The EMDR Podcast

Why I Rarely Start With Attachment Wound Targets

This is a multi-part response that requires that we review what EMDR demands that clients have in place. It also requires a broad understanding of what attachment wounds actually are, why they are so wounding, and why those wounds show up as deficits in the very information networks that we’re trying to connect.

What is required to do EMDR therapy? 

Slow down, be present, notice.  These are not easy tasks for people who are pervasively traumatized.  In fact, most people with this type of wounding have survival strategies that move them opposite these tasks.

Activate, but not overactivate.

Need to have enough adaptive information for the difficult stuff to connect to.  You cannot connect a lie to a lie, and you can’t land a whale into a canoe.

What are attachment wounds?

They are about everything.

They have ten thousand tentacles.

They are about pervasively unmet need.

They are about lovability, connection, safety, family, belonging, value, importance, and identity.  They are about everything and they are behind a lot of our triggering now when we get triggered decades later, they fuel our addictions, our obsessions, are the logic behind all of our forms of disconnection, and are why love is so hard right now.  For all of these reasons, they are not easy targets and especially not initial ones.  But they are essential ones.  Clients with this type of wounding probably will not get pervasively better until someone can help the kid parts out of that existentially lonely childhood state.

Other than being big and nested targets, what else is difficult about this type of wound?

Attachment trauma is wounding in at least four ways that directly impact EMDR processing based on the requirements of EMDR that I just defined.

1. Being born to people who don’t know how to meet our needs is wounding.  It’s one of the worst wounds we have.  It’s almost always the big Barnum and Bailey center ring of the trauma circus.  If that’s how you are starting in this life, everything after that is probably side-show.  The somatic state of that wound is easy to mistake for sadness and is easy to mistake for anxiety because it has plenty of both in it.  For many people, with attachment wounding, huge existential loneliness is the core intolerable emotion.  What do we do in EMDR therapy?  Activate, but don’t overactivate.  When we connect to it, existential loneliness doesn’t want to come in small, measured, noticeable, and digestible chunks. It’s what your clients are trying to stay ahead of when they are surviving by not slowing down.  It’s the size of weather.  They will put a needle in their arm not to feel it for an hour. Again, events have a beginning, middle, and an end. Attachment wounds are about everything.
2. When we are born to people who don’t know how to meet our needs, they very often shame, blame, humiliate us for having those needs.  This causes serious confusion about those needs, but in those needs are some foundational adaptive information about what it means to be born human.  Which is why people with attachment wounding will burn themselves up looking for or trying to make themselves into the very things they were already born being.  Abuse and neglect in early childhood are awful, but the reasons given for the abuse and the neglect find their way deep into the rust red marrow of identity.  And every one of them is a lie.  You cannot connect a lie to a lie in EMDR therapy, and paired with unmet need is almost always a lie that accounts for it.
3. Because this wounding is so pervasive and the somatic experience/reexperience of it is so horrible, we typically need powerful coping strategies to manage them.  Dealing with unmet need is how many of us learned the early alchemy of self-erasure.  And while that disconnective impulse can truly be the thing that saves us, it’s often the thing that can make it harder for us to get exposure to the corrective information that we ultimately need to heal. Trauma of this type necessitates survival strategies and survival strategies often have costs.  The cost of those strategies form some of the challenges in EMDR therapy related to addictions, obsessions and compulsions, dissociation, somatic disconnection, well protected systems, masking, overachieving, and perfectionism.  All of which can be complications and some of which can block this work entirely.
4. When we are born to people who didn’t know how to meet our needs, we did not have the experience of getting our needs met.  So many things about who we are, what we are worth, and how we deserve to be treated must be obtained through actual experiential learning.  The easiest things to believe about ourselves are the things modeled in our earliest experiences.  The things we experientially missed when we were very young comprise much of deficit in the very adaptive information that is most needed for us to heal now.

The purpose of this episode was to take a 30,000 foot view of what is complicated about attachment wounding and to provide some context about why I’m really unlikely to start with these targets in EMDR therapy.  Other podcasts will highlight some options in preparing to work on attachment wounds, and almost everything I do is experiential.  Relational wounds typically require corrective relational experiences to heal.  The therapeutic relationship is part of that.  Relational experiences with attachment figure resources are great places to start. Relational experiences between the client’s parts are perhaps an even better place to start.  Resolving small targets can help build some of the adaptive information needed for the bigger ones.

The book, EMDR With Complex Trauma, walks you through some of the categories of targets I like to start with and is designed to give you some clues about when the client does have enough adaptive information to land these memories. It gives you options about how to help clients develop the needed adaptive information.

In summary, not all memories are the same.  You cannot connect a lie to a lie.  And these memories tend to be the whales of memories.  There is a logic for not starting in the territories of the most identity confusion.  It’s sensible not to start with territories that hold the most intolerable somatic states.

The goal in working with healthy people is to work efficiently.  The goal in working with complex clients is to start somewhere.  The risk is that we get so overwhelmed by the complexity that we don’t start at all.  And by all means, we have to get there.  Something, ideally the client’s most resourced parts, needs to go to that little kid, wrap their arms around him, and tell him that he was born good enough, that he always deserved to get his needs met, that he was born lovable, and that none of it was his fault.  Somebody needs to say it.  Somebody needs to construct that experience.  But, it is often a bad idea to go straight there right out of the gate.