Memories and EMDR therapy
A question that often comes up with clients when we talk about EMDR therapy, is the validity or truth of memories.
Sometimes the question is whether or not EMDR therapy can help verify the ‘truth’ of a memory.
The short answer to this is no. There is no therapy that can promise you will discern the absolute truth of what you remember or that it corresponds to an external reality of what happened. This is not how memory works, and what we know from research is that every time we access a memory it changes.
Sometimes the question is whether or not EMDR therapy can help reveal a memory that has been hidden.
Again the short answer to this is no. What we can say is that often in the process of doing EMDR reprocessing work makes more memories available and accessible. Sometimes those are positive memories and sometimes they are negative. However, we can never promise that a particular memory will get clearer or more filled in.
The good news is that this does not stop EMDR therapy from being helpful.
Sometimes the question is whether a ‘real’ memory is needed for EMDR therapy to be helpful.
And once again the answer to this is no. With EMDR therapy there is a wide range of things we can target. Sometimes we target material from a dream that is really disturbing. Sometimes we target a particular bodily experience that is disturbing. Sometimes we target a family story told about my clients. Any of these things can be felt as disturbing and carry a negative message about ourselves that needs to be shifted to something more adaptive/healthy, EMDR therapy can do that even if we are targeting something that is not strictly a memory.
Ultimately, EMDR therapy is not interested in an external truth. When we are doing this work, what I care about is the felt reality of a situation. I want my clients no longer viscerally disturbed by what they remember. I want my clients to feel settled and empowered by how they view themselves having survived and navigated healing around the trauma as they experienced it.
