Quote by Pierre Janet

Pierre Janet was a French psychologist and a pioneer in his work on trauma and dissociation.

This is such a succinct explanation of trauma and the way it tends to intrude on present day life when it has not been fully integrated, or digested, by the mind.

In EMDR Therapy we use the Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model to understand the way the brain works. According to the AIP model, the brain naturally processes or digests experiences. The drive is always towards health and healing. It is when a traumatic experience overwhelms that system, that the event remains stuck in the brain and undigested, coming back to haunt the individual.

Again, the event itself does not have to be something “big” or evident to the outside world (remember each experience of trauma is individual and valid). Sometimes it is a smaller event, but the way the person interprets it or the reasons why they believe it is happening, that is what can overwhelm the system. In this model, EMDR helps to digest this traumatic memory and get the person’s brain back to doing its own healing.