Healing Addiction with EMDR Therapy by Jamie Marich & Stephen Dansiger

Author:Jamie Marich & Stephen Dansiger [Jamie Marich & Stephen Dansiger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780826136077
Publisher: Springer Publishing Company
Published: 2021-08-07T00:00:00+00:00

●I cannot show my emotions.

●It is not safe to feel my feelings/emotions.

●I cannot trust my emotions (or body sensations).

●My body will let me down.

●I have to be perfect.

●I have to please everyone.

●I cannot handle it.

●I cannot stand it.

●My addiction is my identity.

In addition, NCs that speak to a phenomenon that is called spiritual bypass can be at play.

Spiritual bypass occurs when a person’s adopted belief system is standing in the way of them doing the emotional work that they might need to do in order to heal. In introducing this concept to clients, we must be careful not to disparage any of the religious, spiritual, or other recovery beliefs that they find helpful or meaningful. Yet, beliefs like, “I just have to pray about it,” or “God doesn’t give me more than I can handle,” may stand in the way of a client truly going with that. And these beliefs may have developed as trauma responses or other band-aids when deeper healing wasn’t available.

People who work 12-step programs can also have the tendency to repeat recovery slogans (e.g., “Let go and let God” or “Easy does it”). These slogans, like other spiritual beliefs, may help immensely with coping, but may have to be addressed or even explored as targets if they are standing in the way of deeper work. Although one avenue used to handle spiritual bypass can be the use of interweaves (more on that in the next section), any blocking belief, including those that suggest spiritual bypass, can be explored for source material as targets. For instance, the saying “Honor thy father and thy mother,” one of the Ten Commandments, is not only a belief that many people carry; it is a spiritual teaching that can be used to justify abuse at the hands of parents. Many clients struggle with putting responsibility in its proper place because of this belief system. As with anything in EMDR therapy, if the client has the willingness to address it, you can do a full Floatback or modified Floatback technique (or other affect-bridging strategies) to arrive at a potential target.

PROACTIVE MEASURES AND OTHER MODIFICATIONS

Interweaves

Interweaves (which you may know as cognitive interweaves) are the surest set of proactive measures that EMDR therapists have at their disposal to help restore the flow of healthy information processing if there is a block. Sometimes blocking beliefs can be directly explored as targets, although in other situations, use of interweaves may be sufficient to assist clients when they are stuck. Let us look further at the spiritual bypass example to illustrate this.

In reflecting back on her initial round of EMDR therapy after 2 years of being sober, Jamie remembers the day that she began working on her first major target, a traumatic experience that happened when she was a teenager. After the first set of “Go with that,” her therapist asked her what was coming up, and Jamie immediately dove into the 12-step slogans and ideas that came to mean a great deal to her to get by: “Let go and let God.

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