Thanks, I’d tried self-administered EMDR sometime before and didn’t get much out of it. Now I gave it another shot and it caused some stuff to surface, so seemed to be doing at least something even if I didn’t get to the root of the issue yet.
Do you have any thoughts on how I should try to balance the external stimuli vs. the internal content? I notice that it’s easy for either the EMDR stimuli to push the emotional content out of consciousness or vice versa. Should I try to keep them exactly balanced, or predominantly emotional content with some stimuli, or predominantly stimuli with some emotional content?
I also wondered about, when I was focusing on a felt sense and memory fragments started coming up, should I “make more room” for those memory fragments or just ignore them and keep allocating exactly the same amount of mental space to the felt sense.
These are all excellent questions! Unfortunately, I don’t have definite answers. I’ve read somewhere that the idea is to tax the working memory as much as possible such that you can just barely hold an emotional felt sense at the same time as well. I’d be very interested if someone does some more reading and research on this! What I personally do: The more intensive the felt sense feels, the harder I focus on the EMDR “distractions”, and vice-versa.
Thanks, I’d tried self-administered EMDR sometime before and didn’t get much out of it. Now I gave it another shot and it caused some stuff to surface, so seemed to be doing at least something even if I didn’t get to the root of the issue yet.
Do you have any thoughts on how I should try to balance the external stimuli vs. the internal content? I notice that it’s easy for either the EMDR stimuli to push the emotional content out of consciousness or vice versa. Should I try to keep them exactly balanced, or predominantly emotional content with some stimuli, or predominantly stimuli with some emotional content?
I also wondered about, when I was focusing on a felt sense and memory fragments started coming up, should I “make more room” for those memory fragments or just ignore them and keep allocating exactly the same amount of mental space to the felt sense.
These are all excellent questions! Unfortunately, I don’t have definite answers. I’ve read somewhere that the idea is to tax the working memory as much as possible such that you can just barely hold an emotional felt sense at the same time as well.
I’d be very interested if someone does some more reading and research on this!
What I personally do: The more intensive the felt sense feels, the harder I focus on the EMDR “distractions”, and vice-versa.