don’t just feel the pain. They can also feel or remember a narrative in their head. This narrative can be quite troubling. EMDR is a tool that can help address past trauma and rewrite the narrative.

For example, imagine a parent and young child at a playground. If the child falls, the parent may choose to pause for a moment and allow the child to struggle a bit to recover. They may ask the child if he or she is alright and then they might affirm to the child that they did a good job playing and getting up from a fall. They show empathy, without going to the extremes of either coddling or ignoring. But if you consider those two extremes, there are different narratives which may occur.

If the parent coddles too much, the child may grow up thinking they can’t handle anything or that perhaps they aren’t good enough or strong enough. Alternatively, if the parent ignores the fallen child, the child may feel ignored. They may sense that no one cares about them or that they aren’t lovable enough or good enough. These are just two of many possible narrative scenarios. And, depending on the degree of physical or emotional pain, present day hurts may trigger memories of that moment and that narrative from when they were young. In fact, their response in the present day becomes bigger, become compounded.

Attachment-focused EMDR can help heal this kind of relational trauma. By going deep into the person’s early relationships to identify triggers and unresolved or unprocessed events and traumas, one of our trained psychotherapists at Kathryn Grooms & Associates Psychotherapy will utilize attachment-focused EMDR to identify the trigger, revisit the memory, and use bilateral stimulation (part of the EMDR technique) to process those parts of the person’s history or their upbringing that they weren’t able to process because at the time they were simply “surviving it.”