Re: Derealization

Well, I know you want feedback about your experience, and I just can't offer individual case consultations here. I can only make general comments that apply to many people.

Let me see what I can do...

An increase in the experience of derealization after an EMDR session MAY mean that there is something that is being accessed or tugged on by the EMDR processing that is held out of awareness.

In my experience, a remedy is to use an ego state approach PRIOR to proceeding again with EMDR, or indeed right in the middle of an EMDR session, to give a voice to whatever it is in the periphery of awareness. There is often something like anger or shame or something else that stays at a distance from conscious mind. Once welcomed, it steps forward and "looks through the eyes" and the EMDR proceeds.

I wouldn't keep doing EMDR on someone that was experiencing an increase in derealization after EMDR without addressing it the way I explained above. I'd use a conference room method to invite whatever the issue or part of self is to become known, and make sure it was okay to proceed. I do this whether or not a client has a dissociative disorder by the way.

A final note is that the strategy I described above is an advanced cognitive interweave approach that is not necessarily taught by the Institute, but is taught by some of us that find that ego state therapy is a dynamite way to help people progress in their EMDR work.

You may with to print this off and show it to your therapist.

Sandra Paulsen Inobe, PhD
Fair Oaks, California

Replies:

Re: Derealization, by anon, 03/13/02

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